Author and New York Times columnist Andrew Sullivan appeared at a panel event Monday about how Hollywood portrays “the other side” in film and was shouted down after he defended white, working-class Americans from what Sullivan calls Hollywood’s generalizations of them a “bigots” and “racists.”
“These people who are already insecure about losing their job switch on the TV, look at the newspaper and hear that they are being described as bigots, racists,” Andrew Sullivan said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “And they resent it, and the one thing I would urge you people who do this type of content is try and complete the idea of ‘the other’ being in the room because they can hear what you are saying.”
THR also reports that Sullivan was eventually shouted at by an audience member.
Moments later, the author and New York magazine columnist doubled down on his idea, saying: “Don’t tell them everything is good. That you deserve it and that you are all basically slaveholders under their skin blah, blah, blah, which is what Hollywood is saying to them every second of the day.” Those comments, which were met with audible gasps, set the stage for an immensely tense 20-minute panel which ended in Sullivan being shouted at by an audience member, prompting the moderator to step in and end the panel.
He later told a reporter, “When you’re a struggling, white working-class person in say, Kentucky, and a Yale student says, ‘You have white privilege,’ what do you think happens? [Donald] Trump gets elected — that’s what happens.”
“And they don’t seem to understand any of the lessons from the last time and I don’t want [Trump] to be re-elected, but I don’t think the left is helping and I don’t think Hollywood is helping.”
Breitbart News has previously reported on Sullivan’s contrarian takes on modern liberalism and the far-left in America.
Sullivan, who was born in England, is openly gay and has often been described as a “conservative.” He argued for gay marriage decades before it was mainstream in the United States, and was criticized by left-leaning gay activists at the time who thought marriage would inappropriately “mainstream” gay people into straight culture.
He has repeatedly called out the current progressive movement for their fixation on intersectionality.
“(T)he animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare,” Sullivan wrote last year.
“What matters before anything else is what race and gender you are, and therefore what side you are on. And in this neo-Marxist worldview, fully embraced by a hefty majority of the next generation, the very idea of America as a liberating experiment, dissolving tribal loyalties in a common journey toward individual opportunity, is anathema.”
The 55-year-old also slammed campus politics last year, arguing in a column, “When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based ‘social justice’ movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well.”