Robert De Niro was visibly angry at the producers of the Gotham Independent Film Awards on Monday when they apparently edited his speech to remove anti-Trump comments from his prepared remarks. De Niro, a vocal and unabashed critic of the former president, was in the middle of his speech presenting an honor for the film “Killers of the Flower Moon," when he noticed his speech on the teleprompter was different than he expected.
It was then that he started his rant at the producers for cutting some of his speech out. He then pulled out his phone and read the speech in its unedited form, and the comments went directly into politics, specifically about former President Donald Trump. In his remarks on Trump, De Niro wasted no time calling him names and more during his rant.
“Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal,” he added. “The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution,” he said. “But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul.”
De Niro has a solid reputation in Hollywood for being one of Donald Trump's most rabid haters and using any and all platforms to blast the former president and his family. Telling the crowd of attendees that it was at that point he knew his speech was edited.
“He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature, and shows disrespect, for example, by using Pocahontas as a slur,” De Niro said, referring to Trump’s regular usage of the Indian chief’s daughter as a slight against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who has some Native American ancestry in her family tree.
“This is where I came in and I saw they edited all that,” De Niro told the crowd as some cheered and clapped.
In his off-the-cuff remarks, De Niro told the crowd that he was supposed to thank and honor Apple, who produced the movie, in which he also stars, alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone. Instead, he chose to criticize them for allegedly altering his speech.
“So I’m going to say these things, but to Apple and thank them and all that, Gotham, blah blah blah, Apple, but, who — I don’t feel like thanking them at all, for what they did. How dare they do that, actually,” he said.
Robert De Niro is the perfect example of why so many conservatives hate Hollywood. It never ceases to amaze how many members of the Hollywood elite are ideologically aligned with the far left. Furthermore, the members of the film and television industry in Hollywood who are conservatives feel isolated and afraid even to admit that they are anything but far leftists. Because often, when these conservatives are found out, they suffer from loss of work due to being essentially blacklisted for their political leanings.
I have news for those in Hollywood: Nobody cares about your politics; they just want you to act, produce, work, or whatever it is you do without going off the rails on some political rant. And that goes the same way for right-wing Hollywood people, too, though typically, the only thing that they are "guilty" of is professing their faith or offering a prayer or thanks to God for their achievements. Nobody dares go up on stage and unleash an expletive-laced tirade against President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. If that happened, they'd be fired before they walked off the stage.
We get it: De Niro was talking to his base of fellow leftists in the audience, evidenced by the applause he received for his anti-Trump remarks. But that doesn't hold true for the millions of people who make up the broader audience — who'd prefer celebrities stop making it about them and their political beliefs. In the spirit of the infamous words spoken by FOX News personality Laura Ingraham, De Niro and others like him need to just "shut up" and act.