A host of members from the cosseted Hollywood elites including Sarah Jessica Parker, Mark Ruffalo, Molly Ringwald, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Bradley Whitford released a joint July 4 video with author Timothy Snyder in an effort to challenge President Donald Trump on the day the nation paused to celebrate its 250th birthday.
They reportedly viewed their collective effort as “a call against tyranny” as Trump stood at the fore of his America 250 festivities and addressed the gathered tens of thousands and through them the country as a whole, as Breitbart News reported.
The Wrap reports how the sneering Hollywood effort went public with this claim:
“Two-hundred-fifty years ago, a revolutionary idea was born, not that freedom was guaranteed, not that democracy would take care of itself, but that ordinary people could govern themselves,” Parker says in the 10-minute clip.
“Every generation since has faced the same question: What will you do when our country asks and needs something of you?”
The video was published via author Timothy Snyder’s Substack on Saturday morning with the chosen few reading 20 points aloud from his 2017 book, On Tyranny, which dissects the patterns of authoritarianism in the 20th century.
“To celebrate a rebellion is to know that, from a flawed world, we can make new things,” Snyder wrote in his intro to the video release, per the Wrap report.
“We can hold on, we can find each other, and not just imagine but create a much better America. It is a special 250th – it is ours.”
The clip featured – but was not restricted to – Lisa Rinna, Margaret Atwood, Tony Goldwyn and Leslie Odom Jr. declaiming the book’s 20 lessons to stand against tyranny.
Snyder saluted the participants as his “friends of freedom.”
A statement released with the footage as seen by The Hill said the reading “invites Americans to refuse complacency” seemingly a nod towards Trump ahead of his Saturday evening speech on the National Mall in Washington, DC.