Lessons from the Weinstein Debacle

Try as we might it’s impossible to avoid Harvey Weinstein. Initial reports of a couple of instances of sexual harassment have now metastasized into multiple reports of innumerable instances of sexual assault and even rape. One will be forgiven for hoping that Weinstein be brought before the bar of justice for his actions. We are well beyond improprieties. Many of the actions seem more like felonies. Hopefully, prosecutors will no longer be cowed by an entertainment mogul.

For the record Ronan Farrow’s long expose in the New Yorker yesterday seems to have tipped the scales beyond the point of recovery. Farrow’s article is clear and well-written. Congratulations to him. Of course, he is also Woody Allen’s son… though no one seems to want to mention the point. For the record, we also congratulate the New York Times for breaking the story.

True enough, as we and others have opined, the story's appearance must have something to do with the fact that Weinstein is nearly washed up. Still, the liberal outrage machine has taken a very big hit… and it was not generated by Fox News.

Among the salient observations, the Weinstein debacle has cast a serious pall on the virtue signaling of Hollywood celebrities. These progressive icons, ever at the ready to chastise anyone on the other side of the political divide with gross immorality, have now been exposed as self-righteous hypocrites, perfectly willing to trade sex for power and to allow a score of young actresses to be sexually abused by an entertainment mogul. As happened in the case of Bill Clinton they condone sexual harassment when the perpetrator is one of their own. Progressive men are not just given a pass. They are given free access to young women... to do as they please. This much Harvey Weinstein understood.

Unable to defend members of their own community, self-righteous feminists are in serious moral trouble. Of course, they do not know enough to know how much trouble they’re in, but time will tell them.

Sarah Vine wrote in The Daily Mail:

The Oscars this year were all about Trump-shaming, and yet a much worse specimen of sexism was in their midst, lapping up the love. How dare Hollywood lecture the world about morality.

So, let us not forget the sickening hypocrisy of stars and executives, many of whom owe their success to Mr Weinstein and who, until last week, were more than delighted to sing the man’s praises, despite the fact his horrible behaviour was an open secret.

You don’t get to become quite as big a creep as Weinstein without a certain amount of collusion.

And for all the expressions of consternation and solidarity now emanating from Hollywood’s A-list, what is surprising is that the collusion here is as much female as it is male.

Christian Toto explained on his blog that Hollywood celebrities have set themselves up as arbiters of virtue, especially of politically correct virtue. They lecture us, Toto says, all the time, about how we should feel, what we should believe, whose politics we should support… the list goes on.

Toto wrote:

Stars continue to lecture us on a near daily basis. They tell us how to vote, the best ways to interpret the Second Amendment and how to oversee our immigration laws. Yet they can’t keep their own house in order when it comes to sexual harassment.

America is watching. They see what’s going on and how the people who claim to care so much didn’t act when their most vulnerable members needed them. Most stars also refused to even address the subject on the record. Others, like George Clooney, took days to do so.

Late-night talk show hosts, who now in our decadent age seem to be leading the national conversation about public policy have shown themselves to be mealy-mouthed cowards. For all their talk about speaking truth to power, when it came time to speak truth to the Weinstein power machine they were struck dumb.

Toto was not surprised:

Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel all pounce on the latest headlines. Yet they stayed silent last week as the Weinstein scandal broke. The Daily Beast, a reliably liberal outfit, chastized them for their silence.

Finally they weighed in on the subject this week, although Kimmel and Colbert used the scandal to attack both the former movie mogul and President Donald Trump.

Speaking truth to power doesn’t involved being shamed into action. That’s precisely why these Late Night comics finally did the right thing. The so-called moral consciences took a knee at a lousy time.

And Holman Jenkins explained in the Wall Street Journal this morning that Hollywood should be offended that Weinstein imagined that he could buy their silence by campaigning against the NRA and giving money to Planned Parenthood. After all, he knew the people; he knew the groups; he was connected with the most important Democratic politicians in the country. If he thought they would look the other way, he got that impression somewhere:

If Hollywood people are anything like normal people, they should be nearly as offended by Mr. Weinstein’s presumptions about them as they are by his alleged bullying of women for sex. Where does he get off assuming his colleagues can be so easily manipulated, will so readily fall in line, just because he cites, as he did in his recent self-defense, their shared liberal politics?

How can somebody with his smarts be so heavy-handed and obvious as to think he can mint an instant pass for his transgressions merely by alluding to his opposition to the National Rifle Association and President Trump ?

Then again, maybe we’re missing the real point. Mr. Weinstein was reminding liberal elites that his trouble is their trouble, because they tolerated him for so long. That’s why this scandal may have legs.

Jenkins added this salient point:

OK, hypocrisy is a price we pay for civilization. Politicians and Hollywood types especially are in the business of faking sincerity. Yet there is one thing about which the Hollywood-progressive nexus has been perfectly sincere: its conviction that its choice of political party is a testament to its own shining personal virtue. The Democrats’ celebrity enablers played a key role in fostering the inordinate self-righteousness of the modern progressive movement—which has reached ad absurdum proportions lately with the violent bullies of the Antifa movement.

In short, it has all given President Trump a reprieve. Those who mounted the most vigorous and vicious attacks on him have now been silenced. They were appalled by the way Trump spoke about women, and they put themselves front and center in the Resistance against his boorish vulgarity. Now they are exposed as enablers of a serial sexual predator. They all knew about it and they did nothing about it. Thus, they allowed it to continue. They allowed Weinstein to prey on more women. Their protestations of feminist virtue are ringing hollow these days.