Ken Burns Suspends 'Long-Standing Attempt At Neutrality' To Utterly Torch Trump

Lee Moran

Updated 29 May 2024 at 9:09 am·1-min read

Filmmaker Ken Burns ditched his trademark political neutrality during an undergraduate commencement address at Massachusetts’ Brandeis University to warn what will happen to the U.S. if former President Donald Trump wins back the White House.

“For nearly 50 years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously tried to maintain a conscious neutrality in my work, avoiding advocacy if I could, trying to speak to all of my fellow citizens,” the documentarian explained to the audience in the May 19 ceremony, footage from which is gaining attention online.

Burns later acknowledged he’d been forced “to suspend my long-standing attempt at neutrality” because “there is no real choice this November.”

Watch Burns’ full address here:

“There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route,” the historian warned.

Trump, the four-time-indicted presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is “the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems,” Burns said.

But with Trump in office “you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction,” he predicted.

“Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation,” said Burns. “We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.”

On Tuesday, Burns told MNSBC’s Nicolle Wallace that he’d been compelled to use the address to speak out over the “existential” moment in U.S. history because the stakes have never been higher.

Watch that interview here:

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