The bizarre brilliance of Joaquin Phoenix - WASHINGTON EXAMINER

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Joaquin Phoenix is a dreadfully awkward character in Hollywood. The Joker actor reminded us of his eccentricities during his acceptance speech at Sunday night’s Oscars, but he also made some refreshing and insightful points.

His speech started with an acknowledgment of Hollywood’s penchant for activism on a variety of issues, pointing out that at the core of each cause is a shared concern about injustice. Then, there was the hard pivot to the matter of ... cow insemination.

"I think that we've become very disconnected from the natural world. And many of us, what we're guilty of is an egocentric worldview: the belief that we're the center of the universe. We go into the natural world, and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then, we take her milk that's intended for her calf, and we put it in our coffee and our cereal."

Any time you turn on the Oscars, you can expect an excess of politics, virtue-signaling, and preaching from cultural elites, but something about Phoenix’s tortured address resonated.

Understood to be an imperfect vessel for any message of social change and responsibility, Phoenix stuck to a subject he’s been talking about for decades: his concern about intensive animal farming. Most people willing to look at what goes on at industrial farms understand those actions to be cruel, and Phoenix knows this, but he aimed higher than just guilt-tripping the audience over the milk in their cereal.