Add Piers Morgan to the list of people who don’t appreciate Meryl Streep’s anti-Donald Trump speech at the Golden Globes, writing, “I haven’t heard such elitist snobbery since Hillary Clinton branded Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’.”
“She began by saying that Hollywood, foreigners and the press are ‘the most vilified segments of American society right now,’” Morgan wrote in the Daily Mail, the British media outlet for which he is currently an editor at large. “At which point the cameras panned out to hundreds of the richest, most privileged people in American society sitting in the audience in their $10,000 tuxedos and $20,000 dresses, loudly cheering this acknowledgement of their dreadful victimhood.”
Morgan continued: “She then said that if all the ‘outsiders and foreigners’ were kicked out of Hollywood, ‘you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,’ … I haven’t heard such elitist snobbery since Hillary Clinton branded Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables.’”
The former CNN host made it a point to say he loves the famous actress, and even said Streep is “the greatest actress in history.”
“She’s also, and I speak from personal experience, a delightful woman – incredibly smart, warm, funny and decent,” Morgan wrote before explaining that he “laughed out loud with incredulity” while listening to her speech.
“You’d be hard-pushed to find an industry that encourages more disrespect and violence than Hollywood,” Morgan wrote. “A place where rich powerful people make billions of dollars by regularly pandering to the lowest common denominators of sexism, racism, homophobia and misogyny.”
Streep bashed Trump, without actually saying his name, during her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes.
“It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back,” Streep said, referring to an incident with Trump on the campaign trail. “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.”
“[This] instinct to humiliate, when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” the star of “Florence Foster Jenkins” continued. “Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
Streep also called on Hollywood to support a free and independent press as we find ourselves entering the Trump era. “We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage,” she said. “That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution.”