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Why Anne Frank Center Targeted Tim Allen

The attempt to shame conservative star Tim Allen is a textbook example of how liberals play the Selective Outrage game. And reporters are only too eager to join the fray.

The star of “Last Man Standing” recently cracked a joke about Hollywood’s treatment of conservatives. Sitting on the couch at “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Allen explained to Kimmel the pressure his fellow Republican stars face in the Age of Trump.

“You gotta be real careful around here, you know. You’ll get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody believes. It’s like ’30s Germany.”

Tim Allen on Going to Donald Trump's Inauguration

Allen said it with a smirk. That wasn’t enough for Steven Goldstein, the executive director of the Anne Frank Center.

“Tim, have you lost your mind?” Goldstein wrote in a Facebook post.

“No one in Hollywood today is subjecting you or anyone else to what the Nazis imposed on Jews in the 1930s,” said Goldstein directing Allen to leave his “bubble” and “apologize to the Jewish people” as well as “other peoples targeted by the Nazis.”

Stop the Presses!

Goldstein’s comments attracted instant attention from most major news outlets. Time Magazine. The Hollywood Reporter. Variety. Entertainment Weekly. USA Today.

Reporters slavishly weaponized Goldstein’s comments to embarrass Allen into an apology. And, perhaps, silence the fact that he had a point.

The joke wasn’t Allen’s finest. Yet Allen is hardly the first celebrity to make a clumsy reference to either Nazi Germany or Adolf Hitler over the past few months. Heck, it’s become mainstream for celebrities to invoke the era to slam President Trump.

And most aren’t joking.

  • Sarah Silverman donned a Nazi outfit and a Hitler mustache to talk Trump on TBS’s “Conan” show.
  • Cher sent out the following tweet: “LIKE TRUMP,HITLER CAUSED CHAOS&FEAR,THEN SAID HE WAS THE ONLY MAN STRONG ENOUGH 2KEEP PPL SAFE& KEEP TROUBLE MAKERS FROM RUINING THE COUNTRY.”
  • Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong told Kerrang! Magazine: “He’s preyed on their anger…He just said, ‘You have no options, and I’m the only one, and I’m going to take care of it myself.’ I mean, that’s…Hitler, man!”
  • “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway called Trump a “complete dangerous monster” at the 2016 Emmy Awards Ceremony, adding “and at any moment that I have to call out Trump for being an inheritor to Hitler, I will.”
  • Director Spike Lee told The Daily Beast Trump would shutter mosques. “That’s like the Nazis. That’s like Hitler, Mussolini, the Axis Powers. You can’t do that..”
  • Ashley Judd’s comments at January’s Women’s March featured her approvingly quoting from a young poet: “I am not as nasty as a swastika painted on a Pride flag and I didn’t know devils could be resurrected, but I feel Hitler in these streets.”
  • Actress Leighton Meester recently insinuated Trump was worse than Hitler

That’s just a partial list.

And yet The Anne Frank Center appeared to ignore those outrageous comparisons. A good faith Google search didn’t find evidence the Center took those stars to task.

So we reached out to both the Center and Goldstein to ask why.

Here is Goldstein’s swift response:

“We have watched Tim Allen’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live closely.  He was not engaging in satire but rather, making a comparison he took seriously.  As an organization, we have issued numerous statements cautioning even our own supporters not to compare President Trump, whose civil and human rights policies we abhor, with Hitler.  No one can’t credibly claim we are selective with whom we take issue when it comes to Antisemitism and other prejudice.”

This reporter politely asked via email both Goldstein and the group’s press representative for any examples where the Center took the aforementioned stars to task for their Nazi comparisons.

No response.

Why?

Tim Allen, Conservative

tim-allen-trump
Tim Allen dressed up as a certain president for ABC’s “Last Man Standing.”

Could it be that Allen votes for the GOP while the other stars making the Hitler comparison are liberals? You don’t have to dig too deeply into the Anne Frank Center’s social media presence to see a decidedly liberal tilt.

And that’s fine.

The center’s selective outrage? That’s another matter. And why aren’t media outlets asking the very same question? They’ve reported on the stars’ Hitler Card obsession for a full year now. Why not ask the Anne Frank Center why it didn’t slam other celebrities, too?

It fits a familiar pattern.

When rapper Bow Wow Tweeted about pimping out First Lady Melania Trump there was precious little outrage. The press’ reaction was muted.

No major women’s group called for the rapper to apologize. Imagine if a conservative country star had said something similar about First Lady Michelle Obama?

This reporter reached out to the National Organization for Women to respond to the rapper’s heinous tweet. The group said it didn’t have a spokesperson available to comment.

This Isn’t a New Story

Allen’s comments came on the heels of two major media outlets essentially admitting to Hollywood’s suffocating attitude toward conservatives. Both the LA Times and The Hollywood Reporter published articles explaining how conservatives are mistreated in Hollywood.

GOP actors have met in secret for years while liberals stars flaunt their Democrat fundraisers. It appears to be getting worse since President Donald Trump took the oath of office.

Let The LA Times paint the picture:

For the vast majority of conservatives who work in entertainment, going to set or the office each day has become a game of avoidance and secrecy. The political closet is now a necessity for many in an industry that is among the most liberal in the country.

Have other outlets started investigating the threat to free speech in an industry that allegedly thrives on it? Not yet, at least. Salon.com mocked how conservatives call the unequal treatment the “new” blacklist. So did the AV Club, the partisan news wing of the liberal comedy site The Onion.

So there you have it. A liberal organization attempts to silence a conservative star for speaking the truth in an admittedly clumsy fashion. And the press, oh so happy to slam a Republican while downplaying Hollywood’s oppressive nature, pounces.

It’s another sad example of the entrenched biases in both the press and Hollywood. That’s something everyone should be outraged about.

40 Comments

  1. “No one can’t credibly claim we are selective with whom we take issue when it comes to Antisemitism and other prejudice.”–

    I think we safely can.

    1. Except the original statement was so badly-written that it kinda, sorta makes sense – in a nonsense way. “No-one can’t credibly claim…”?

      1. The real lie was in the rest:
        “As an organization, we have issued numerous statements cautioning even our own supporters not to compare President Trump, whose civil and human rights policies we abhor, with Hitler. No one can’t credibly claim we are selective with whom we take issue when it comes to Antisemitism and other prejudice.”

        This reporter politely asked via email both Goldstein and the group’s press representative for any examples where the Center took the aforementioned stars to task for their Nazi comparisons.

        No response.”

        So basically she claimed they cautioned other Hollywood people not to make Hitler comparisons, but then when confronted numerous examples, could produce no statement in any leftist case by them to back up their claim.

    1. Copyright (c) Mark Steyn.
      (Notice I’m not disagreeing with him . . . well, of course, to be fair, you aren’t either.)
      (Actually, can a pithy observation be copyrighted?)

      1. Actually what you can do is put a h/t Mark Steyn. That is how you give proper credit to something that somebody says.

  2. I am amazed at the deliberate misunderstanding of what Mr. Allen said, are these folks all so determined to find offense by conservatives that they read there own narrative into what someone says. I would be inclined to say to him I know you think you know what I said, but what you heard was not what I said.

  3. No one should be allowed to make Nazi jokes, my grandfather died in a concentration camp.

    He fell out of a guard tower.

    1. Or as Joan Rivers once said:
      “I lost my whole family at Auschwitz. Seriously, I must have spent two hours in the gift shop waiting for them”.

    2. You know… that is funny… but a bunch of butt-hurt libtards wouldn’t understand it… or they’d publicly attack it while privately telling it to their useful-idiot friends. I’m done with being lectured to by my inferiors.

    1. Looks to me like they are not interested in protecting Jewish interests around the world. They are exploiting her name to push a Leftist agenda which has nothing to do with Israel or other valid Jewish interests.

      Kind of like People for the American Way was founded by serious liberal Norman Lear and has nothing to do with the American Way. They push the Leftist/Commie agenda and fight the true American traditions and Way.

  4. The problem is he should have used Stalin as an example except that would make too many historically ignorant fools in Hollywood proud.

  5. Steven Goldstein is an illiterate buffoon. Many things were going on in 1930’s Germany, much of which had zero to do with Jews. Oppose the Nazi Party, and the Brownshirts would descend on you in brutal verbal and physical attacks. The modern parallel to this is the Antifa fascists who attack peaceful Trump supporters. Mr. Allen was spot-on.

    1. Not to mention the lefties who try to drive Trump supporters out of business or make them lose their jobs.

    2. If Allen is talking about Hollywood punishing and blackballing people for political speech, an even better comparison would be to the McCarthy era, except instead of silencing communists, Hollywood is now silencing Conservatives. Except Communism was indeed a real threat to the USA then, while conservatism is only a threat to leftist political power, not to ordinary Americans or to the nation as a whole.

      1. The Venona Papers proved that McCarthy was vindicated in his belief too. Communism is still a threat, but it goes under different labels now, like the environmental movement.

    3. Yes he was. The Anne Frank Center must need some fundraising publicity. That is the only reason I can think of for them attacking one honest comment vs all the months worth of spiteful trash that the Left has been spewing.

  6. To all you Snowflakes in Hollyweird who were Offended by Tim I have this to say; GFY and the horse you rode in on.

  7. Just FYI, this web page is totally, totally fucked up in Chrome on Linux. Entire left side of the page is off the screen and unreadable. Fire your web developer. You’re welcome.

  8. From its website:
    “Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect is a progressive voice for social justice, fighting hatred of refugees and immigrants, Antisemitism, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, bias against the differently abled and any other hate that runs counter to American promise of freedom…. Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect is headquartered in New York City, with an additional office in Los Angeles….”
    http://annefrank.com/about-the-center/

    In other words, it has about as much to do with Anne Frank as the Republican National Committee…

      1. The RNC certainly is better at standing up for Israel and opposing Anti Semitism. You notice that in the long list the Anne Frank organization listed of people subject to prejudice and persecution, they never listed Jews or Israel, and only mentioned anti semitism in the middle of a very long list. For an organization supposedly existing to memoralize a Jewish girl killed by NAZIS, mentioning every leftist favored group in the world, including Muslims who are often anti semitic, but never mentioning Israel or Jews at all, this group has pretty much totally forgotten their original purpose, and gone full leftist.

  9. I realize a double-negative in English doesn’t equate to a mathematical double-negative… yet I can’t shake the impression that Goldstein is a lying sack of $#!+.

  10. I’m confused. I remember Tim Allen’s rabid tirade against Newt when the Republicans won the Congress after 40+ years of Democrat ownership. So when exactly did Tim Allen become a conservative?

    1. Trying to do the type of show he does, with actual male related topics and ideas and humor, has probably opened his eyes to a lot more reality than he was used to at the time.

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