Ready for round 2! Meryl Streep launched into an epic rant against President Donald Trump at a Human Rights Campaign fundraising gala in New York City on Saturday, February 11, a month after her much-publicized political tirade at the 2017 Golden Globe Awards.
In response to the criticism she faced for her Globes speech, the three-time Oscar winner, 67, said: “It’s terrifying to put the target on your forehead, and it sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is to feel you have to. You have to! You don’t have an option. You have to.” It is unclear who Streep was referring to with the term “brownshirts,” which was originally used to describe members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi militia.
Referencing Trump’s post-Globes tweet, in which he called Streep “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood,” Streep continued, “Yes, I am the most overrated, overdecorated, and currently, I am the most overberated actress, who likes football, of my generation.” The crowd cheered as she added, “But that is why you invited me here, right?”
The actress, who was accepting the LGBT group’s National Ally for Equality Award, also defended the controversial comment she made at the Globes that football and mixed martial arts “are not the arts.”
“I do like football,” she explained on Saturday night. “I have watched more football in 60 years than anybody here. But if you hear a woman in a restaurant say, ‘My son is very interested in the arts,’ she’s not talking about football or mixed martial arts because they’re just not the same thing. Some of us like football, some of us like the arts, many of us want both in our lives. … It isn’t helpful to make it us vs. them.”
Returning to Trump, Streep said the United States has “much to thank this president for because he will have woken us up to how fragile freedom really is.”
“All of us have the human right to life,” she concluded. “If you think people were mad when they thought the government was coming after their guns, wait until you see when they try to take away our happiness.”
