Former NFL Star Calls Out Meryl Streep For Golden Globes Speech
Meryl Streep’s anti-Donald Trump speech at the Golden Globes on Sunday night didn’t sit well with former Indianapolis Colts and Baltimore Ravens defensive tackle Tony Siragusa.
Meryl Streep, a three-time Academy Award winner and a multiple Golden Globe winner, was on stage to receive a lifetime achievement honor for her legendary acting career known as the Cecil B. DeMille Award when she began taking Trump to task. At one point in her remarks, she said that “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” This was interpreted to be a rebuke of the president-elect’s immigration policies.
“The slight to sports did not go unnoticed by one former professional athlete,” the Daily Caller added.
While Trump — a former Democrat and independent who ran for president as a Republican — regularly mixed with celebrities during his high-visibility career in and out of show business, that was then, and this is now, and many in the stage and screen industry apparently are still having trouble coming to grips with the final results of election 2016.
The Golden Globes may only be a warm-up for the political commentary that could emerge during the Academy Awards ceremony.
UFC president Dana White responded by describing Streep as an uninformed “uppity 80-year-old” and pointed that MMA fighters in his organization come from all over the world.
A Super Bowl winner with the Ravens, Siragusa, aka “Goose,” a longtime Fox network NFL sideline reporter (2003-2016) who ironically perhaps has a few acting credits on his resume, separately called out Streep on Twitter for the football reference.
“Meryl Streep you’re a joke! It must be great to have all your friends give you an award for being someone else. Did you ever get an award for being you? Btw athletes ARE real people, we don’t have to pretend to be someone else we are real!!!”
— Tony Siragusa (@TonySiragusa) January 9, 2017
According to The Big Lead, “[MMA] is open to all and plenty of foreigners inhabit the UFC ranks. The NBA is full of foreign players from around the globe. MLB has a very large Hispanic base of players. The NFL is the most American of sports, but features diversity in the locker room in the backgrounds of its players. The arts are not the only thing that would suffer if we limited the talent pool.”
A Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporter, Meryl Streep also took some heat on social media for the alleged anti-Israel implications of the speech. When she rattled off a list of actresses who were born in other countries, she identified Natalie Portman as being born in “Jerusalem” rather than Israel.
“Streep…employed an anti-Zionist tactic in her Sunday night speech by deliberately avoiding saying that Jerusalem, the city where Portman was born, is located in the Jewish State of Israel,” the Washington Free Beacon noted.
In her remarks, the renowned actress also took the president-elect to task for allegedly mocking a disabled journalist during one of his free-style campaign rallies, an accusation that Trump denies. “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,” she asserted about what she deemed an “instinct to humiliate.”
Gateway Pundit recalls that President Obama in 2009 mocked the Special Olympics in joking about his bowling ability.
On Fox & Friends, Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway wondered why Streep didn’t use her nationally televised platform to give a shout-out to the youngster with special needs who was the victim of the Chicago hate crime kidnapping.
At the beginning of her speech, Meryl Streep claimed that “all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments of American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.” New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi, who is no Trump fan, found the statement and the speech generally as a truth-challenged example of elitism.
Describing the Golden Globes as a phony awards show orchestrated by sketchy freelance journalists, Stasi wrote, in part, the following.
“So how could Streep, who makes $5 million a movie, and will reportedly be making $825,000 per episode for a new TV show, cluelessly face that dazzling room of the luckiest people on the earth, and declare that they all ‘belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.’ What? That’s three lies in a row — four if you count the one about Mixed Martial Arts not being an art.”
[Featured Image by Michael Perez/AP Images]
