In her latest appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Thursday, Oprah Winfrey opened up about her hefty donation to the March for Our Lives movement and responded to the president’s “hate tweet” against her.
Following the tragic deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Winfrey announced that she would be following George and Amal Clooney, Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw in making her own $500,000 donation to support the March for Our Lives demonstration in which students “will take to the streets of Washington, D.C., to demand that their lives and safety become a priority” and that gun violence and mass shootings cease.
“George and Amal, I couldn’t agree with you more. I am joining forces with you and will match your $500,000 donation to ‘March For Our Lives.’ These inspiring young people remind me of the Freedom Riders of the 60s who also said we’ve had ENOUGH and our voices will be heard,” Winfrey tweeted on Tuesday.
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Winfrey continued to praise the young students while sitting down with DeGeneres. “This is a moment. This is exactly what happened during the civil rights movement where people … they were 18, 19, 20 years old, young people who said, ‘We have had enough. Enough.’ These kids are right there.” Winfrey also compared the moment to when she reported, earlier in her career, about the Mothers Against Drunk Driving organization, thinking the young students need to devise a name and plan for the anticipated march.
Winfrey then advised that the young activists get “organized,” arguing that the “reason why the civil rights movement worked, [is because] there was a strategy. There was a plan. It wasn’t just out there, hocus-pocus, protesting all the time.”
Winfrey also took a moment to respond to President Donald Trump’s “hate tweet,” in which he called the activist “insecure” following her report about America’s political divide during Trump’s presidency on Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes.
“Just watched a very insecure Oprah Winfrey, who at one point I knew very well, interview a panel of people on 60 Minutes,” Trump tweeted. “The questions were biased and slanted, the facts incorrect. Hope Oprah runs so she can be exposed and defeated just like all of the others!”
“I woke up and I just thought,” Winfrey began to tell DeGeneres, before raising her hands in the air and shrugging. “And I don’t like giving negativity power, so I just thought, ‘What?’ What I actually really did was I went back and looked at the tape to see if there was any place that that could be true. Did I feel like it was slanted or biased? I went back and looked at every tape, I called the producer. Because what actually happened was when you do 60 Minutes, you sit in a room with at least seven other people who critique the piece before you air it, before you do the introduction to it, and then they give you the critique. They critique every word and is this fair — you have this whole panel of people looking at whether it was fair.”
Winfrey then admitted that she realized that there was something missing from the conversation after rewatching it, even asking, “Do you think, do you care about what other people think about America?”
“They only used the Democratic side. And I said, I remembered the guy Matt had said, ‘No, we’re the only people that are worried what other countries are thinking of us.’ And I said, ‘I think you should go back and put that in because it makes it more balanced.’ So, I was working very hard to do the opposite of what I was hate-tweeted about so, it’s OK.”
