Jane Fonda revives her father’s first amendment group, enlisting hundreds of supporters

Based on her personal and political past, Jane Fonda has revived an activist group from the Cold War era which was supported by her father and colleague victorious of the Oscars, Henry Fonda.

Jane Fonda announced Wednesday that she had launched an incarnation of the 21st century of the Committee for the first amendment, initially trained in 1947 in response to the hearings of the Congress surveying the scriptwriters and the directors – notably the so -called “Hollywood ten” – and their alleged communist links. The signatories of the mission statement of the new organization include Florence Pugh,, Sean Penn,, Billie Eilish,, Pedro Pascal and hundreds of others.

Wednesday news arrives in the wake of The brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC on his comments on the air after a conservative activist Charlie Kirk assassination. President Trump was one of those who called Kimmel to be dismissed, and the President of the FCC, Brendan Carr, also made statements criticizing Kimmel, exhorting ABC to “act” and saying in an interview: “We can do it the simplest way or the hard way”.

“The federal government is once again engaged in a campaign coordinated to silence the criticisms of the government, the media, the judiciary, the university world and the entertainment industry,” said the committee of the mission statement of the first amendment.

“We refuse to stay next to it and let this happen. Freedom of expression and freedom of expression are the inalienable rights of all Americans from all horizons and political beliefs – no matter how liberal or conservative you can be. The ability to criticize, to question, to protest and even to make fun of those who are in power are fundamental to that America has always been to be”.

Other famous supporters from the list of more than 550 people included Alyssa MilanoBarbra Streisand, Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore, Lily TomlinMandy Patinkin, Melanie Griffith, Natalie Portman, Nicolas Cage, Olivia Wilde, Susan Sarandon, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg and Winona Ryder.

The Fondas everyone had Long activism storiesWhether Jane Fonda’s opposition to the Vietnam War or the prominent support of Henry Fonda to the candidates of the Democratic Party, including John F. Kennedy, for whom the elder Fonda appeared in a campaign announcement in 1960.

In recent years, Jane Fonda has used her platform to attract attention climate change. She founded the Jane Fonda Climate Pac in 2022 to help the “climate champions” in mayor, municipal, state and presidential council races.

“It’s not just about the environment,” she told CBS News in September 2024. “This is the whole planet.”

In 2019, She was arrested Five times during the Fridays of fire drilling, a series of protests She started in Washington, DC, which was designed to draw attention to global warming. Fonda even spent the night of its 82nd birthday behind bars. The last time Fonda had spent the night in prison was in 1970, at the age of 32, when he spoke to protest against the Vietnam War.

Henry Fonda, who died in 1982, joined the committee of the first amendment in 1947 with actors and filmmakers such as Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra. Although highly publicized at the time, the committee had a short and troubled history. Bogart and others would find themselves accused of communist sympathies and express a surprise when a handful of the Hollywood Ten, including screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, turned out to have been members of the Communist Party at one time or another.

The following year, Bogart had published a test in the magazine Photoplay entitled “I am not a communist”, in which he said that “the actors and actresses are always too far on things” and warned of the “used as dupes by the corporate organizations”. Trumbo and others in the Hollywood Ten would be imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with the Congress and found themselves among many to be put on black list until the late 1950s and beyond.