Justine Bateman feels like she can breathe again in 'new era' after Trump win
Justine Bateman is over cancel culture.
The filmmaker and actress, 58, said the quiet part out loud over a Zoom call Tuesday afternoon, about a week after former President Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election against Vice President Kamala Harris. Pundits upon pundits are offering all kinds of reasons for his political comeback. Bateman, unlike many of her Hollywood peers, agrees with the ones citing Americans' exhaustion over political correctness.
"Trying to shut down everybody, even wanting to discuss things that are going on in our society, has had a bad result," she says. "And we saw in the election results that more people than not are done with it. That's why I say it's over."
Anyone who follows Bateman on social media already knows what she's thinking – or at least the bite-size version of it.
Bateman wrote a Twitter thread last week following the election that began: "Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years." She "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." Many agreed with her. Replies read: "Same. Feels like a long war just ended and I’m finally home." "It is truly refreshing. I feel freer already, and optimistic about my child's future for the first time." "Your courage and chutzpah is a rare commodity in Hollywood. Bravo."
Now, she says, she feels like we're "going through the doorway into a new era" and she's "100% excited about it."
In her eyes, "everybody has the right to freely live their lives the way they want, so long as they don't infringe upon somebody else's ability to live their life as freely as they want. And if you just hold that, then you've got it." The trouble is that people on both sides of the political aisle hold different definitions of infringement.
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Justine Bateman felt air go out of 'Woke Party balloon' after Trump won
Bateman referenced COVID as an era where if you had a "wrong" opinion of some kind, society ostracized you. "All of that was met with an intense amount of hostility, so intense that people were losing their jobs, their friends, their social status, their privacy," she says. "They were being doxxed. And I found that incredibly un-American."
Elon Musk buying Twitter in April 2022 served, in her mind, as a turning point. "The air kind of went out of the Woke Party balloon," she says, "and I was like, 'OK, that's a nice feeling.' And then now with Trump winning, and this particular team that he's got around him right now, I really felt the air go out."
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Trump beat Harris in a landslide. Will his shy voters feel emboldened?
Did Justine Bateman vote for Donald Trump?
Did she vote for Trump? She won't say.
"I'm not going to play the game," she says. "I'm not going to talk about the way I voted in my life. It's irrelevant. It's absolutely irrelevant. To me, all I'm doing is expressing that I feel that spiritually, there has been a shift, and I'm very excited about what is coming forth. And frankly, reaffirming free speech is good for everybody."
She also hopes "that we can all feel like we're Americans and not fans of rival football teams." Some may feel that diminishes their concerns regarding reproductive rights, marriage equality, tariffs, what have you.
But to Bateman, she's just glad the era of "emotional terrorism" has ended.
Time will tell if she's right.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Justine Bateman, Donald Trump and the return of 'free speech'