Donald Trump wasn’t the only controversial cultural figure on the receiving end of Robert De Niro’s ire, as the two-time Oscar winner delivered a blistering speech at the Gotham Independent Film Awards Monday. The 80-year-old De Niro also slammed the long-dead John Wayne, suggesting that the star of Hollywood Westerns was anything but an exemplar of positive American values.
In fact, De Niro invoked racist statements Wayne made in an infamous 1971 Playboy interview to suggest to the audience that his own Hollywood film industry has long participated in the dishonesty and racism that he believes marked Trump’s presidency and thrives with the former president’s MAGA conservative politics.
“The entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease,” De Niro said, after complaining that organizers of the awards ceremony edited his speech, excising criticism he wanted to make of Trump and of Hollywood.
“The Duke John Wayne famously said of Native Americans, ‘I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them,’” De Niro said, before quoting Wayne some more: “There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.’”
De Niro mostly quoted Wayne’s comments correctly, though “The Searchers” actor also said in that statement: “Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival.”
In the Playboy interview, the “True Grit” star had been asked if he felt any “empathy” for Native Americans, or for the way they were expected to play “a subordinate” role in his movies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Native American activists become vocal about the way they had long been villainized in Hollywood Westerns. Their concerns culminated with Marlon Brando refusing to attend the 1973 Academy Awards or to accept his best actor Oscar for “The Godfather” to protest “the treatment of American Indians by the film industry.”
It’s likely that De Niro has become attuned to the marginalizing of Native Americans, and their stories, in movies and TV because he currently stars in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” (Perhaps not coincidentally, De Niro won his first Oscar by playing a younger version of Brando’s Don Corleone in “The Godfather Part II.”)
“Killers of the Flower Moon” director Martin Scorsese said he hoped that his new epic film would help correct this historic sidelining by placing Native American characters and actors at the center of the film’s story about the brutal serial murders of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma.
In his speech, De Niro appeared to call out Apple, which produced “Killers of the Flower Moon.” He blasted the company for excising his political comments without permission. With that, De Niro left the approved script and went on the attack, mostly against Trump but also against Wayne and the film industry.
In his off-script remarks, De Niro began: “History isn’t history anymore. Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness.” The actor also cited changes to Florida’s Black history curriculum, which requires students to be taught that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” the Washington Post said.
De Niro continued with his remarks about Wayne and the entertainment industry, then returned to railing on Trump, saying: “Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution.”
The Washington Post, citing its Fact Checker team, reported that Trump indeed told more than 30,500 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.
“He’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution, but with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul,” De Niro also said. He added that Trump “attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature, and shows disrespect, for example, by using Pocahontas as a slur.” Here, De Niro was referring to Trump’s regular use of the name of the Indian chief’s daughter as a slight against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who claimed to have Native American ancestry in her family tree.
As De Niro spoke, he received a growing chorus of cheers and applause, according to the Daily Beast.
Both the Washington Post and the Daily Beast said that Apple and the Gotham Independent Film Awards did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In invoking Wayne, De Niro didn’t mention some of the actor’s other incendiary remarks about Black people. He told Playboy: “I Believe in White supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.” Wayne also derided women’s rights and the depiction of gay sex in “Midnight Cowboy.”
As for Native Americans, Wayne dismissed the writer’s questions about them being dehumanized on reservations or having their land stolen from them. Wayne said that any poor treatment of Native Americans happened in the 1800s, and “our forefathers evidently thought they were doing the right thing.”
“What happened between their forefathers and our forefathers is so far back — right, wrong or indifferent — that I don’t see why we owe them anything,” Wayne said. “I don’t know why the government should give them something that it wouldn’t give me.”