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In the wake of a sweeping Republican electoral victory, filmmaker and actress Justine Bateman said on Friday that she had been “walking on eggshells” the past four years, a period she called “un-American.”
“I have found the last four years to be an almost intolerable period. A very un-American period in that any questioning, any opinions, any likes or dislikes were held up to a very limited list of “permitted positions” in order to assess acceptability,” Bateman posted on X..
Bateman, who appeared in hit TV shows “Family Ties” and “Desperate Housewives,” added further that she’s never known such conditions “to be an American environment.”
“It’s an environment I have encountered in smaller groupings (a church, a private club, a clique), but never before as a national blanket. It has been suffocating. Common sense was discarded, intellectual discussion was demonized,” she said.
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She went on to say, “‘Permitted position’ behavior and speech was ‘allowed.’ Complete intolerance became almost a religion and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others.”
“Their destruction was displayed in the ‘Townsquare’ of social media for all to see.”
Bateman’s comments came after President-elect Donald Trump’s landslide victory on Election Day over Vice President Kamala Harris in sweeping every battleground state, securing the electoral college as well as the popular vote.
Harris congratulated Trump over the phone on Wednesday morning and later delivered her concession speech at her alma mater, Howard University.
Trump’s second presidential election came alongside the GOP winning the Senate majority and gaining more seats in the House.
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The Republican Party’s victory has prompted many discussions within the Democratic Party, including Harris-Walz surrogates, to self-reflect on what led to the outcome, especially considering that a Republican has not won both the popular vote and electoral college in over 20 years. For instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., accused the Democratic Party of abandoning the working class.
Bateman added that the suppression of speech over the past four years has stifled the country from any “forward movement” because it shut out “independent thinkers and cultural and intellectual innovators.”
“This was the #MeMeMeMeToo moment, where every effort was made to divert attention to oneself, instead of recognizing how one contributes to the whole. This was the era of trying to exercise control over those who did not want to follow the crowd and has their own ideas about what they needed to do,” Bateman said.
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“When you starve a society of those called to be independent thinkers and cultural and intellectual innovators, you rob that society of any forward movement,” she continued. “Those that tried to impose that control maintained a kind of ‘hall monitor’ position by threatening others with damning labels like ‘Sexist,’ ‘racist,’ “homophobic,’ etc, when the free-thinking and questioning was nothing of the sort.
“However, the mob mentality that followed caused these social convictions when there was often no evidence to support them,” she said while pointing to the book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”
“I am neither one extreme or the other, but am one of the millions of people who believe in common sense, and that everyone should be free to live their lives however they want, unless that freedom interferes with someone else’s freedom to live their own life. That’s it,” she concluded.
Bateman’s remarks followed several other celebrities, many of whom supported Harris, to soul search after the Republicans’ decisive victory. “The Big Short” director and staunch progressive Adam McKay announced that he was abandoning the Democratic Party for the Green Party or Working Class Families Party.