L os Angeles County supervisors are up to their eyeballs in challenges. With the Summer Olympics coming to town in 2028, the world’s people are likely to meet in a region beset by nightmarish traffic, failing schools, and rampant street crime and homelessness. But the supervisors took time out from doing nothing to honor local favorite Jane Fonda with her own special day, April 30.
“See Dad, I wasn’t always bad,” Fonda said in accepting the designation. “I’m kind of blown away. I cannot believe there is a Jane Fonda Day.”
Neither, likely, can millions of Americans who served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese who fled their country, or the people who simply remember when communists overran Saigon on April 30, 1975, and absorbed South Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
They also likely remember “Hanoi Jane.”
The observance was ostensibly created to celebrate “the actor’s activism for the environment, peace and justice issues, and women’s rights,” but it seems unlikely that the supervisorial initiative accidentally settled on April 30.
“It’s a day that we mourn,” said state senator Janet Nguyen.
“Ms. Fonda was a propagandist who supported a Communist agenda in Vietnam. Her visit to North Vietnam in 1972 earned her the title ‘Hanoi Jane’ for betraying American troops and the United States,” Nguyen said in a letter to Lindsey Horvath, the L.A. County supervisor who led the Fonda lovefest.
“By honoring an individual whose actions during that time were anti-American and anti-democratic, the Board has chosen to disregard the immense sacrifices made by these brave men and women and the pain of Vietnamese-Americans. Further, by honoring a pro-communist activist on the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, the Board shows contempt for the deeply painful experience of Vietnamese refugees.”
Nguyen was born in Vietnam and represents a district in Orange County’s Little Saigon. When North Vietnamese communists rolled into her village, her uncle, a South Vietnam army officer, was hauled in front of his village and murdered. Her mother and father were jailed when they attempted to flee the country.
Fonda “may be a very strong activist for climate change, but besides that, we also view her as being a person who was very cruel to the rights of the South Vietnamese people during the antiwar protests,” said Phat Bui, Garden Grove city council member and chairman of the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California.
Fonda has since tried to downplay her anti-war activism. Touring with the enemy in North Vietnam in 1972, she was photographed posing on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. It was all a big misunderstanding, she said later — she didn’t even know what an anti-aircraft gun was or how the image would be twisted to mean support for the North.
Those who, like Horvath, don’t remember the details of Hanoi Jane’s treason would do well to read then-NR film critic Kyle Smith’s 2021 tour de force, “Jane Fonda’s Vietnam Actions Were Worse Than You Think.”
Rewatching F*** the Army, a 1971 documentary of Fonda’s anti-America oeuvre, Smith asks and answers: “So how does Jane Fonda, who was just honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, look half a century later? Exactly the same: like a brainless simp for Team Communism. Those who tend to dismiss Hollywood stars as merely stupid, not evil, can consider the other side of that.”
Wearing an on-point beret for the Los Angeles County ceremony, Fonda spoke at length about the virtues of California’s environmental movement. Ever the leftist activist, she urged anyone within hearing to vote in November: “When you go into the ballot box, have climate in your heart.”
In giving her the award, county supervisor Horvath mentioned none of the sordid details. She underscored Fonda’s work on behalf of “the LGBTQIA community” and the environment. “One billion people annually rose not only to end violence against women and girls but to protect the Earth,” Horvath said.
If Horvath knows the grim significance of April 30 for many Americans and Vietnamese, she’s diabolical. If she doesn’t — if she hasn’t been acquainted with recent world history — well, that just makes her a perfect fit for California politics that is hard at work tearing down the past in order to produce a workers’ paradise. It may be the latter: After the backlash, Los Angeles County officials now say they will move the holiday to another April day.