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Jane Fonda uses SAG Life Achievement Award speech to stir rebellion: ‘This is big-time serious, folks. Let’s be brave’

February 24, 2025 | | Print Article

Actress Jane Fonda accepted the SAG Life Achievement Award and used her speech to bash President Donald Trump.

Though the 87-year-old still known as “Hanoi Jane” for her anti-war trip to Vietnam in 1972 did not actually mention the president by name, it was clear she was railing against him and his supporters during her speech at the SAG Awards on Sunday night.

While leftists in Hollywood and beyond cheered her on, plenty of others dropped a reality check on Fonda’s speech and her definition of “woke.”

“What we, actors, create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls,” Fonda said. “And make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. By the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”

“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening,” she said, making vague references to the Trump administration’s actions. “Even if they’re of a different political persuasion, we need to not judge but listen from our hearts.”

“I’m a big believer in unions. They have our backs,” she continued. “They bring us into community, and they give us power. Community means power, and this is really important right now when workers’ power has been attacked and community is being weakened.”

The activist actress went on to recount her stand against McCarthyism in the 1950s and how “Hollywood resisted” while she urged her fellow actors to do the same at the current time.

“I made my first movie in 1958. It was at the tail end of McCarthyism when so many careers were destroyed,” she said. “Today, it’s helpful to remember, though that Hollywood resisted.”

“Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements — of apartheid or civil rights or Stonewall — and ask yourself would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge? Would you have been able to take the hoses and the batons and the dogs? We don’t have to wonder anymore, because we are in our documentary moments. This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal!” she added.

“We mustn’t, for a moment, kid ourselves about what is happening. This is big-time serious, folks. Let’s be brave. We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future,” she concluded.

Social media users were not impressed with Fonda’s focus on politics rather than reflecting on her lifetime achievement award.

“I bow to nobody in my admiration of @Janefonda but this is not what ‘woke’ means… it actually means shaming, abusing, threatening and cancelling anyone who disagrees with you, and sucking all the joy out life. That’s why everyone’s sick of it,” British journalist Piers Morgan wrote in a post on X.

Frieda Powers
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