“Vice” director Adam McKay calls to 'abandon' Democratic Party, blasts Kamala Harris campaigning with the Cheneys
"Who would have guessed…embracing fracking, the Cheneys & a yr long slaughter of children in Gaza wouldn’t be a winning strategy?"
Adam McKay is furious about the state of the Democratic Party.
In the wake of Kamala Harris' defeat in the 2024 presidential election, the Anchorman filmmaker blasted her campaign's decision to publicly align with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney. The Harris campaign touted the elder Cheney's endorsement as a signpost signifying the breadth of her coalition tent, and Harris made multiple campaign stops with his daughter.
"Who would have guessed lying about Biden’s cognitive health for 2 yrs, refusing to do an open convention for a new nominee, never mentioning public healthcare & embracing fracking, the Cheneys & a yr long slaughter of children in Gaza wouldn’t be a winning strategy?" McKay, who dramatized the Cheneys' rise to power in his Oscar-nominated 2018 biopic Vice, wrote on social media.
"Anyone with half a brain?" the filmmaker continued in another post. "But I thought liberals’ whole thing is being smart? It’s not? They actually just blindly cheer the parade of rickety optics wrapped up in New York Times fonts that is the modern Dem Party? Well at least it’s time for the dusty hacks & careerists to spread their feathers wide post election and blame Russia and third party candidates. That should fix things."
McKay later wrote, "It is time to abandon the Dem Party. I’m registering Green Party or Working Families. But am open to ideas." McKay joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America in 2019 and was a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. In a separate post, he said, "The real way Trump wins is if we don’t abandon or take over the DNC. It’s time for a real opposition party."
McKay has been one of Hollywood's few vocal critics of the United States' support of the Israeli government's actions in Gaza, and pointed to the Democrats' policies in the Middle East as a critical issue that lost Harris votes in Michigan. "Who could have possibly guessed openly supporting the mass murder of voters’ family members would hurt Dems like this?" he wrote as he reposted voting stats from Dearborn, Mich., a city with a massive Arab-American population.
Since his feature debut Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy hit theaters in 2004, McKay has emerged as one of Hollywood's foremost cinematic satirists. His earlier, broader comedy work like The Other Guys, Talladega Nights, and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues lampooned the buffoonery of white male chauvinists while making wry jabs at policing, Wall Street, evangelicalism, and the 24-hour news cycle; his later dramedy projects like The Big Short, Vice, and Don’t Look Up made more pointed critiques of American political and economic systems.
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