“Hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go.”
That was movie star Jane Fonda at a star-studded “Fire Drill” rally on climate change rally last Friday in Los Angeles.
“We have to act like the house is on fire,” Fonda the crowd. “Millions of young people and students have stood up. Now older people are joining them.”
As the California Globe noted, several counter protesters waved signs that Fonda was a traitor, and shouted “You’re a traitor, Jane.” Fonda, now 82, responded “never mind” and organizers and police “pulled out” the protesters. The younger crowd likely had no clue that the traitor charge went back to the 1960s, when the United States was fighting in Vietnam.
Many Americans argued that the United States had no good reason to be there. Others protested the military draft and the disastrous way politicians were conducting the war. Still others were pro-war, but on the side of the North Vietnamese Communist regime. A prime player on that team was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose members used to chant “Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win,” and so forth.
New Left stalwart Tom Hayden co-authored the SDS “Port Huron Statement,” and wound up married to Jane Fonda (Cat Ballou, Barefoot in the Park, Klute), who loaded up the SDS with star power. Jane Fonda duly journeyed to Hanoi, and parroted North Vietnamese propaganda. A rapturously smiling Fonda was photographed on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, at a time when American pilots such as Lee Ellis, author of Leading With Honor: Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton were still imprisoned there.
The North Vietnamese tortured more than 95 percent of American POWs, Ellis notes, including eight tortured to death. The captors piped in propaganda and, Ellis explains, “the afternoon broadcasts were especially disheartening because they featured Americans spouting words that could have been written for them in Moscow and Hanoi.” American Tom Hayden “was a regular speaker,” later joined by his wife “film star Jane Fonda.”
That had veterans comparing Jane Fonda to “Axis Sally,” Mildred Gillars, an American traitor who served jail time for broadcasting Nazi propaganda during World War II. For her part, “Hanoi Jane” suffered not at all, and became the darling of California Governor Jerry Brown, who avoided the draft by going to seminary and never served in the military. Brown appointed Fonda to the California Arts Council, a poke in the eye to Vietnam veterans, brave fighters betrayed by politicians and the targets of vilification.
Fonda made some half-baked attempts at an apology but as she explains on her website, the “one thing” she will regret to her dying day is, “I allowed myself to be photographed on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.” Like the SDS, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden were never “anti-war activists.” They were info-warriors for the Communist regime, and when the tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975 Fonda popped the champagne.
In 1979, during the exodus of the “boat people,” Joan Baez and other liberals criticized “the cruelty, violence and oppression” of the Communist regime. Baez was instantly condemned by
Jane Fonda, Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, and Tom Hayden, and Fonda charged that one of Baez’s sources was a CIA agent.
Jane Fonda has never aligned herself with critics of any Communist regime. As such, she is the ideal mouthpiece for the totalitarian left’s latest gambit, a variation of watermelon environmentalism: green outside, red inside.
As the left now warns, climate change is such an existential threat that we must turn over the economy to socialists. So no surprise that at the “Fire Drill” rally, as the California Globe noted, Democrat presidential contender Tom Steyer was handing out signs and members of Greenpeace were “talking with crowd members about Bernie Sanders,” who also has his eyes on the prize.
No surprise that the crimson-clad Jane Fonda was leading the chant of “Hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go.” This from a multi-millionaire actress whose movie star father Henry Fonda facilitated her entry to Hollywood, where it’s all relative. Still, there’s no denying Jane’s dramatic talent.
Jane Fonda won two Academy Awards, two British American Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, seven Golden Globes, and many other prizes. Fonda won a best actress Oscar for the 1971 Klute, in which she played a high-end whore, essentially the same role she played for the North Vietnamese Communists.
Fonda won her second best-actress Oscar for the 1978 Coming Home, in which paraplegic Vietnam veteran Luke Martin (Jon Voight) performs cunnilingus on Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda). As Oliver Lyttleton of Indywire recalls, the camera lingers “on Fonda’s face as she climaxes, giving it a real tenderness.” This was “one of the more memorable scenes in a tremendous film.”
For actual Vietnam veterans, the scene could recalled Fonda’s expression as she sat on the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. Vietnam veterans could believe that this memorable scene is Jane Fonda’s own favorite performance of all time. With this pampered Hollywood star, it’s “Hey hey, Ho Ho,” forever. If members of all age groups choose to disregard anything Fonda has to say, it would be hard to blame them.
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