Sean Penn Tells Artists To Be “As Politically Incorrect As Their Heart Desires"

Sean Penn, a two-time Oscar winner, received a career honor at the Marrakech Film Festival, and ended up using his acceptance speech to warn artists worldwide about the dangers of “political correctness.”

Penn, never one to hold back his views, decided to scorch “liberals” who make it harder to embrace freedom of thought back at home. In the speech, he specifically cites a 2018 debate between British star Stephen Fry and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson to make his argument (via Deadline):

While Steven is a very progressive-minded person, he criticized the liberals on the other side of the aisle for what liberalism has become in the United States […] Around the world [there is] this demand for diversity — but not diversity of behavior and not diversity of opinion or language. I would just encourage everybody to be as politically incorrect as their heart desires and to engage diversity and to keep telling those stories.

Lately, Penn has not been shy in his criticism of what he calls today’s “timid and artless policy toward the human imagination.” He keeps blaming liberals and political correctness for the problem. It’s come to the point where Penn that it’s now become too “miserable” to act in movies.

Penn recently told The New York Times that the current zeitgeist would have prevented him in playing the part of a gay man, as he did in his Oscar-winning 2008 performance in “Milk.”

The actor claimed that “Milk” “was the last time I had a good time [on a film set],” adding, “It could not happen in a time like this. It’s a time of tremendous overreach. It’s a timid and artless policy toward the human imagination.”

This came just a few months after telling Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast that liberals had a misplaced sense of compassion, labeling them an “idiot show of politically correct morons.”

Of course, this hasn’t stopped Penn from acting. Although he’s not as prolific as he once was, opting to choose far less roles this decade, he recently appeared in the indie “Daddio,” and is set to have a supporting role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming “The Battle of Baktan Cross.”