In a powerful Golden Globes speech, Meryl Streep defends Hollywood, the press

Meryl Streep, while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Golden Globes, used her platform to remind people of the importance of the creative arts and to slam President-elect Donald Trump's "performance" while on the campaign trail.

Hollywood, foreigners, and the press are the "most vilified segments in American society right now," she said. "But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It's just a bunch of people from other places." Streep noted that she is from New Jersey, and pointed out other heavyweights from Ohio, South Carolina, and Israel. "Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if you kick us all out, you'll have nothing to watch except for football and mixed martial arts — which are not the arts," she said.

Without mentioning his name, Streep went on to share that she can't get Trump's public mocking of a reporter with a disability, The New York Times' Serge Kovaleski, out of her head. "It wasn't in a movie, it was in real life," she said. "The instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone on a public platform, filters down into everybody's life. It gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence; when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose." Streep also said the press needs to hold the powerful to account, "to call them on the carpet for every outrage," and urged the Hollywood community to support the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Streep ended her speech by reminding her fellow actors that it's a "privilege" to act for a living, and shared some words of wisdom by her late friend Carrie Fisher: "My dear, departed friend Princess Leia once told me, 'Take your broken heart, and make it into art.'"