Jane Fonda has been arrested, again. But don’t worry, she did it for your future.
The actress recently moved to Washington D.C., so she can get arrested a few dozen times over the next several months in order to protest climate change. Like she did on Friday, she’ll be waiting on the steps of the Capitol for police officers to take her away.
This is the type of commitment only a privileged, white actress could have to signaling her moral seriousness. But Fonda insists that she’s protesting climate change for all of us.
“It’s as simple as this. We have according to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 12 years, but that was a year ago,” Fonda told the Washington Post. “So according to their report we have 11 years left. Eleven years to do something that has never been done in human history. And if we don’t do it, huge parts of the planet are going to be uninhabitable, by the way.”
The radical claim, though also touted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been disputed by climate scientists. Nevertheless, rather than taking a less melodramatic approach to the problem of climate change, Fonda insists on telling us we’re likely doomed.
She admits that she still flies in planes and eats meat, popular objects of scorn for the climate activists of the day. So she says she’s targeting the federal government, trying to get the United States to stop funding fossil fuels.
As for the charge that her protests may seem like unnecessary antics, Fonda brushes it off. “There’s some people you’ll not convince,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But we want to reach the people who know it’s a man-made problem, know it exists, but they don’t know what to do.”
In all likelihood, though, Fonda will continue to alienate the voters she hopes to convince.
She set her own precedent when her career as an activist began in the 1970s. In Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, she infamously posed atop an anti-aircraft gun, earning the nickname “Hanoi Jane.” Her efforts to protest the Vietnam War backfired as she was perceived as threatening the U.S. military. Since then, Fonda has repeatedly apologized for the incident.
But for the past few decades, she hasn’t been able to shake the moral elitism that got her into her first scandal. Plenty of Americans, including those overseas, didn’t want to be involved in the war either. So protests such as her anti-USO group FTA, which stood for Free The Army but also nodded to the phrase “f— the Army,” were more about virtue-signaling than actual support for the country.
As Fonda takes to the streets of D.C. echoing the same hyperbolic rhetoric that has turned some away from the legitimate debate about sustainable energy, she sabotages her message. No, most Americans don’t want to listen to what Hollywood has to say. And when an actress pulls taxpayer-funded stunts with rhetoric that ignores the nuance of the debate, she doesn’t invite any more people to listen.
