3849 What Pisses Me Off About Harvey Weinstein's Sexual Harassment Allegations
Recently the New York Times published an expose on Harvey Weinstein alleging sexual harassment allegations from multiple women over a significant period of time. Stefan Molyneux explains the part of this significant story that nobody is discussing. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I've been teaching the world now publicly as a prominent philosopher, the largest and most popular philosophy channel in the world, for about 10 years now.
It's getting a little frustrating at times just how much everybody seems to miss the boat.
So I'm going to express my frustration in this story about the sexual harassment and other allegations.
Against Hollywood mega mogul Harvey Weinstein.
And I think you'll understand why when I get to the point of what everyone's missing about all of this.
So just a brief bit of backstory.
The New York Times just released these allegations against Mr.
Weinstein going back almost three decades.
They say that he's reached at least eight settlements with women from a young assistant back in New York in 1990 to an Italian model in 2015 and even thereafter.
This New York Times article says that there has been a lot of nasty, nasty stuff going on.
Now, of course, in public, Harvey Weinstein, he says, hey, man, I'm a total liberal.
He presents himself as a champion of women.
And, of course, he's won a lot of artistic awards, also goes for the humanitarian awards as well.
And he is, of course, a massive mega-dino donor to the Democratic Party.
He is really in tight with all of this.
And this is sort of the point that I'll get to in a few moments.
But before, I want to give you a bit more backstory and then talk about my own experiences with sexual harassment.
So, these are dozens of his former and current employees, all the way from like lowly assistants all the way to the top.
Executives, they say, oh yes, we knew of inappropriate conduct while we worked for him, but only a few said that they ever sort of sat down or confronted him or whatever.
Now, part of this is the legal tangle that happens.
So, employees who work for the Weinstein Company, they have these Non-disclosure agreements or contracts saying that you can't criticize the company, you can't criticize its leaders in any way that could harm its reputation in business or any personal reputation of any employees.
So it's a little bit tight.
And the women who complained and who claimed to be victims of this stuff, a lot of them accepted these payouts.
And in these payouts, there are confidentiality clauses which basically say you can't speak about anything that led up to these events or the events themselves or any of the deals that followed them and so on.
There was a pattern, right?
So women were invited up to Weinstein's hotel room.
They say they think it's going to be for work reasons.
And then they find out that this guy has, I guess, different plans for the evening.
Now, he has been married for most of the three decades in question, but may not have stopped him.
So these eight women were interviewed.
They described this different kind of behavior by Harvey Weinstein, that they show up and he's like naked, nearly naked, fully naked, that he wants them to watch him bathe, that he asks for a massage or starts, you know, that creepy hand rubbing stuff.
And this was sort of spread horizontally in the, you know, sort of female defense league, so to speak.
One woman said to another woman, if you're summoned to his hotel room, wear a Parker.
Just to put on a sort of, I guess, a winter full-body condom or something like that.
So there's this woman named O'Connor.
Sorry, she was a Weinstein employee.
And... She complained, and this was not just her complaint, this happened with other female employees, that, and I'm quote, she was quote, being used to facilitate liaisons with vulnerable women who hoped he would get them work.
So, you know, this is setting up the meetings in his hotel room with no one else present and so on.
You know, I still struggle with this very concept that seems very hard for people to accept that women have full moral agency.
You know, they want equality.
That's called equality.
So if you know that this guy, or if you believe that this guy is some sort of sexual predator, and you're facilitating meetings with vulnerable women in the privacy of his hotel room with like no witnesses and so on, Why would you complain that you're being used to do that?
Why wouldn't you just say, not do it?
I just, I find that sort of incomprehensible, fundamentally.
Like, well, you know, he was using me to set up these meetings with these young women, and that's a problem.
It's like, well, then don't do it.
I mean, I don't, I'm sorry, like, I just find this absolute, just don't do it.
Take the hits. Take the hits.
It's not easy to be good. That's why we need virtue.
It's not easy to eat well. That's why we need nutrition.
Just don't do it. This woman, Ms.
O'Connor, said that some female guest of Weinstein's had to wait for some hotel room upgrade, that Weinstein yelled that she would be better off marrying a, quote, a fat, rich, Jewish, end quote, man, because she was probably only good for, quote, being a wife, end quote, making babies.
And apparently he used a few expletives.
So yeah, he seems like a pretty volcanic and titanic personality.
Wow, guy at the top has a lot of high T. Strange.
And as far as his political affiliations, I mean, the guy's donated almost 600,000 bucks to the Democrats.
He's hosted these, like, insanely high-priced fundraisers for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and so on.
And this is the old disavow question, right?
I think Mike Cernovich is right about this, you know?
I mean, Trump has no relations to David Duke, but was constantly being asked to disavow him, even though he'd done so repeatedly.
Where are all of the disavowal demands coming in for these Democrats?
There has been some pressure from the left and the right for the Democrats to return Weinstein's donations.
Some already have. Some have donated them to women's causes and so on.
But this inness between this guy and the Democrats is really, really tight.
But this connection between Weinstein and the Democrats, I mean, it's really, really tight.
In 2013, he hosted a fundraiser And Obama, then President Barack Obama, thanked Weinstein for his, quote, friendship and support and praised him for the, quote, amazing movies, end quote, that he had made.
Really, really quite powerful.
Now, Weinstein himself has penned a rebuttal.
He's working with Lisa Bloom and has been for the last year to, I don't know, reform or change or whatever it is.
So, he told the New York Times, the New York Times has published this with the article, and I quote, I appreciate the way I've behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it.
Though I'm trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go.
And he kind of seemed to blame being raised in the 60s and 70s.
You know, well, that was the culture back then, and this is how I was raised, and this is how I was absorbed, and so on.
Come on. My dad was raised even before that age and never actually harassed anyone.
I mean, this idea that, well, it was just an environmental thing and you've got to forgive me because this is the way I was raised, you know?
Let's say that there's some old racist.
Do people say that from the left?
Of course not. Now, he says, Weinstein says, he's been trying to fix this for like 10 years.
He's got an army, I guess, of therapists and consultants and lawyers and activists and who knows what floating around him and still hasn't had Much luck, it would seem, trying to kick this habit.
That seems somewhat important.
You know, feminists say, oh, well, the patriarchy's got to change and so on.
And this aspect, of course, is repulsive and certainly should.
This guy who's, like, wealthy and powerful and has access to all kinds of resources, he's been working on fixing this for over 10 years.
He says he has a long way to go.
That speaks to the permanence of certain patterns of thinking.
And now that's interesting because the left says that we can change fundamentally the way people operate.
We can design a system, whether it's from communism to the welfare state, where people don't respond to incentives anymore.
Under communism, people will work just as hard for the collective and for no profit to themselves as they will for profit under a free market system.
We can reform everything.
We can change everything. And we can do it in a big hurry through laws.
This is an example of this guy claiming he's been trying to change this for a decade, still says he has a long way to go.
Now, remember, these are only allegations.
The fact that he settled is not necessarily proof.
You can settle to avoid long and expensive litigation.
There could be a number of reasons why.
So I just wanted to sort of point this out.
Now, Weinstein then says that he kind of dangles his kibble in front of people.
He says he wants to make an anti-Trump film and confront and oppose the National Rifle Association.
Yeah, because... Disarming women is just going to make them so much safer from sexual predators, right?
And this, of course, is basically, he's dangling something that people want.
You understand, it's the same pattern.
Watch me shower and I'll get you a role in the movie.
Let me off the hook for this and I'll make an anti-Trump film and oppose the NRA. You see, he's still, it's still the same pattern.
Same pattern. Give me what I want and I'll give you a great benefit.
Conform to what I want.
And this is something that what has been learned, if these allegations are true.
Nothing. Nothing has been learned.
It's exactly the same pattern.
Now, the New York Times also reported an account by Ashley Judd, who I guess was an actress 20 years ago and now is an activist, feminist, I'm not sure, But Ashley Judd went up for a meeting and Weinstein basically asked her to watch him shower and wanted to give her a massage.
You know, that's not very good game.
I guess you don't need game if you can dangle fame in front of people.
Now, Ashley Judd said that she made a joke, right?
She said that if Harvey Weinstein wanted to touch her, she would first have to win an Oscar in one of his movies.
Just, I mean, it's wild.
Now, this happened a long time ago, but in a recent interview, Ashley Judd said, quote, Women have been talking about Harvey amongst ourselves for a long time, and it's simply beyond time to have the conversation publicly.
This, again, to me, is an amazing statement.
An amazing statement. Now, she's no longer an ingenue, to put it mildly, so the fact that she's able to talk about this now, when...
She's past her prime, is, to me, interesting.
Coincidentally, she, you know, wants to be a woman's activist.
I think she claims to be a feminist.
But by being silent and cooperating with all of this stuff, she did expose women to this kind of harassment and potential predation down the road.
So it's hard to see...
How she chose the good of women over her own personal ambitions, at least for me.
Because years after this event, where she claims all of this stuff, Ashley Judd was into Weinstein films.
And she said it was without incident.
So... If this had become known, then this predation, this harassment, may have stopped.
And it's a shame to me that this didn't happen, but everyone has to live with the choices that they make.
So another allegation, March 2015, Mr.
Weinstein invited a woman named Ambra Batilana, and she's an Italian model and wannabe actress, and...
He invited her to his Tribeca office on a Friday night to discuss her career.
Yeah, let's have a meeting alone in my office on a Friday night to discuss your career.
Now, hours after she showed up for the meeting, this Italian model called the police.
And told them that Mr.
Weinstein had grabbed her breasts after asking if the breasts were real and also put his hands up her skirt, according to the police report.
So, if you remember, of course, last year, in the lead-up to the election, presidential election, Trump made jokes with Billy Bush about grabbing women by the pussy.
Now, according to this police report, this woman says that Harvey Weinstein literally grabbed her by the pussy.
Grabbed her breasts, jammed his hands, plural, up her skirt.
Literally grabbed her by the pussy.
Seeing the media reaction to these two things?
Now, I understand Harvey Weinstein not quite as potentially powerful as an American president, but as far as respect for women goes, as far as professionalism goes and all of that...
One man joking about it was literally the end of the world, it seemed, whereas another man who was alleged to have actually done it...
So these claims, this woman, the Italian model, these claims were taken up by the New York Police Department Special Victim Squad, and it did go across the tabloids, and there were reports that the woman had worked with investigators to record a confession from Mr.
Weinstein, you know, Wall Street secret style.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office later decided not to bring charges.
Now, this embedding again in the Democrat political power structure.
You know, so the former Obama aide, Tommy Vieter, tweeted just recently that Weinstein, quote, has been a well-known scumbag for a long time, end quote.
All right. So apparently, this guy who...
It was an aide to Obama, said, oh yeah, we've known this guy's terrible for a long time.
But Weinstein made 13 trips to the White House during the Obama administration.
That's according to Breitbart News.
And most, to me, appallingly and shockingly, is that if this was kind of an open secret among the democratic political elite, why on earth would Obama send his oldest daughter, Malia, to do an internship under Harvey Weinstein this very year, 2017? If this was known, why would you do that?
I simply can't imagine.
I can't process it.
I don't know what that means.
So in 2014, Weinstein invited, according to allegations, Emily Nestor.
And she just worked there one day as a temporary employee.
And he invited her to a hotel and made, I guess, what could be considered a traditional offer in corrupt circles.
If she accepted his sexual advances, he would help her in her career.
And this is according to the accounts that she gave to colleagues who then sent those accounts to the executives of the Weinstein Company.
The following year, a female assistant said that Mr.
Weinstein had badgered her into giving him a massage while he had no clothes on, leaving her, and I quote, crying and very distraught.
And this, you know, you can look all of this stuff up by yourself.
There are allegations, who knows?
This is the privacy. This is why there used to be rules of sexual conduct.
This is why there used to be chaperones, because the he said, she said stuff.
It's really, really tough to figure out.
It wasn't just some of the Democrats that I've talked about.
Michelle Obama, when she was first lady, praised Harvey Weinstein.
She said he was a, quote, wonderful human being and a, quote, good friend.
This is back in 2013.
A reporter talking about Weinstein, as of 17 years ago, back in 2000, he wrote this.
Weinstein didn't like my question about a movie.
There was an altercation, I recall, that he called me a C-U-N-T and declared that he was glad he was the effing sheriff of this effing lawless piece of shit town.
When my colleague Andrew, who was also my boyfriend, intervened, first calming him down and then trying to extract an apology, Weinstein went nuclear, pushing Andrew down a set of steps inside the Tribeca Grand, knocking him over with such force that his tape recorder hit a woman who knocking him over with such force that his tape recorder hit a woman who suffered long-term injury and dragging Andrew in a
He says, such was the power of Harvey Weinstein in 2000 that despite the dozens of camera flashes that went off on that sidewalk that night, capturing the sight of an enormously famous film executive trying to pound in the head of a young newspaper reporter, I have never once seen a photo.
Back then Harvey could spin or suppress anything.
There were so many journalists on his payroll working as consultants on movie projects or as screenwriters or for his magazine.
End quote. Words, truth.
We may find out, we may not.
So, one big question I always have is, okay, well why now?
If these allegations have been swirling around for a long time, why pull the journalistic trigger now?
I don't know. But the one thing that is happening that is really underreported in the media is the amount of prosecution for, you know, horrifying sexual crimes has really gone up, right?
So, you know, Donald Trump became president January the 20th, 2017, and in one month, one month, There were over 1,500 arrests for sex crimes.
This is all the way from trafficking to pedophilia.
And that's a big deviation.
One month, 1,500.
That's really an astounding number.
1,500 arrests. In all of 2014, under Obama, there were less than 400 sex trafficking-related arrests.
That's according to the FBI crime statistics.
Now, this net closing around this sexual predation...
I'm not putting Weinstein into this category.
This is a different category, although not a good one.
But what's happening now is there is, of course, an escalating set of arrests around this sexual crimes.
And that may be changing some of the opportunities to discuss these things.
And, you know...
The lion ages.
It gets longer the tooth.
The pores and the muscles get weak.
Weinstein is, by a lot of people, considered kind of past his prime.
Some people, or there are reports that say that Weinstein is kind of in the hole financially, deep financial trouble.
He's 65 years. Years old.
And, you know, as far as juice and opportunity goes, he hasn't come near getting an Oscar or produced a big hit in, I guess, almost half a decade.
And his, you know, the offerings that he put out into the movie market that was supposed to be very successful, this is including Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, I mean, they pretty much bombed.
So, when you lose your juice, you lose your power to offer things when the king can no longer provide treasure, well, sometimes the knives come out.
So, he may not have the power to ruin anyone, and that may be one of the reasons why the backlash is occurring.
It's one possibility.
And this is not uncommon.
You know, the Joss Whedon, right?
This is a guy, he's a writer, he's a producer, and he was the force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
It was like a 1990s television series.
And it turned out he was like a serial adulterer and so on.
I mean, just this kind of stuff.
So, this is kind of what I wanted to point out.
A lot of this... This sexual nastiness, if not outright criminality, is kind of popping up and it does seem to me to be clustered a little bit more on the Democratic side.
So we've got Democratic Seattle Mayor Ed Murray resigned relatively recently after a lot of allegations of child abuse.
Child sexual abuse surfaced, and this is pretty nasty stuff.
And it's not broadcasted by the media very much.
He resigned after a fifth allegation of child sexual abuse surfaced, the final one from an actual family member.
Now, of course, everyone knows about Anthony Weiner, who's been sent up for years for his role with an underage girl.
There was Jacob Schwartz.
He was only 29.
He was a young Democrat, up-and-coming guy.
He worked on...
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's staff, but in May he was arrested on child pornography charges.
He was allegedly kept more than 3,000 images and 89 videos of children, I assume, being forced to commit pornographic acts.
I talked about recently Robert Menendez, another Democrat.
He's on trial facing federal corruption charges.
The ball for this kind of got rolling in 2012 over allegations that he and another man I talked about in the presentation were having sex with underage prostitutes.
Just horrendous. There's Jeffrey Epstein thing that is going on, which you can look up as well.
He's been accused of having an elaborate sex trafficking enterprise, according to the Daily Mail, and I'll let you dig into that.
It's, you know, wear a hazmat suit, and I don't know what to say.
And last but not least, and this is just the ones I found with a fairly cursory search, recently Democratic Connecticut Councilman Scott Chamberlain was forced to step down after...
Well, photographs of him emerged on a private website for something called furries, which is, I guess, a subculture of people who dress up in furry costumes in the pursuit of sexual gratification.
I guess they don't visit my channel.
So here's what I'm frustrated about that people aren't seeing.
Okay, look. We are evolutionarily adapted reproductive machines.
A lot of stuff is about sex.
You know, people mistake things all the time because they're not educated.
But, you know, the purpose of television is not to deliver shows to you.
The purpose of television is to deliver you to the advertisers and the shows are what is used for that.
People just, right, what is the purpose of art?
Well, everyone thinks, oh, the purpose of art is to describe the human condition, to plumb the depths of the human soul, to deliver beauty, terror, horror, catharsis to an audience.
Yeah, I guess that's somewhat true.
But, you know, sometimes it really seems like the purpose of art is not to deliver beauty to the world, but to deliver nubile young women to grizzled old men.
And they have to have something to offer, and it's not prettiness, and it's certainly not virtue.
And the men have to have something to offer, so they offer opportunity, wealth, fame, and the power that comes with it.
Although, of course, if you sell yourself for that kind of fame, I believe it makes everything afterwards taste like ashes.
You end up with Macbeth, not with power, but with insomnia.
And I mentioned, so my history with this, I was in the art world before I was in the business world and before I was in the Public philosophy world as I am now, and there was a fair amount of corruption.
It's not just male to female.
So I wrote a play, and a woman read the play, and she offered to have it produced on radio.
I won't get into the details.
It's so long ago. But she offered to have it produced on the radio, basically, if I would go out with her.
And that happened.
And of course, I... No, I'm not.
I'm not doing it that way.
Good Lord. Another time, a woman who was in a publishing house, and I had written a number of novels that I was trying to get published, a woman in a publishing house said that she would recommend my books to her editor if, again, I went out.
And again, I'd like to say that I was really noble and heroic for saying no, but I can tell you, like, it just wasn't even remotely tempting.
Another time I was introduced to an older gay man who, again, offered to get behind my artistic endeavors, I guess in return for, quote, a meeting in his offices on a Friday night or, you know, that kind of stuff.
I was very pretty when I was younger and I guess that had a certain amount of cachet.
I thank the gods of time every day that Father Time stripped me of my hair because it certainly helped me develop internally as a human being.
It seems sometimes you get external beauty, internal corruption, or internal beauty and external corruption.
Well, maybe it's just the oofprint of time on my visage, but it's like what the hobbits say about Aragorn, that you would Feel foul, but seem fair.
And it wasn't just in the art world, right?
So, I mean, that avenue to, I guess, fame and success and so on was something I was not going to do.
It happens in the business world as well.
I'm very good at building things and selling things.
I'm selling philosophy right now.
But... Seeing that particular talent and ability, you know, when you are a rainmaker, when you have the capacity to make money, to make profits for people, they will swarm you.
And it's generally not a very positive or productive experience because they're using you for the resources you can bring to them.
They're not interested in you, quite you.
You as a human being, you as an individual.
They're interested in you as a utility for having it rain coin.
And that is just an important aspect.
Of the world that it's really, really important to keep your wits about.
It's never been worth it to me.
And of course, in hindsight, it led me to where I am now, which is the most important place for me to be in the world.
So I just wanted to sort of point out that resist these kinds of temptation.
What you get on the other side is scarcely worth it, I mean.
Meryl Streep, for heaven's sakes, seems to be a big fan of Weinstein.
She thanked God-Harvey Weinstein.
I mean, it's horrendous. Now, this idea, of course, that the youth have value because they're young and the old have value because they're in control of resources is a long story.
There's a reason why vampires are ancient and they generally prey on On the necks of the young.
They don't prey on the old. You don't see vampires usually stalking the aged vintage of an old age home.
They're floating around the young.
And the old preying on the young?
Social security, right?
Old age pensions that's preying on the young.
Government schools is preying on the young.
It's denying them quality education and critical thinking for the sake of harvesting money and votes.
For the left, national debts are preying upon the young.
The youth have future earning potential, which can be used as collateral by the old to get more free stuff.
The ultimate, of course, is war, where the mistakes and vanities and hatreds of the aged end up shredding and dismantling the bodies, hearts and minds of the young.
But here's the fundamental point that I kind of want to get.
This is what I really, really want people to understand.
And no one's talking about it.
Please, you guys got to start thinking more deeply than you're thinking or just thinking more.
I don't know what it is, but here's the basic equation that needs to really be understood.
A lot of top Democrats, big fans of Harvey Weinstein.
Now, Harvey Weinstein has said, well, not all of these allegations are true, but he has admitted to bad behavior.
Very bad behavior. So, a corrupt guy, maybe.
Well, by his own admission, a bad behaving man.
Now, why do we have governments?
We have governments, fundamentally, to fight immorality, to fight evil.
That's the, yes, not my particular perspective, but that's the general perspective.
Why do we have? Well, politicians have to be able to recognize immorality.
Otherwise, they're mere tools of corporations and the military industrial complex and the poor and single moms and everyone who votes to just gain resources at the expense of stability, morality and integrity.
So, if politicians are unable to recognize immorality, then they have no just claim, even in a theoretical sense, to the power that they wield.
Would you go to a doctor Who was unable to recognize illness?
Would you go to a dermatologist to get a mole checked out when he had no capacity to differentiate a mole from skin cancer?
Would you go to a lawyer who had no capacity to differentiate between legal and illegal?
Would you be comfortable sitting in front of a judge who had no capacity to differentiate innocent from guilty, or a jury for that matter?
Would you go to an accountant who had no capacity to differentiate between good bookkeeping and bad bookkeeping?
Of course not. Would you go to a dentist who had no capacity to differentiate a healthy tooth from a diseased tooth?
Of course not.
Politicians have one job, which is their capacity to identify evil.
I mean, can you imagine? I mean, some zombie movie?
It would be a terrible comedy.
Some zombie movie.
Where the zombie fighters were like three guys and ten zombies.
We're going to go fight those zombies.
Here, hand weapons to the zombies.
I mean, you understand. If you can't differentiate between zombies and human beings, you can't be in charge of the zombie fighting brigade.
I mean, I don't know what to say.
In the movie Jaws, it's like if Chief Brody jumped in the water and started biting Bob Shaw on the leg.
I mean, you understand?
It's the one job.
They must be able to differentiate good from evil, morality from immorality, corruption from integrity.
Because if this guy is floating around and raising huge amounts of money for the Democrats and they're praising him, he's a great guy, he's a wonderful human being, it means one of two things.
Logically, this is what people need to start thinking.
At this level, you need to start thinking at this level, world, or we're doomed.
We're literally doomed. So they're floating around, this guy, who's admitted to egregious behavior.
Now, either A, they have no capacity to differentiate morality from immorality, moral people from immoral people.
No capacity. In which case, their laws have nothing to do with morality.
Their campaigns, their pronouncements, their speeches have nothing to do with morality.
Which, of course, is false because just about every politician speaks about morality, talks about morality all the time.
So, if you're hanging around a guy who's admitted to corrupt behavior, And you're praising him.
Either you know he's corrupt or you don't.
If you don't know he's corrupt, you have no just right to the power that you wield, which you claim to wield on behalf of morality, all the time.
So either you don't know the immorality of the person you're praising, or you do.
If you do know the corruption or the immorality of the person that you're praising, and you continue to praise him, well, that says everything.
That people need to know about your character and the quality of your own ethics.
Now, in my particular view, people on the left who praise people, who praise the Weather Underground ex-members, who praise convicted cop killers, who praise all sorts of immoral, corrupt, and sometimes downright evil people, Can they reliably identify corruption?
