Radical leftist Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo delivered a speech in Flint, Michigan, on Friday in which he urged Americans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris because “she’s got black woman wisdom.”
The bizarre appeal was part of a brief but belligerent address in which Ruffalo repeatedly referred to Republicans generally as “downers” and urged voters to “get down with democracy, and down with Donald Trump and Trumpism.” He accused the former president of several falsehoods, including repeating the false claim that Trump suggested Americans “inject bleach” during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and referring to the non-existent “Muslim ban” Trump never enacted.
Ruffalo, a prominent celebrity endorser for the Harris campaign and prolific agitator for a variety of far-left causes, claimed that “black woman wisdom” is “a special kind of wisdom” earned from “being part of an awful part of American history,” presumably referring to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and decades of racist government policies, largely promoted and enforced by Democrats, in the 20th century. Harris’s parents were born in India and Jamaica, respectively.
“She’s got a black woman wisdom,” Ruffalo claimed of Harris. “I’m not going to say that’s the only wisdom, but that’s a special kind of wisdom.”
“That’s a kind of wisdom that comes from the grace of being part of an awful part of American history. That is painful. And I have to learn to survive in that, generation after generation,” he continued. “That gives you a grace; that gives you a humility; that gives you a compassion that has to be — we have to think about that. We have to honor it.”
“I’m not saying it’s better than anyone, but there’s something to be learned from that, just like there’s something to be learned from every different kind of people that make up America,” he concluded.
Elsewhere in the speech, Ruffalo lists Harris’s positive attributes as, “she’s young, she is a person of color, she’s a woman, she has fresh ideas, she is whip-smart, she doesn’t lie her ass off, and her vision for America is for all Americans.”
Ruffalo has made several public appearances supporting Harris, including on a Zoom call this week with fellow stars of the Avengers superhero movie series.
Despite his ubiquity, Ruffalo has openly admitted to some reservations about endorsing Harris. Days before the Avengers call, the Now You See Me 2 star appeared disappointed by Harris’s positions on the war between Israel and the jihadist terrorist group Hamas. Asked how he reconciles his support of the anti-Israel cause with endorsing Harris, he explained, “There is no perfect candidate right now.”
“You gotta be mature about your votes,” he said. “Harris is the closest thing we’re going to have to changing what is happening in Gaza from within the United States.”
Asked what he would tell Arab-American voters, he added, “it’s a hard time and it’s a very, very difficult time, there’s no perfect candidate right now, but we know what Trump will do, they’ll sell out the Arabs.”
Ruffalo is a forceful political activist – he joked in his speech on Friday that he is a full-time activist and only “moonlights” as an actor – and has made enthusiastic presidential endorsements in the past. In 2022, Ruffalo decided to involve himself in the Brazilian presidential election, backing socialist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Lula, a two-time president prior to running in 2022, was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2019 on charges of corruption, accused of misappropriating public funds while being president to buy a luxury beachfront property. The leftist-controlled Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), Brazil’s top court, overturned his sentence and allowed him to run by declaring that the original court that processed the case had no jurisdiction; it never presented any exonerating evidence for Lula.
“Of course, we have our own problems here in America and I know how difficult it is to make these decisions. But we are living in a world that is more and more interconnected, especially as we fight climate change,” Ruffalo said in a campaign video for Lula in September 2022, “and what happens in any one country is what happens everywhere in some sense.”
“Right now the rainforest is of utmost importance in its health and its size … so there’s a global implication to your election that I am asking you to consider,” he continued, “and what happens to the rainforest and the indigenous people that are there will impact the rest of the world for millennia to come and right now the leader that is best positioned to protect the rainforest is Lula.”
Lula won the election, defeating conservative then-incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Lula was inaugurated into office in January 2023; by August of that year, Ruffalo was publicly expressing disappointment in his choice.
“You’re one of my heroes, Lula, but it breaks my heart to see the Belém Declaration has no concrete goals to protect the rainforest,” Ruffalo wrote in a post on Twitter, referring to a global environmentalist pact signed at the time. “The Amazon emergency is a climate emergency, and we can’t afford any delays.”
This year, under Lula, the Amazon rainforest experienced record-setting fires. In August, Sao Paulo documented 3,482 fires, the most on record, causing $63.6 million in damages. Smoke from the fires covered 80 percent of Brazil in October and poured over into neighboring Argentina. Neither Ruffalo nor the several other high-profile American celebrities who condemned Bolsonaro for allegedly not doing enough to protect the rainforest have returned to take up the cause of the fires this year.
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