Anti-Trump celebs plan 'People's State of the Union'
29 January, 2018
Actor Mark Ruffalo, center, is among the celebrities participating in an evening of speeches and music in New York City on Monday, Jan. 29, 2018, a day before President Trump's State of the Union address. (Associated Press)
A cabal of Hollywood elites, progressive groups and social activists are planning a “People’s State of the Union” as a “public alternative” on the eve of President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address.
Notable participants in Monday's scheduled event in New York City include filmmaker Michael Moore, actors Mark Ruffalo, Alyssa Milano, Rosie Perez and Whoopi Goldberg.
They'll congregate at the Town Hall in Manhattan, the venue where suffragists met in the 1920s. Singer Andra Day and rapper Common will be performing the song, “Stand Up for Something,” from the biopic film "Marshall," about the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Tickets were still available Saturday at $47 each.
The event, coordinated by unions, organizers of the Women’s March and Planned Parenthood, is being marketed as a celebration of the “resistance,” closer to “the people’s point of view,” USA Today reported.
Ruffalo, an inveterate progressive and vocal critic of President Trump, told People magazine, “I think it’s important because we have a president who has a difficult time with the truth, who has a radical, divisive agenda, and spends an enormous amount of time focusing on the negative and hopelessness and despair.”
Monday’s event also will serve as a platform for the launch of "We Stand United," the lead organizing group of the "People’s State of the Union."
The group’s campaign director, Julia Walsh, said, “We’re all going to work together across all different movements to make sure that we win back Congress in 2018 and hold this president in check.”
“It’s the mother of all movements,” Ruffalo said.
The event will be livestreamed online at peoplessotu.org.