Hollywood’s favorite aging radical is at it again.
Jane Fonda flew to Venice, Italy, to collect an award and ended up delivering one of the more unhinged celebrity political rants in recent memory.
And what she said about tech billionaires, robots, and childbirth is going to leave you shaking your head.
What Fonda Actually Said at the DVF Awards
Fonda, 88, was one of the honorees at Diane von Furstenberg’s DVF Awards charity gala, held on the sidelines of the Venice Film Festival, according to reporting from Variety. Before the ceremony, she took questions from a small group of journalists and used the platform to unload on what she called “tech bros,” oligarchs, and billionaires.
A reporter asked her about the longevity obsession spreading through the global elite class. That was all the invitation she needed.
“They want to live forever, while they’re killing the rest of us,” Fonda said.
She kept going. “There’s two things: most of these guys, these tech bros and these oligarchs and billionaires,” the actress, reportedly worth $250 million, continued, “they feel that the laws that the rest of us live by don’t matter to them, including the laws of physics. Natural laws. They’re going to live forever.”
Then came the part that really stands out.
“The other is that because these guys can’t have babies, they’ll create robots. That’ll be their babies. And they’ll just turn the rest of us into tradwives, who have a lot of babies too,” she exclaimed.
She wasn’t done. “Then they’ll take away the vote. Can you believe it?” she added. “And we’re not going to stand for it. They’re not going to win, because we’re not going to stand for it.”
Worth noting: she did not explain why a man who does not age would be unable to father children.
The Merger Rant Came First
The tech bros portion of the evening was actually the second act. Fonda opened by going after the proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. She insisted the deal “would be terrible for consumers. Prices would go up,” and claimed, without offering supporting evidence, “Thousands and thousands of people would lose their jobs.”
She also used the occasion to defend Marvel actor Mark Ruffalo, who had been accused by Paramount Skydance of invoking antisemitic tropes after he publicly criticized the merger and pointed to business ties between Larry Ellison’s Oracle and the Israeli military.
Fonda was not buying the antisemitism charge. “Larry Ellison, because he doesn’t like Mark Ruffalo’s position on the merger, accuses him of antisemitism, when he said nothing that isn’t within his constitutional right to say,” she said. “It’s a tactic they’re using. He should be ashamed of himself, Larry Ellison.”
So there you have it. An evening that started with a Hollywood merger dispute ended with a conspiracy theory about billionaires breeding robots and enslaving women as tradwives.
The crowd at the DVF Awards, which reportedly included California Governor Gavin Newsom’s wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom and media personality Fareed Zakaria, did not appear to object.
What This Tells You About Hollywood’s Grip on Reality
Let’s be honest about what happened here. A woman worth a reported $250 million flew to a film festival in Italy, accepted an award at a charity gala honoring “extraordinary women,” and then warned the assembled press that billionaires are secretly plotting to replace human reproduction with robots while forcing the rest of womankind into domestic servitude.
And the entertainment press covered it like it was a serious political statement.
This is the state of Hollywood liberalism in 2026. The same industry that has spent years lecturing ordinary Americans about their values, their politics, and their way of life produces celebrities who spin out fever-dream theories about tech moguls and tradwives on the international stage, and everyone nods along like it’s perfectly reasonable.
But here’s the thing. Fonda has been doing this for decades. She was doing it in the 1970s, when her political tourism earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane” that has followed her ever since. She was doing it during the Trump years. She’s doing it now, almost 90 years old, still collecting awards from fashion designers in Venice while warning about the imminent robot-tradwife apocalypse.
The late-night shows and entertainment press eat it up every time. Ratings for those programs have cratered because the audience for left-wing political lectures dressed up as entertainment has been shrinking for years. The people who actually watch football, listen to country music, and go to work every morning are not tuning in to hear a multimillionaire actress explain why tech billionaires are going to take away the vote and replace women with robots.
And the internal logic of the whole thing doesn’t hold together. If these supposedly ageless tech bros are going to live forever, why can’t they have children? Fonda didn’t say. The robots-versus-tradwives argument also seems to work against itself. Either the billionaires want robot babies or they want women producing human babies. It’s not entirely clear how both plans operate simultaneously.
None of that matters to the audience Fonda was performing for. The point was never coherence. It was performance. It was the familiar Hollywood ritual of the celebrity activist, standing before a sympathetic crowd, confirming what everyone already believes while adding a new villain to the list.
The irony is that Fonda spent the same evening defending Mark Ruffalo’s right to say whatever he wants about corporate mergers, invoking the First Amendment as a shield. Free speech is a principle worth defending, and Ruffalo has every right to criticize a business deal. But that same principle applies to the ordinary Americans Fonda and her Hollywood allies have spent years trying to silence, deplatform, and dismiss as deplorables who don’t deserve a seat at the table.
The tech billionaires Fonda is ranting about are not, in fact, building robot armies to enslave women. What some of them are doing is funding the AI systems and data infrastructure that represent a genuine economic challenge for working Americans. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and drive unemployment to somewhere between 10 and 20 percent within one to five years. That’s a real concern worth taking seriously.
But Fonda didn’t go there. She went to robots and tradwives instead, because that’s the language that plays in a Venice ballroom full of fashionable progressives.
The out-of-touch Hollywood elite routine has a long shelf life, apparently. Fonda has been running it since the Nixon administration, and she’s still getting standing ovations from fashion designers in Italy for it.
Americans watching from home are less impressed. They’ve seen this show before, and they know how it ends. The celebrity flies home to her mansion. The cameras move on. And nothing changes, except the list of people the Hollywood Left has decided to blame for the world’s problems gets a little longer.
Tech bros and so-called “tradwives” are just the latest addition.
Sources: Breitbart, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter