Meryl Streep skewers Donald Trump, 2016 election in passionate Golden Globes speech

Meryl Streep used her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2017 Golden Globe Awards on Sunday to take aim at Donald Trump and the recent 2016 election. She called the president-elect's run for office one of the biggest "performances" of the year and began her speech by calling on some of her friends who are "foreigners."

Streep questioned the audience, "What is Hollywood really anyway? We're all a bunch of foreigners."

"The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is part of the most vilified segments in American society right now — Hollywood, foreigners and the press. But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It's just a bunch of people from other places," she explained, before adding that she hails from New Jersey, her friend Viola Davis was born on a share-cropper plantation in the Carolinas, Sarah Jessica Parker was one of many children from Ohio, Amy Adams was born in Italy, Natalie Portman was born in Israel, Ruth Negga is from Ethiopia, and Ryan Reynolds is from Canada.

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"Where are their birth certificates?"

"Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if you kick us all out, you'll have nothing to watch except for football and mixed martial arts, which are not arts," Streep said as she held back tears.

Streep then explained that one "performance" stood out this year: that of Donald Trump when he mocked a The New York Times' Serge Kovaleski, a disabled reporter. "There was nothing good about it, but it did its job," she said. "It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can't get it out my head because it wasn't in a movie, it was in real life. That instinct to humiliate when it's modeled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everyone's life because it gives permission for others to do the same."

"Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence," she added passionately. "When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose."

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Streep than asked for the press to stand up to Trump and for the "well-heeled people in Hollywood" to help support the press for their long road ahead.

"We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage," she said.

Streep then closed her passionate speech by quoting her dear friend, the late Carrie Fisher.

"As my friend, and dear departed Princess Leia once said, "Take your broken heart and make it into art."

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