Voight meets harsh political criticism

Jon Voight is at the cusp of a cultural moment. Fellow actors and celebrities are not heaping criticism on the silver-screen conservative following his feisty criticisms of President Obama, made in a speech before Republicans and in The Washington Times last week.

But Mr. Voight is getting some serious flak in the political realm, and the criticism is ideologically driven. He’s being accused of hate speech.

The Academy Award-winning actor was cited Monday by People’s Weekly World, a magazine once known as the “Daily Worker” and sympathetic to the Communist Party.

In a wide-ranging editorial denouncing “home-grown terrorism,” the publication pounced on Mr. Voight’s mention of an effort “to bring an end to this false prophet, Obama” as he addressed the National Republican Congressional Committee last week.

“I don’t want to equate what Jon Voight said as expressing a conservative opinion on politics. It went way beyond that. He made a threat against the president of the United States to a crowd at a GOP fundraiser and got a good response from the Senate minority leader and other powerful people. And that is scary,” said Teresa Albano, editor of the publication.

Marsha Zakowski, president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, was alarmed, too.

“Jon Voight is a celebrity. He can influence people. Voight has just been coming out with this ultraconservative point of view. It is deplorable,” she told the magazine in a separate article.

Mr. Voight’s entire comment was a little longer than the eight words cited.

He was in the process of lauding a list of 23 Republicans and conservatives - from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to historian Shelby Steele and Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard.

“Let’s give thanks to them for staying on course to bring an end to this false prophet, Obama,” Mr. Voight said that night, according to his handwritten speech, shared during a recent visit to The Times newsroom.

But the abbreviated phrase, isolated out of context, for the most part, stuck in the craw of many.

Mr. Voight attracted the attention of some prominent journalists who were not treating the 71-year-old performer as a novelty act, simple-minded Hollywood conservative or some upstart curiosity left over from the John Wayne era.

Frank Rich, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, included Mr. Voight on a roster of “Obama haters’ silent enablers” and also cited the abbreviated passage.

Mr. Rich observed: “This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-scriptural call to action, is toxic.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman cited Mr. Voight’s words in an Op-Ed called “The Big Hate” that accused certain conservatives and news organizations - including The Washington Times - of “mainstreaming right-wing extremism” systematically as far back as the Clinton administration.

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