Adam McKay Endorses General Strike Idea: “Shut It Down”

On Thursday Don’t Look Up filmmaker Adam McKay appeared at the virtual town hall of a grassroots group attempting to help organize a general strike, encouraging participants to “shut down this broken, befouled economy.”

McKay joined a town hall for the “General Strike 4 Resignations” group alongside Chris Smalls, the co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union and one of the subjects of the 2024 documentary Union, which McKay executive produced.

The idea of a general strike — however realistic or unrealistic — has gained momentum in select activist and labor circles in the last few years as a means of changing the status quo in the U.S. The general idea is that if enough working people, unionized or not, withhold their labor across the country, they can establish enough leverage to change policy.

While still far from mainstream, two leaders of major stateside unions — Association of Flight Attendants international president Sara Nelson and United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain — have endorsed the notion, with Fain calling on fellow unions to time their labor contracts to expire on May Day 2028 to make a mass work stoppage possible for organized workers.

McKay is a believer, as he demonstrated on Friday. “I am here because I am terrified,” he told the modest group of attendees, which hovered a little above 30 over the course of the town hall. “I have two daughters and a wife that I love, and I became friends with a bunch of climate scientists. Then at that point, I started to petition our government to do something about this calamity [climate change] that is happening right in front of our faces. And look, I’m a Hollywood guy, so we have money, we talk to people. You can be like, ‘Screw you.’ But I am here to tell you, the people in Washington D.C., the people in London and the Western countries do not give a shit about what’s going on.”

McKay added that he has tried to push the Democratic left “for years” to no avail. “Eventually I started to figure out, ‘Oh, they don’t want to offend their money.’ So the two parties at this point are useless. So what do we do? And what we do is we shut down this broken, befouled economy.”

Over the course of the conversation with Smalls and the General Strike 4 Resignations organizers, which occasionally meandered to the topics of the Blue Origin all-female space trip, AI, Palestine and socialism, the filmmaker promised that he would pledge $250,000 to a strike fund to help cover the living costs of people in the southwestern U.S. if a general strike came about.

“If you’re a wealthy person and you’re hearing this, you are delusional if you’re not giving money to the same fund,” McKay said.

The filmmaker also emphasized the importance of spreading the idea of a general strike through word of mouth, saying that his work in the media industry has shown him that the business is always trying to recreate those kind of exchanges. He underscored the urgency of climate change and its effects, like rising global temperatures.

“I kind of feel like the whole reason we’re here is that every one of you needs to say, ‘Fuck social media, fuck the press.’ Talk to the people to your left and right and say ‘shut it down,’” he said. “It is a monster death machine. And I am telling you, I have met with so many scientists and so many economists. Shut it down. We can do it. We really can.”

McKay has been active in climate causes in recent years, donating $4 million in 2022 to the Climate Emergency Fund and joining the board of directors. In 2023 he launched the nonprofit Yellow Dot Studios, which seeks to activate people around climate change with entertaining short-form videos “that challenge the decades of disinformation pushed by oil companies and amplified by large swaths of elected leaders and the media,” according to the organization’s website.

As Donald Trump amassed electoral votes during the 2024 presidential election, which he eventually won, McKay — who has in the past identified as a Democratic Socialist — posted on X that “it is time to abandon the Dem Party. I’m registering Green Party or Working Families. But am open to ideas.”