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According to some web sites, several celebrities - including Rosie O'Donnell, Debra Messing, and Ed Asner - have threatened to go on strike until Donald Trump resigns the Presidency. The following is the start of a story at the YourNewsWire site:

A group of liberal Hollywood celebrities are threatening a “massive, all-round Hollywood strike” unless Donald Trump resigns. Describing Hollywood as “the base of the entire modern American culture“, the group also claims to be speaking on behalf of “all of humanity.”

After some searching I've yet to find a source reporting this that seems credible to me. Furthermore, a strike such as this seems unlikely to have much affect; in fact, it might create a backlash to those who might wish to remove Trump from the Presidency.

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  • The article you linked doesn't say exactly what you say it says. Setting aside for a second the question of if any of this is true: they do not name which actors have threatened to go on strike, nor do they name the talkative spokesperson they quote from the NYT.
    – Dan Getz
    Jan 12, 2017 at 21:18
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    @DanGetz: The headline of the article says "until Trump resigns", although the text does say the strike is supposed to be one month. The article claims that some advocate a "general strike" and "all-out strike", which could be interpreted to mean until Trump steps down.
    – GreenMatt
    Jan 12, 2017 at 21:47
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    I found a call for a "J20 art strike", sometimes called a "culture strike", which appears to be real, and has some similarities to what that article claims (at least in the sense of referring to a strike!), but that article is way too detailed to arise from any confusion with this other strike.
    – Dan Getz
    Jan 12, 2017 at 22:14
  • yes, I see now the "part of a group … calling for" wording in the headline.
    – Dan Getz
    Jan 12, 2017 at 22:23
  • plus it leaves open the discussion of who would count as "celebrities"....
    – jwenting
    Jan 18, 2017 at 7:12

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The article you linked says that its source is an article on Spinzon which says that its source is an article on TheRightists.com from January 6th. In fact, they have mostly the same text.

TheRightists.com describes itself as a "HYBRID site of news and satire", saying

part of our stories already happens, part, not yet. NOT all of our stories are true!

That doesn't prove any part of the article to be false, but it certainly means you can't take any statements in it for granted. In particular, the article quotes extensively from a supposed spokesperson for Refuse Racism talking to the New York Times. The claims in the YourNewsWire article's headline and first few paragraphs about Refuse Racism's goals seem to be referring to these statements. As far as I can determine, these statements do not appear in any New York Times article. (I found no results for text searches of recent NYT articles with key phrases, and Snopes says the text of those statements "was not published in an article by the New York Times".)

If you read the articles more carefully, they don't quite say that Rosie O'Donnell, Debra Messing, Ed Asner, and Michael Shannon "have threatened to go on strike until Donald Trump resigns the Presidency". Instead, they say that those people

have attached their names to an effort calling for a month-long protest to stop President-elect Donald Trump

and that the calls "for an all-out strike that would span the entire movie industry" are instead from "other Hollywood celebrities" (emphasis mine). Unfortunately, they never mention who these other celebrities might be.

This slightly different claim about what the four named celebrities have expressed support for (signing support for a protest, not necessarily a strike, nor by all of Hollywood, and one month, instead of until Trump resigns) appears to be true. The Refuse Racism website highlights a number of signatories of their call to action, and those four people are listed among them.

This call to action does mention "walkouts from schools and work" as a possible action for people to take, one of many suggestions.

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    and of course "call for protest" and "go on strike" are two completely different things. It's much easier to scream that other people should do something than to do it yourself...
    – jwenting
    Jan 18, 2017 at 7:13
  • I'm glad you made that comment, it saved me from screaming at you to make it.
    – dougal 5.0.0
    Apr 15, 2017 at 6:55

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