Bill Murray Trends After He’s Quoted Attacking The Government, But Did He Really?

Bill Murray is trending over a quote that comes off as very anti-government. But did he actually say those words or was he misquoted?

By Doug Norrie | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

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Bill Murray has been many things over the course of his long career, a lot of it funny, but the actor has mostly avoided major controversy since first coming on the scene back in the 1970s. He’s a singular dude, taking a different strategy when it comes to his roles and how he navigates Hollywood. Has he had some industry beefs over the years? For sure. But in terms of getting political, the dude really hasn’t gone there all that often. That’s why it was somewhat interesting when Bill Murray began trending on social media over some reported comments he made about the U.S. government. Though now it turns out that he might have been falsely quoted in order to get some clicks. 

The message attributed to Bill Murray was shared on Twitter and made some decent rounds on the social media platform. The original is a picture of Murray with the quote, “So, if we lie to the government it’s a felony. But if they lie to us it’s politics. ” It was just the kind of thing bland enough to not be all that controversial, but also lightning-rod-ish enough to get a certain sector of folks fired up. It got the actor trending with a number of folks jumping on the anti-government bandwagon, but now according to some fact-checking from Reuters, it doesn’t look like Bill Murray said any such thing. 

Reuters did a search to try and find any evidence of Bill Murray actually muttering these words, and there didn’t seem to be much in the way of concrete proof that it was from him. What would motivate someone to attribute a random quote to an actor isn’t totally clear, though I guess engagement for engagement’s sake is sometimes worth it. Maybe? The original quote looks like it came from a Bill Murray parody account that has since been shuttered and Bill Murray himself hasn’t come out with any public comment about his feelings around the machinations of the United States government. 

But in the era of all publicity is good publicity, having some random quote like this attached to your name doesn’t feel like the worst thing in the world. For his part, Bill Murray remains plenty busy these days, even though he’s pushing well into his 70s. Just this past year he reunited with director Wes Anderson for The French Dispatch. It marked the 10th time the two have paired up for a film with others including The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Moonrise Kingdom just a few. 

And Bill Murray also got back into the Peter Venkman role when he appeared in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, reuniting with Dan Akroyd and Ernie Hudson for the reboot of that franchise. Next up for the actor will be Bill Murray joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After letting it slip that he was entering the MCU, it’s been confirmed that he’ll appear in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania with Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lily. Apparently, he’s going to play a villain this one, though his exact role hasn’t yet been laid out.