About a year before A-list Hollywood actor Will Smith blew up his iconic career by attacking Chris Rock at the Academy Awards, he revealed he’s open to running for public office ‘at some point” in the future. Smith’s years of pushing a radical, left-wing agenda offer insight into how this $350 million Hollywood elite would act if elected.
The King Richard star told CBS Sunday Morning back in 2015 he was feeling compelled to run for office to counter former U.S. President Donald Trump‘s successful 2016 campaign — although no such move was forthcoming.
Here are five times Will Smith used his money, his massive platform to push a radical leftist agenda:
1.Will Smith went full-fledged Black Lives Matter , using a GQ interview to praise the message behind the Marxist movement. “This is a difficult area to discuss, but I feel like the simplicity of Black Lives Matter was perfect,” the Men in Black star said. “Anybody who tries to debate Black Lives Matter looks ridiculous. So when I talk about the marketing of our ideas, Black Lives Matter was perfection.”
2. He backed proponents of critical race theory (CRT), going so far as to say in an interview with GQ that it should be re-branded as “truth theory.” Will Smith believes a political theory that promotes the organization of society along racial lines, including the demonization of white people, should be called “truth theory.”
3. The Hollywood star embraced boycotting Georgia over the state’s voter integrity law, which were intended to combat voter fraud. Smith moved the shooting of his slavery-themed movie Emancipation from Georgia to Louisiana in protest, as Breitbart News reported. He explained the move this way: “The new Georgia voting laws are reminiscent of voting impediments that were passed at the end of Reconstruction to prevent many Americans from voting. Regrettably, we feel compelled to move our film production work from Georgia to another state.”
4. In 2020 Smith joined other Hollywood elites and made a financial contribution to Democrats running in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections. A-list Democrat celebrities including George Clooney, Joaquin Phoenix, and Leonardo DiCaprio joined Smith in pouring cash into Georgia’s runoff elections, hoping to push Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock across the finish line, thereby flipping the Senate blue. They succeeded.
5. Smith saw nothing but darkness and hopelessness in Donald Trump’s rise to the White House. Without mentioning the then incumbent by name, Smith told an interviewer: “This is the purge, right?” according to Indiewire. “This is the cleanse, this is what happens. This is the natural reaction to the amount of light that came into the world when Barack Obama was the president […] We had to expect that [the pendulum] was going to go the other way, as a cleanse – but this is the darkness before the dawn.”
Who would be Smith’s role model in the Oval Office?
In August 2016 he spoke directly about his admiration for Barack Obama during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“I was thinking about it but, you know, I watched [Barack] Obama for the last 8 years [and] that’s a hard job,” Smith conceded. “I definitely have had the itching. I have lots of views and ideas and sometimes I hear people say things on television and I just want to run against them.”