This is not about Meryl Streep

But she tried her best to make it that way.

Just like Trump himself is often praised at being a master troll, getting people to attack him for things that end up showing their own weakness instead, Meryl Streep accepted her Cecil B Demille Lifetime Achievement Award last night at the Golden Globes by attacking the president-elect, his supporters, and their very culture. She knew that anyone riposting her would be attacked by hordes of online fans as mysogynist, xenophibic, etc etc etc.

So this is not about her. She is an immensely talented actress, and by all accounts a gracious and generous person. It’s about what she said, how nauseatingly predictable it all was, and the entitled, tunnel-vision worldview that fostered it.

The speech began by pointing out all the talented, foreign-born actors at the awards show. The ability of Hollywood to attract the best and brightest from around the world to become Americans, on screen if not by law, is truly a remarkable microcosm of the overall immigration system.

Streep used it instead to pretend that the incoming Trump administration has an actual plan to “kick them all out”. Fact check: Pants on fire. Hugh Laurie accepted an award earlier in the evening and joked that he was proud to accept the award the last time they would be handed out, since an organization called the Hollywood Foreign Press probably wouldn’t be around much longer in Trump’s America.

Laurie was joking. Streep was not. That’s the difference. And it’s an important one.

Democrats spent the last six months complaining that fake news got Donald Trump elected. Yet they don’t recognize it coming from their own mouths.

Trump isn’t going to deport all “outsiders and foreigners”, Meryl. He isn’t even going to deport all undocumented “outsiders and foreigners”. He’s married to one, for Streep’s sake.

But it didn’t stop there. Streep had the unmitigated gall to demand that the “principled press” should “hold power to account” and “call him on the carpet for every outrage.” That would indeed be a noteworthy change, as the Hollywood left and their friends in the “principled” press have utterly failed to do so for the last eight years.

Who held power to account when it assassinated a teenage US citizen eating in a restaurant in 2011? Who was called on the carpet for authorizing the indefinite detention of US citizens, secret kill lists without due proess, blanket surveillance of every American, or the 26,000 bombs dropped last year on Muslim countries with whom we have not declared war? Who was held to account for federal drug raids into sovereign states that had legalized them for medicinal use? Who spoke truth to power when the president campaigned to reform immigration in his first year and instead focused instead exclusively on a health insurance takeover that’s about to be undone?

The rank hypocrisy of these Hollywood Democrats would be stunning if it weren’t so obvious and tired. And it goes on.

Streep complained that if Trump deports all the artists (*yawn*), all we’ll have left is “football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” How many movies about “football and mixed martial arts” have been made by the people in the room where she said that? How many thousands of writers, producers, directors, set decorators, lightning and sound technicians are employed by football and mixed martial arts broadcasts every week? Hollywood elites like to graciously thank the crew when they receive awards, then immediately forget them when they do work for “lesser” productions.

I’m kind of over the #WhyTrumpWon phenomenon of blaming every perceived slight against “real America” as the cause of Democrats’ electoral defeat. But the most powerful woman in Hollywood looking down her nose at two of the most popular cultural past times in the country might have something to do with it.

Trump might not even have to campaign for reelection in 2020. Hollywood has already started doing it for him.