With just under two weeks to go until Donald Trump hosts NBC’s Saturday Night Live on November 7, calls for the network to cancel the billionaire Republican presidential frontrunner’s hosting gig have intensified.
The hashtag #RacismIsntFunny began trending on Twitter over the weekend as Hispanic advocacy groups and some entertainment industry figures called for Trump to be removed as host of the late-night variety program over his strong position on illegal immigration.
https://twitter.com/Hayde8604/status/655521089653616640
The Twitter campaign follows an October 15 letter sent to NBCUniversal CEO Stephen Burke and Saturday Night Live showrunner Lorne Michaels from the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a coalition of 40 advocacy groups that says it is “flabbergasted” that SNL invited Trump to host the show.
The group wrote:
“Donald Trump has yet to apologize for his bigoted comments about Mexican immigrants. Allowing Trump to host SNL will legitimize and validate his anti-Latino comments. NHLA had praised NBCUniversal, when it severed its ties with Donald Trump. We are appalled that you would enable Trump’s hateful speech for nothing less than a ratings ploy and ask that you rescind the SNL invitation.”
The group also questioned how SNL could “justify casting zero Latinas over 41 seasons and only 2 Latinos (Horatio Sanz and Fred Armisen) over the same period, while promoting Trump’s divisive speech” toward Hispanics.
A website, racismisntfunny.com, was also started to urge people to sign petitions requesting NBC and SNL cancel Trump’s appearance. The site claims that more than 360,000 people have signed such petitions.
By Tuesday, Trump supporters and Internet pranksters had hijacked the #RacismIsntFunny hashtag to make politically incorrect jokes and skewer those who called for NBC to fire Trump:
https://twitter.com/Hendrix357/status/659083935477960704
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