Actor Ben Stiller said President Donald Trump’s “divisive rhetoric” has “real-life consequences,” echoing a years-long narrative pushed by Democrats and the broader left accusing the president of inciting political violence.
Stiller’s remarks came in a recent podcast interview with Michael Cohen, a former personal attorney of Trump’s. The Tropic Thunder and Zoolander star and Cohen discussed Twitter’s censorship of President Trump and the social media platform’s purging the president.
“I wonder, in terms of just our everyday lives how much this is really changing our actual lives,” Stiller said. “And I think the people who have the ability to actually change our real life experience with Twitter are people like Trump, who can say something and then that will motivate people to do things, and that, to me, is the scary thing.”
Last week, Facebook and Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s accounts. Instagram, and Twitch have indefinitely banned the president’s access on those platforms, as has Snapchat. The president’s personal Youtube page has been temporally suspended. This week, Stripe, the multi-billion dollar online payment processing service, severed ties with President Trump’s campaign and shut down the campaign’s payment processing services.
The Dodgeball actor dismissed the impact and influence of celebrities’ political commentary on Twitter.
“What some celebrity might say about another movie, or even what I might say about Trump — whatever — that doesn’t really matter that much, but if there’s somebody who’s in a leadership position and who’s out spouting this divisive rhetoric, I mean, we’re seeing the real-life consequences of it, and that’s what’s upsetting to me.”
Stiller stated that he knows many people who voted for Trump:
It’s a very interesting thing to me, who votes for Trump, and I know a lot of people who voted for Trump this second time around, people I know, family, people, relatives, friends. We don’t talk about it a lot, but the reality is that people, I think, dissociate the person from the choice as to who they’re going to vote for president. Somehow they dissociate it, still to this day.
That, to me is the thing that I kind of have trouble getting over, is how they can do that, but I also think you can’t discount the fact that 70-plus million people voted for him. You can’t discount 70 million people, right?
“[Trump has] a lack of having any conscience, really, about telling lies,” Ben Stiller added.
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