California voted Ronald Reagan and then Arnold Schwarzenegger in as their state governor. Clint Eastwood and Scott Baio have given public speeches at the RNC and just recently, Robert Davi could be seen all over the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference. Meryl Streep openly criticized Donald Trump at the Golden Globes and you can’t read anything about Lena Dunham without hearing her political views.
While I would definitely prefer if celebrities stayed out of politics, you cannot deny that they will get involved. As American citizens, it’s all of our duty to get out and vote and, in turn, be educated about the political state of our country.
So if American celebrities want to tweet about their hatred or support for something or someone, they can go right ahead. What I do have an issue with is when celebrities from other countries decide to start getting involved in the conversation.
Take, for example, Patrick Stewart. Stewart is an English actor who began his career in the Royal Shakespeare Company, got his start on television on BBC and was later named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and then knighted. Despite a few brief stints of living in Los Angeles, Stewart has lived the majority of his life outside of America. Yet on Thursday, he announced that he was going to be applying for U.S. citizenship in order to “oppose” and “fight” President Trump.
Now, I feel that somebody who is not an American should not be making such strong political statements, especially if they have a large following both inside and outside the U.S. America as a whole has enough division and there are enough people, including celebrities, who are on both sides of the political spectrum. We don’t need foreign celebrities coming in and furthering this divide.
American celebrities didn’t rush to become British citizens when Brexit was happening, and when Theresa May became the prime minister and issued in an entire new cabinet, American celebrities weren’t up in arms on Twitter.
To become an American citizen because you wish to live in America is also a completely different story than becoming an American citizen simply to oppose a sitting president. To me, the former is effectively the same thing as being somebody who could vote and chose not to, yet protested anyway.
Why is it then that celebrities like Patrick Stewart, J.K. Rowling, Shakira, Andrew Garfield and countless others feel the need to discuss American politics when they do not permanently live in America? They are not being forced to stay here, they are not being forced to become American citizens and they have more than enough means to leave the U.S. whenever they wish. Yet they publicly announce their disdain for a president whose executive actions will have little, if any, effect on them.
America is a very unique country; it’s extremely diverse and Trump would not have won if there were not citizens in the United States who genuinely felt he was the best fit for the job. As an outsider, you can look at American politics and think anything you want, but in the end, your opinion doesn’t really matter in a political sense because you cannot vote in our democratic process. You cannot directly create the change that you publicly speak about, so it’s better if you don’t attempt to do so by taking advantage of your fan base.
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