Tim Allen thinks being a conservative in Hollywood is like living in “’30s Germany.”
At least, he said as much during an interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on March 17.
“You’ve gotta be real careful around here,” Allen told Kimmel after the host asked him about attending Donald Trump’s inauguration. “You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody believes. This is like ‘30s Germany. I don’t know what happened. If you’re not part of the group, you know, ‘What we believe is right!’ I go, ‘Well I might have a problem with that.’ I’m a comedian, I like going on both sides.”
The former “Home Improvement” star’s comments are being met with outrage by New York’s Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, which has demanded the actor apologize. In a statement posted on Facebook on March 19, the organization wrote that Allen’s comments are a “deeply offensive characterization that trivialize the horrors imposed on Jews in Nazi Germany.”
“Tim, have you lost your mind?” Steven Goldstein, the center’s executive director said, per the statement. “No one in Hollywood today is subjecting you or anyone else to what the Nazis imposed on Jews in the 1930s — the world’s most evil program of dehumanization, imprisonment and mass brutality, implemented by an entire national government, as the prelude for the genocide of nearly an entire people.”
He continued, “Sorry, Tim, that’s just not the same as getting turned down for a movie role. It’s time for you to leave your bubble to apologize to the Jewish people and, to be sure, the other peoples also targeted by the Nazis.”
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