The hosts of ABC’s long-time left-wing talk show The View ripped into actor Billy Bob Thornton for choosing not to comment much on politics and proclaimed that his “silence is complicity.”
Thornton, who currently stars as the lead in the hit Paramount+ series, Landman, recently appeared on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast where he criticized entertainers for speaking out on politics and cited comedian Ricky Gervais who several years ago advised actors at awards show to “Get your little award and fuck off.”
“I don’t know anything about politics,” Thornton told Mandel. “I have no idea. And the stuff that I do believe, I don’t want to force it down somebody else’s throat because I’m not an expert on that.”
Showing a clip of his interview, the ABC hosts were not happy with Thornton’s decision to keep his nose out of politics and to just stick to his craft of acting and entertaining people.
Joy Behar, for instance, called Thornton stupid, insisting, “Imagine bragging about how uninformed you are.”
Panel member Sunny Hostin added, “We are at a crisis point in this country. I think democracy is participatory.”
She went on saying, “I think when you have a platform, that means I have an outsized voice and when you have a platform, I think that you have a responsibility to speak up about what’s going on in this country and my view silence is complicity. We need every single ally to speak out.”
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However, Alyssa Farah Griffin noted that her fellow hosts criticized George Clooney for his political activism when he called for Joe Biden to step down.
“A lot of this table criticized George Clooney when he wrote his Biden op-ed,” Griffin said. “That is a celebrity using his voice, saying what he believes, it can’t just be when they agree with your position.”
But Behar responded that it is her “free speech” to criticize Thornton just as it’s Thornton’s free speech to call people out for their opinions.
Still, Griffin blasted actors for engaging on “slacktivism” and just spouting off despite having no real knowledge about what they are talking about. And she added, “I don’t think we should bully people, saying, ‘You have to speak out.’”
For her part, Sara Haines said that too many celebrities are just preaching to the choir and not rally helping their causes at all.
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