We’ve seen in the last couple of days that beloved actor Ed Asner is a hard-line socialist – if not an out-and-out Communist – and a champion of the Castro regime in Cuba.
Castro isn’t the only guy Asner has stood up for. As Mark Tapson noted in a 2012 article, Asner is one of those celebrities who seem drawn to murderers (especially cop-killers):
Asner testified as a character witness for accused cop killer Kenneth Gay and has spoken out publicly on numerous occasions protesting the death sentence of the celebrity set’s favorite cop-killer, Mumia Abu Jamal. Asner was also a member of the International Committee to Free Geronimo Pratt of the vile Black Panther Party, arrested in 1970 for murdering a Los Angeles schoolteacher.
Asner also embraces the crudest kind of socialist economics. In 2012, he narrated Tax the Rich, a brief propaganda video for children created by the California Federation of Teachers. “You have to see this outrageous and amateurishly animated video,” wrote Tapson,
to believe just how blatant and exaggerated is its class warfare propaganda. It’s shot through with the Occupy movement’s language about the decent 99 percent versus the insanely greedy 1 percent. It asserts that the heartless rich (all white men, of course, as opposed to the diverse commoners) became wealthy through tax loopholes, tax cuts and tax evasion; they are blamed for causing the decline of public services and crashing the economy, for buying politicians and suppressing votes, and for controlling the media which then hypnotizes the people into believing there is no alternative to capitalism.
The video, intended for the brainwashing of young minds in the classrooms of California and written by a staffer who, as of 2011, earned $139,800 a year, occasioned the following criticism by political commentator Tucker Carlson: “There’s really no overstating how dumb this is. The idea that there are any California teachers currently in classrooms in charge of children who agree with that, is horrifying.”
Amusingly, however, in 2013, when asked by an interviewer for Russia Today whether he had any concerns about the discrepancy between the salaries of “top Hollywood actors” and those of, say, nurses and schoolteachers, Asner said: “Hollywood actors are at least putting out some semblance of beauty or style or acting. I think it’s unfair to list them as part of the one percent.” The rules, in short, apply to corporate executives and the like, but not to me and my fellow TV and movie stars.
As if all this weren’t enough, Asner is, in addition, an outspoken 9/11 Truther. In a video taped for a 2004 Truther conference in Toronto, he called into question the responsibility of Osama bin Laden and suggested that members of the U.S. government had been behind the atrocity. In the above-mentioned interview with Russia Today, he repeated his charge that the official story of 9/11 was a lie. In his opening remarks at a 2007 Truther “symposium,” he referred to the U.S. as a “so-called democracy” and to the atrocity itself as “so-called terrorism.” He narrated a Truther documentary, “Solving the Mystery of Building 7.” And in 2012, along with several other actors (among them Woody Harrelson and Martin Sheen), he called for a new investigation of 9/11 and announced his participation in a planned feature film entitled Confession of a 9/11 Conspirator (the title was later changed to September Morn), which, Asner promised, would show that “Al-Qaeda couldn’t have done it.” This project soon fell apart as a result of angry disputes, with participants telling different stories about what had happened.
Bottom line: terrific actor. And hopeless stooge.