Hollywood elites are out early trying to influence the 2024 presidential election. Take Samuel L. Jackson, for example. He is doing interviews to promote the release of his latest work, Secret Invasion, which begins streaming on Disney+ today. What better way to get some headlines than to trash Trump and Republicans by calling them racist?

It’s a tired trope but the left persists. When all else fails, just call Trump and other Republicans racists. The 74-year-old Jackson spoke with Rolling Stone and expressed many hot takes on current events and past memories, too. This ramble came when he was asked about being an usher for Martin Luther King’s funeral.

I was an usher because the funeral was held at Morehouse College. I was a student, and they asked students to help people find their way through the campus and to their seats at the funeral. The day after Dr. King got killed, they brought his body to Spelman and he was laid in the chapel over there. Robert Culp and Bill Cosby rented a plane and took about 100 or so students from Spelman and Morehouse and Clark to Memphis to march with the garbagemen, and then we came back and the funeral was the next day. So, I volunteered to do all that.

The world seems to be in as hard a place as it’s always been. As a child of the Sixties, watching what happened at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and seeing the police beating those demonstrators — and those were young white kids — I learned there’s a certain kind of thing that the powers that be don’t want us doing. One of them is protesting what they think they want us to do. So, when George Floyd happened, it was great to see all the different faces of kids out there fighting the injustice and what the power was doing once again to keep you from having an open mind or keep you from creating change that is not the change they want made. That part has not changed. In my opinion, it’s kind of worse. They used to hide it. Now, they don’t hide it anymore! When I grew up in segregation, I knew which white people didn’t want to be bothered with me and I knew how they felt about me. I know how the Republicans feel about me now because of what my mindset is. When I see Trump, I see the same rednecks I saw when I was growing up who called me “n*****” and tried to keep me in my place. That’s what the Republican Party is to me. They’re doing it to young people, gay people. They don’t care who you are. If you’re not them, you’re the enemy.

As a college student at the time, he may or may not have known that those white people who “didn’t want to be bothered” with him were probably Democrats. Those people calling him the N-word were likely Democrats. And we should remember that the KKK was an organization run by Democrats. To say that things are “kind of worse” today, compared to the 1960s is absurd. By admitting that “all the different faces” protesting against perceived injustice and bringing up George Floyd shows a deliberate effort to hold on to old grudges. Having grown up in the Deep South during the sixties and seventies myself, I find it is flat-out disingenuous to pretend that things have not changed and are even worse now. Jackson was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Tennessee.

As for saying that Republicans believe “if you’re not them, you’re the enemy,” look around. In today’s divided country, both sides have been known to operate like that. Maybe Jackson is bothered by the fact that Trump voters included black males and every demographic of minorities in 2016. Trump’s percentage of support from black males increased in 2020.

So, Jackson’s character Nick Fury is back and he’s promoting the new series for Disney+. He is also going to be in The Marvels with Brie Larson, with whom he has a friendship. They bonded over the trauma of Trump’s election in 2016.

Then, we bonded through the election while we were doing her movie when Donald Trump won. She was broken and I was like, “Don’t let ‘em break you. You have to be strong now.” Then, when she got Captain Marvel, she called me and was like, “They want me in the Marvel Universe. Should I do it?” And I was like, “Hell yeah! Let’s do it!” But she’s not going to let any of that stuff destroy her. These incel dudes who hate strong women, or the fact that she’s a feminist who has an opinion and expressed it? Everybody wants people to be who they want them to be. She is who she is, and she’s genuinely that.

Trump broke a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle, even a strong woman like Brie Larson, it seems. The personalities on CNN and MSNBC have still not recovered. It is an insincere opinion to pretend that nothing has changed since past days, though. People holding on to that trope do so for political reasons. It is to their advantage to use that argument, that think, so they can spew forth with generalizations against a politician like Trump and a political party. The dialogue in the interview with Rolling Stone will turn off a large portion of the audience Jackson hopes to attract. Republicans buy movie tickets and watch Marvel movies. Calling them rednecks isn’t a smart thing to do. Hasn’t he seen what happened to Bud Light and Target, among other companies who felt entitled to insult about half the country? It’s not working out so good for them. We are in a presidential election cycle now. Jackson and his ilk should tread lightly.