By Julie Kelly
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more desperate
virtue-signaler on Twitter than Mark Ruffalo.
The actor, known for playing the Hulk in the Avengers movie series and appearing in
cheesy B-list rom-coms, routinely tweets out his solidary with All of the
Oppressed People, including women, minorities, LGBTQs, college snowflakes, and
Bernie Sanders. Ruffalo is also an environmental activist who protests fracking
and GMOs while demanding that we all live off renewables by the year 2050.
After President Trump exited the Paris climate accord, Ruffalo tweeted that the
president will “have the death of whole nations on his hands.” He’s also a 9/11
truther; in a 2011 interview he complained that more people die from smoking
every year but “we give this” — 9/11 victims — “a lot more play.”
On the cuckoo scale of Hollywood progressives, Ruffalo is
off the charts. It’s almost as if this Kenosha, Wis., native is trying way too
hard to abandon his Midwestern roots and fit in with the cool kids of Manhattan
and Beverly Hills.
In a 2015 Tumblr post, Ruffalo rambled on about what he
called the “‘I am not a feminist’ internet phenomenon.” According to Ruffalo,
if you reject the moniker of “feminist,” you are “insulting every woman who was
forcibly restrained in a jail cell with a feeding tube down her throat for your
right to vote” and “degrading every woman who has accessed a rape crisis
center.” He credits feminism with everything from property ownership to divorce
rights to sexual-harassment laws: “When you grin with your cutesy sign about
how you’re not a feminist, you ignorantly spit on the sacred struggle of the
past 200 years. In short, kiss my ass, you ignorant little jerks.”
That same year, the theater-school-educated actor told
the Daily Beast that sexism is “embedded”
in men and he has “to make a conscious evaluation of my own. I have two girls.
Even the way I talk to them, and what I expect of them, still has a sexism
inside it that I have to be vigilant against. You become aware of it in bits
and pieces.”
I guess when you play a superhero on the big screen, you
see villains in every corner. Ruffalo’s constant self-flagellation is far from
charming and often comes off as insincere, if not downright patronizing. But of
course, there is one group undeserving of Ruffalo’s Hulk-sized platitudes about
feminism and sexism: white conservative women, or at least women he thinks are
conservatives. On June 10, Ruffalo tweeted:
Sign the petition: Tell @MSNBC
@NBCNews to stop the white conservative hiring spree https://t.co/CQGV7zRHWr
via @CREDOMobile #p2
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) June
10, 2017
The tweet links to a petition on the website for Credo
Action, a progressive activist group funded by the San Francisco–based network
provider, Credo Mobile. The petition aims to “let NBC executives know that
there will be a sharp backlash if MSNBC becomes another platform for right-wing
hate.” It accuses Andrew Lack, chairman of NBC News, of “pushing out Black and
Brown voices and filling its network with hard-line extreme conservatives.”
(The petition has nearly 176,000 signatures.)
Three new NBC hires are mentioned — Greta Van Susteren,
Megyn Kelly, and Nicolle Wallace (whose first name is misspelled as the more
common “Nicole”) — as proof the network is on a “white conservative hiring
spree.” The petition laments how Wallace, who hardly represents conservatism
during her obsequious anti-Trump, anti-GOP rants on MSNBC, will get her own
show by replacing Rachel Maddow’s protégé, Steve Kornacki. Kelly and Van
Susteren are referred to as “conservative former FOX News hosts.” That may be a
surprise to them, since neither woman has ever demonstrated a particularly
conservative political bent.
If anything, Ruffalo should warmly welcome Kelly into
NBC’s fold. Not only is she a working mother of three young children, she
blasted Trump during the presidential debates, bolted the country’s only
conservative cable news network, and was part of an “underground army of women”
(her words) that led to Roger Ailes’s resignation amid accusations of sexual
harassment. He should add her to his long list of feminist heroes.
So basically, Ruffalo and his ilk do not want white
conservatives hired at NBC, even if they are not really conservatives, because
they used to work for Fox News and because they are white. Despite their phony
appeals to free speech and expression, these “artists” and their followers want
expression stifled everywhere except for Fox News, which they want destroyed
and burned to the ground. At the same time, they are so blinded by their own
rage that they cannot see their blatant hypocrisy.
Ruffalo may think he’s clever and compassionate, but he’s
a small-minded bully who demands tolerance and inclusion for everyone except
his political enemies. The Hulk would be embarrassed for him.
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