Justine Bateman is beyond cancel culture.

The filmmaker and actress, 58, said the quiet part out loud during a Zoom call on Tuesday afternoon, about a week after former President Donald Trump won the US presidential election against Vice President Kamala Harris. Pundits and experts give all kinds of reasons for his political comeback. Bateman, unlike many of her Hollywood colleagues, agrees with those who cite American exhaustion over political correctness.

“Trying to silence everyone, even wanting to discuss things that are going on in our society, has had a bad outcome,” she says. “And we saw in the election results that more people are done with it. That’s why I say it’s over.”

Anyone who follows Bateman on social media already knows what she’s thinking – or at least the bite-sized version of it.

Bateman wrote one Twitter thread last week after the election started: “Decompression from walking on eggshells for the past four years.” She “found the past four years almost unbearable. A very un-American period in which every question, every opinion, every preference or disapproval was submitted to a very limited list of ‘allowed positions’ to judge its acceptability. .” Many agreed with her. The answers were: “Same. It feels like a long war has just ended and I’m finally home.” “It’s really refreshing. I already feel freer and, for the first time, optimistic about my child’s future.” ‘Your courage and boldness are rare in Hollywood. Bravo.’

Now, she says, she feels like we’re “entering a new era” and she’s “100% excited about it.”

In her eyes, “everyone has the right to freely live their lives as they wish, as long as they do not infringe on someone else’s ability to live their lives as freely as they wish. And if you just hold on to that, then you can I’ve got it.” The problem is that people on both sides of the political spectrum have different definitions of infringement.

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Justine Bateman felt air rush out of the ‘Woke Party balloon’ after Trump won

Bateman called COVID an era where society shut you out if you had some “wrong” opinion. “All of that was met with an intense amount of hostility, so intense that people lost their jobs, their friends, their social status and their privacy,” she says. ‘They were doxxed. And I thought that was incredibly un-American.”

Elon Musk buying Twitter in April 2022 was a turning point in her eyes. “The air just kind of went out of the Woke Party balloon,” she says, “and I thought, ‘Okay, that’s a nice feeling.’ And with Trump winning, and this particular team that he has around him now, I really felt the air go out.”

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Trump defeated Harris in a landslide. Will his shy voters feel empowered?

Did Justine Bateman vote for Donald Trump?

Did she vote for Trump? She doesn’t want to say it.

“I’m not going to play the game,” she says. “I’m not going to talk about the way I voted in my life. It’s not relevant. It’s absolutely not relevant. For me, all I’m doing is expressing that I feel like there’s been a shift spiritually, and I’m very excited about what’s going to happen. And honestly, reaffirming freedom of speech is good for everyone.”

She also hopes “that we can all feel like we are Americans and not fans of rival football teams.” Some may feel that this reduces their concerns about reproductive rights, marriage equality, tariffs, whatever.

But for Bateman, she’s just glad the era of “emotional terrorism” is over.

Time will tell if she is right.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Justine Bateman, Donald Trump and the return of ‘free speech’