Robert Redford, who is best known for starring in such movies as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, wrote an article for the December 11 issue of TIME magazine, which describes him as also a “director, producer and environmental activist.”
In an obvious effort to live up to that last description, Redford hammered President Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress for “trying to break” a promise “to protect and preserve the national splendor of this country.”
The article began:
I’ve always believed our country’s wide open landscapes reflect our unique American spirit.
It’s that sense of boundless opportunity, personal freedom and the pursuit of equality that’s defined us as a people and inspired us from our start as a nation.
“Those values created what is often called America’s best idea,” he continued, “the promise to protect and preserve the natural splendor of this country, not just for some, but for all of us. And not just for today, but for all time.”
Redford then accused President Donald Trump of “trying to break that promise and sacrifice spectacular lands for the sake of oil and gas profits. His target is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the last truly wild places left on this Earth.”
“The Arctic Refuge is a national treasure, so majestic and wild and beautiful” that some people “call it ‘The Sacred Place Where Life Begins,’” he continued, which is “part of the reason Republican President [Dwight] Eisenhower set aside the Arctic Refuge more than 50 years ago.”
“Oil and gas companies have coveted those lands ever since,” Redford added. “They’ve tried, and failed, more than a dozen times to break down the protections that guard the refuge from drilling and the harm they cause.”
However, “Congress is about to shell out tax cuts to these same big corporations,” he stated, “and you may not know their deal includes a provision to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.”
“They are claiming to pay for proposed tax cuts by charging oil companies $100 million a year to mine the Refuge, but we all know what’s really going on,” Redford noted, that while “$100 million sounds great, … don’t be fooled. It won’t even pay the interest on our new debt for even a single day.”
“And it’s not even close to being worth the trade for giving up the Refuge,” he stated.
“It’s a dirty deal -- but it’s not a done deal,” the activist asserted. “Republicans are scrambling to get their tax scam out of Congress and onto Trump’s desk by Christmas. I believe we can still stop it -- but we’ve got days, not weeks.”
“Join me right now to stand up for this special place,” Redford pleaded. “Tell Congress you’ll hold them responsible if they give away our lands to the most profitable companies in the world.”
“Remind them of our American spirit, the will to fight and to stand up for causes and ideas bigger than ourselves,” he concluded.
As NewsBusters reported in April of 2011, Redford told TIME that “I’m not a left-wing person. I’m just a person interested in the sustainability of our country.”
During September of 2015, the actor/director also starred as disgraced CBS anchorman Dan Rather in a film entitled Truth, which was based on the book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power, written by Mary Mapes, the disgraced producer of 60 Minutes during Rathergate, who was also terminated from CBS News.
The environmentalist later stated in an op-ed for the Washington Post in April of 2017 that he “was so impressed with Woodward and Bernstein that he made a movie out of their self-promoting journalistic hero story.”
Then on September 13 of this year, the actor/director/activist told Esquire’s Michael Haney that former presidents Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, “are not helping us at all. They’re taking us backward in time.”
Redford also stated that Trump serving in the White House is “our fault,” and “You can’t blame him for being who he is.”
Four days later, the liberal actor and director claimed that global warming skeptics as simply “afraid of change” during an interview with former CNN host Larry King.
During the discussion, Redford asserted: “If you belong to a certain group of people that are afraid of change, which I think some people are. And so, I think they’re going to deny change when it happens.”
After championing all these left-wing causes, can Redford still believe he’s not a liberal activist? Nevertheless, Hollywood can be a strange place sometimes.
