George Clooney should really stay in his lane. That’s my takeaway from the back and forth he’s having with Megyn Kelly.
This all apparently started with Clooney who is currently starring in a stage production based upon his film Good Night and Good Luck, which is about journalist Edward R. Murrow. 60 Minutes did a segment on Clooney and the upcoming play which included a small segment in which he talked about his decision to write an editorial for the NY Times last year calling on Joe Biden to step down. Here’s a bit of that.
Kelly took objection to Clooney presenting himself as a truthteller with that op-ed. “That right there is such a lie,” she said on her show last month. She then presented the timeline, noting that Clooney had held the fundraiser with Biden two weeks before Biden’s bad night at the first presidential debate.
“Two weeks passed; he said nothing,” Kelly said. She added, “It wasn’t until July 10th, almost a month after he attended the fundraiser with him, that George Clooney finally wrote that op-ed after it became clear that Joe Biden wasn’t stepping down. He’s such a liar.” She also said at one point, “George Clooney is not a journalist.”
That might have been the end of it except Clooney defended himself in a recent interview with Patti Lupone.
During Clooney’s appearance alongside Patti LuPone on Variety‘s Broadway Actors on Actors, LuPone noted that Clooney has been labeled “a communist” and “a fascist” for his political activism over the years. Clooney, for his part, made no apologies about speaking “truth to power,” adding that “I didn’t give up my constitutional rights when I became an actor.”
“I don’t care much in terms of what they say,” Clooney said. “You see Megyn Kelly, who’s come out and said I’m not a journalist. I didn’t say I was a journalist.”
LuPone interjected: “Neither is she. ”
He continued, “I’ve at least been to Darfur and Sudan and the Congo and been shot at to try to get stories out. I’m not quite sure what she’s done to be a journalist.”
Kelly didn’t let that slide and devoted the entire opening of her show Wednesday to a response, mocking the idea that Clooney could ever be a journalist.
Clooney fancies himself a journalist you see and has lots of thoughts on how journalists need to journalism. Like he does it, mainly. You know, like stumbling upon the biggest story of the decade, that a sitting president is mentally infirm and ought to be 25th Amendment’ed right out of office, and then burying it, saying absolutely nothing for weeks on end.
And then only after that president humiliates himself on the national stage at a Presidential debate, and then refuses to step down as the entire Democrat Party watches its electoral chances up and down the ticket go swirling down the toilet, finally decides to write an op-ed in the New York Times saying Joe Biden is not up for the job.
That’s not journalism, George, it’s cowardice followed by naked partisanship.
Kelly is right about the timeline. Here’s the piece Clooney wrote for the Times in July in which he admits the Joe Biden he saw in June weeks earlier wasn’t the same guy he’d known before.
It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.
Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign.
It really would have been brave and speaking truth to power if Clooney had written that before the debate but he didn’t do that. Instead he acted as a partisan and sat on the story until there was no denying it anymore. And then, he acted like a partisan again and called for a replacement so Democrats could still have a chance to win the election. He never spoke truth to power. He spoke hope to a broken party and a broken president who had zero chance of winning after that debate meltdown.
Kelly is right that a person who sat on the biggest lie of the last four years probably shouldn’t be praising himself as a truthteller or lecturing anyone else about how to do journalism. She also notes he lied about being shot at too. That never happened. Here’s Kelly’s full response on Wednesday’s show. It seems Clooney hasn’t fired back since then. That’s probably a good idea on his part.
“His world is the world of entertainment and cosplaying ‘human rights advocate’…” @megynkelly unloads on George Clooney for claiming he’s more of a journalist than Megyn is.
Watch below, and download: https://t.co/F96HgI7HIW pic.twitter.com/yQwUVIb8rD
— The Megyn Kelly Show (@MegynKellyShow) April 23, 2025
