“Don’t Look Up” and “The Big Short” filmmaker Adam McKay slammed “white moneyed liberals” as “the worst” in a recent podcast interview, asserting that the demographic is “getting a lot from this broken system.”
The famously left-leaning filmmaker appeared on Wednesday’s episode of the “Urgent Futures” podcast hosted by Forbes contributor Jesse Damiani. During the conversation, McKay explained his ongoing disdain with the Democratic Party and white liberal voters and donors.
“We are being hit with the high-grade marketing and no group is worse than white liberals. I mean, they are the worst,” McKay said. “I’ve tried to talk to them about climate, they are so smug and captured. And it boils down to privilege. I mean, when you talk to white moneyed liberals, they’re getting a lot from this broken system.”
He added that the Democratic Party’s leaders are experts in “manipulative marketing” and could name hundreds of ways they have hurt the American people, including by keeping healthcare privatized.
After President Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2024, McKay announced on X he was officially leaving the Democratic Party. The filmmaker also insisted he was ready to “abandon” the Democrats and shared his intention to join the Green Party or Working Families, while being “open to ideas.”
On this week’s “Urgent Futures” episode, McKay further expressed his dismay with progressive and liberal voters who have stuck with the Democratic Party.
“It is incredible to watch people this far down the road still say, ‘You gotta stand behind the Democrat Party.’ The same party that wouldn’t convict Trump of a crime after he told a crowd, ‘Go to the Capitol,’” the Oscar winner noted. “The same party where the previous presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, literally funded Trump’s campaign.”
The same night he announced his departure from the Democratic Party, McKay also laid the blame for Trump’s reelection right at the feet of the party’s leaders.
“Who would have guessed lying about Biden’s cognitive health for 2 yrs, refusing to do an open convention for a new nominee, never mentioning public healthcare & embracing fracking, the Cheneys & a yr long slaughter of children in Gaza wouldn’t be a winning strategy?” he wrote on X at the time.
In August 2025, McKay signed an open letter along with over 2,300 other Writers Guild of America members calling out the actions of the Trump administration and its “unprecedented, authoritarian” attacks on free speech.
