Adam McKay Calls White Liberals ‘The Worst’

Adam McKay has some things to get off his chest — and he is not holding back. The Oscar-winning director of The Big Short and Don’t Look Up went scorched-earth on the Democratic Party and its liberal base during a May 13 episode of the Urgent Futures podcast, hosted by Forbes contributor Jesse Damiani, delivering one of the more unfiltered political monologues you’ll hear from a major Hollywood filmmaker this year.

“We are being hit with the high-grade marketing and no group is worse than white liberals. I mean, they are the worst,” McKay said flatly. “I’ve tried to talk to them about climate, they are so smug and captured. And it boils down to privilege. I mean, when you talk to white moneyed liberals, they’re getting a lot from this broken system.”

He didn’t stop there. McKay went on to say he’d reached a wall with those conversations entirely. “At some point, I realized these are bad faith arguments and conversations,” he said. “The level of damage those creeps have done to our country, white liberals don’t even want to hear about it, because it’s inconvenient and unpleasant. So yeah, I almost can say I despise American white liberals. They are the grossest of the gross.”

Why McKay Broke With the Democrats

This isn’t a sudden turn for McKay. After Donald Trump secured his second presidency in November 2024, the filmmaker announced on X that he was done with the party. “It is time to abandon the Dem Party. I’m registering Green Party or Working Families. But am open to ideas,” he wrote — a post that has since been deleted. That same night, he posted a sharper indictment of the party’s strategy: “Who would have guessed lying about Biden’s cognitive health for 2 yrs, refusing to do an open convention for a new nominee, never mentioning public healthcare & embracing fracking, the Cheneys & a yr long slaughter of children in Gaza wouldn’t be a winning strategy?”

On the podcast, he expanded on all of it. He argued there’s little meaningful difference between the two parties by global standards. “Once you kind of flip that switch and realize white liberals are full on right wingers and the Republicans are extreme right wingers, by any international definition of right/left wing, you can’t support a party that doesn’t want universal health care,” he said. “The Democrats don’t have that in their party platform. Kamala Harris never brought it up.”

He was equally pointed about the party’s handling of Trump. “It is incredible to watch people this far down the road still say, ‘You gotta stand behind the Democrat Party.’ The same party that wouldn’t convict Trump of a crime after he told a crowd, ‘Go to the Capitol.’ The same party where the previous presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, literally funded Trump’s campaign.”

For anyone still trying to push the Democrats left from the inside, McKay had a blunt message: “Best of luck to you, because you’re not gonna argue with them. They’re coming from a place of they don’t care. They have privilege. They’re trying to stay in their class, social scene. They’re more worried about their alumnae cocktail hour and not stepping out of place.”

McKay’s political evolution has been years in the making. He supported Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020 and joined the Democratic Socialists of America in 2019. He’s also been a vocal climate change campaigner — which, he made clear, is a major source of his frustration with liberal voters who he feels aren’t taking the crisis seriously enough. He specifically called out former President Joe Biden for failing to declare a climate emergency before leaving office.

More recently, in August 2025, McKay signed an open letter alongside over 2,300 Writers Guild of America members condemning what they described as the Trump administration’s “unprecedented, authoritarian” attacks on free speech — a reminder that his break from the Democratic Party doesn’t mean he’s made peace with the right.

He also produced the documentary You Need This, which charts America’s history of capitalism and, per the film, calls it “the worst thing to ever happen to our planet.”

What McKay Is Working On Next

Amid the political fire, McKay also shared details about a new project that sounds very much like his wheelhouse. He’s written a pilot for a noir series at Sony Pictures TV tentatively titled No One to Tell — a three-season project inspired by Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown’s dogged investigative work exposing Jeffrey Epstein.

“God bless the Miami Herald with Julie K. Brown,” McKay said. The series will follow a former hotshot investigative journalist grinding through gig work while fighting to get a story heard — not exactly a stretch from what McKay seems to feel about mainstream media right now. He’s accused outlets like MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post of being “totally captured by Big Capital.”

“If you look at the genres from the past 100 years, film noir is holding up pretty well,” he said. “A complicated morally gray world, with a cynical anti-hero who’s going to get destroyed by the one thing he actually cares about. Oh my God, that’s a pretty good description of 2026 America.”

Hard to argue with that one.