Film director Spike Lee made an alarming prediction about the future of the planet when asked if he thinks Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders should launch another bid for president in 2020.
“Shoot, I hope this nuclear code doesn’t get punched. I’m not thinking about 2020,” Lee, who endorsed Sanders’s 2016 run, told Variety in an interview. “Look, you got Putin. You got the other crazy guy in North Korea and this other crazy guy, Agent Orange. That’s not a good trio for me, my children, for the world.”
In a wide-ranging interview with the outlet, the Oscar-winning director said advertisers who pulled funding from New York’s Public Theater over its production of Shakespeare in the Park’s Julius Caesar — in which a stand-in for President Donald Trump is brutally stabbed to death — will affect future art projects.
“Well, it’s their money,” Lee said of Delta Air Lines and Bank of America, who pulled funding from the theater following backlash over the controversial scene. “I think there’s going to be more things like that happening. It affects art directly.”
“With this administration now which has no regard for the arts and wants to get rid of any National Endowment for the Arts all that stuff, it’s going to be more difficult for arts,” Lee added. “Also, artists are going to start thinking , ‘If I do this, I won’t get money.’ That affects art too. It’s a very dangerous time we live in today. I don’t think this present administration has any idea what humanity is.”
The Do the Right Thing director also said a now-infamous, protest-themed Pepsi advert starring model Kendall Jenner was a “complete appropriation of Black Lives Matter.”
“It was horrible,” Lee said before naming black victims of police-involved shootings. “That was a complete appropriation of Black Lives Matter, and Black Lives Matter is not a joke. Black people getting shot down left and right, and cops are walking and they are going to make a commercial out of that?”
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson
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