According to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, famed director Quentin Tarantino is a “pornographer of violence” who should be admonished by Democratic politicians for “coarsening America’s culture.”
Scarborough’s rant was prompted by a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former cable news anchor Campbell Brown, who appeared as a guest on Thursday’s “Morning Joe.” In the editorial, Brown called out President Obama for not taking a stand against violence in Hollywood in the wake of the recent massacres in Colorado and Newton, Connecticut.
Scarborough made the case that Tarantino’s behavior following last December’s Newtown, Conn. shooting tragedy was as offensive as anything the National Rifle Association had done following the incident. Tarantino’s films, which include “Pulp Fiction” and the recent “Django Unchained,” are often noted for their extreme and graphic depictions of violence.
“It would be a lot more effective is if the arbiters of what is culturally acceptable or not would start treating people like Quentin Tarantino like the pornographer that he is,” Scarborough said. “Here’s a guy right after Newtown that was unbelievably insensitive as anybody in the NRA. The things he said afterwards, just as insensitive. And yet, this man was the toast of Hollywood despite the graphic violence in all of his movies including the last one that again, was just praised to high heavens.”
“He is a pornographer of violence,” Scarborough continued. “He has made hundreds of millions of dollars for people in Hollywood by being a pornographer of violence, by coarsening America’s culture, by bloodying America’s culture. And yet, he is still praised. When are we culturally going to start calling out people like this?”
Scarborough then called on the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to call out Tarantino and Hollywood for violence in films.
“If the President of the United States…be it Bill Clinton or be it or, you know, Barack Obama — a Democratic president would stand up in the middle of the Golden Globe ceremony where Quentin Tarantino was treated like Cecil B. Demille. The Academy Awards where everybody stood up and praised Quinton Tarantino — a guy, again, that we’ll be glad to run clips every day of what a despicable human being he was after Newtown,” Scarborough said.
“He’s the one this season after Newtown that received rewards and great praise from, you know, The New York Times all of the way down for pushing violence that our children are inundated with,” he added.
