Spike Lee went on a profanity-laced rant against President Donald Trump during his press conference at the 71st annual Cannes Film Festival in France, while promoting his film “BlacKkKlansman.”
“And we have a guy in the White House — I’m not gonna say his fucking name — who defined that moment, not just for Americans but the world, and that motherfucker was given the chance to say ‘we are about love and not hate,'” the 61-year-old film director said Tuesday as he talked about the violence that broke out at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, last year.
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“And that motherfucker did not denounce the motherfucking Klan, the alt-right, and those Nazis motherfuckers,” he added. “It was a defining moment, and he could have said to the world, not the United States, that we were better than that.”
“The so-called American cradle of democracy — that’s bullshit,” he continued. “The United States of America was built on the genocide of native people and slavery. That is the fabric of the United States of America. As my Brooklyn brother Jay-Z would say, facts.”
“We look to our leaders. They give us direction to make moral decisions,” Lee shared, according to Vulture. “And I like to say this is not just something that pertains to the United States of America, this bullshit has gone over the world. This right-wing bullshit is not just America, it is all over the world, and we have to wake up.”
Following last year’s violent protests, however, Trump said he condemned the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.”
As the president shared, “To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered… we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.”
“Racism is evil,” he added. “And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”