Oct. 10, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:15
3853 The Fall of Harvey Weinstein
Recently the New York Times published an expose on Harvey Weinstein alleging sexual harassment allegations from multiple women over a significant period of time. The response, or rather the lack of response from Hollywood and political elites tells quite the story.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 don't think people out there, I don't think you really get what a huge deal this is.
This is one of these transition points, what used to be called a strategic inflection point in the culture wars that is night and day.
It's like Aragorn showing up with the Ghost Riders.
It is... Truly an astonishing development, this recent report in the New York Times, of course, talking about accusations of sexual harassment and other even worse behavior against Harvey Weinstein, a filmmaker, going back over three decades.
Now, there was three days, my friends, where there was virtual radio silence from the actors, from the producers, from the reporters, from the pundits, from the late-night, quote, comedians, idiot, quote, jesters that they are.
Nothing happened for three days.
Now, three days after this news broke, Weinstein was fired by the company that he co-founded.
And now, wouldn't you know it, people have found their moral courage.
Now that he no longer has power, they are throwing their slings and arrows of Victorian couch-fainting smelling salts outrage at him.
Lord B, he was a terrible man!
Yeah, well, they had to wait until the king was deposed before speaking ill of the king.
Now, former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, All of whom have very long-standing ties, if not sticky spiderwebs of mutual corruption, to Weinstein, who was, of course, a major Democratic Party fundraiser.
This guy was heart, soul, and center of a lot of the Democratic money machine.
And Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have not publicly addressed these allegations.
Radio silence from these moral issues.
Heroes. Weinstein, he's been a Clinton donor forever.
He's got strong ties to the Clintons.
Back in the day, he donated to Bill Clinton's Legal Defense Fund in the 1990s, at least according to the Washington Post.
And, yeah, the Clintons rented a home right next to Weinstein in the Hamptons.
In 2015, and Weinstein served as this sort of conduit, this flowing connector between Hollywood stars and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
I mean, it's not a lot of money in the big scheme of things, but I guess it's a lot of money in politics.
Weinstein raised about $1.5 million from 1990 through till 2016 and really helped out Clinton's 2016 candidacy.
He did a star-studded fundraiser for Clinton in June 2016 right there in his Manhattan home.
Clinton also personally was the headline act of For multiple fundraisers that Weinstein was involved in organizing during the whole process of her 2016 campaign.
Now, of course, for those who don't know, this is one of the great blows that feminism took from me when I was younger.
Bill Clinton, of course, has been plagued by highly credible allegations of sexual harassment and even worse stuff and assault, sexual assault and so on throughout his own political career.
Now, why now remains somewhat of an open-ended question.
We'll see. But according to Sharon Waxman, she was a former reporter at the Times.
She said she had the story on Weinstein in 2004, 13 years ago, but that he bullied the Times into dropping it.
And guys who play heroes in movies...
Don't seem to me quite so heroic on the phone.
So she reports that Matt Damon and Russell Crowe called her personally and directly to urge her to back off the story.
And of course, Miramax was a major advertiser in the New York Times.
Everyone has their price.
This could have been 13 fewer years of these allegations occurring in the darkened corners of pseudo-professional meeting houses.
Now, in 2015, Weinstein's lawyer donated $10,000 to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's campaign.
Now, this is after the District Attorney declined to file sexual assault charges against one Harvey Weinstein.
I'm sure this will be looked into in more detail.
Fox News reporter Lauren Sivin told the Huffington Post that about 10 years ago, Weinstein masturbated in front of her and ejaculated into a potted plant.
If only it had been a Venus flytrap.
Justice might have been served, however, in whatever small servings it could be served in.
So what was going on?
There are strong arguments that people, journalists and producers and movie stars and lots of people knew everything that was going on.
But according to some people, there were like so many journalists working on Weinstein's payroll.
They were consultants on his movie projects.
He hired them as screenwriters or he hired them for the magazine called Talk, which is the magazine that Weinstein started at Miramax with Tina Brown.
And they all talked about this was back in the day.
This was a big business synergy.
So you've got writers who write these magazine articles, which then get transformed into books, which then get transformed into movies with options and money and fame and glory and all of that kind of stuff.
And I guess it was a pretty heavy wheel of gold to try and jam a single thin stick of justice into, so everybody kept going in, right?
There was a time when Miramax paid for the rights to just about every big story that was published in New York City magazines.
So, yeah, not a lot of incentive to be as courageous as they often pretend to be these mainstream media hacks.
Here's an interesting question which I think drives to the heart of some of the panicked and hysterical motivations between the conflicts between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Question for you out there world.
Let me know what you think of the comments below.
Do you think that the Weinstein story would have been published if Hillary Clinton had become president?
I'm going to lean to a negatory on that one.
And if it's true that this story wouldn't have been published if Hillary Clinton had achieved the presidency, well, this is why there's such hysteria.
The threat, which is so important, the threat of sexual abuse, of pedophilia, of sexual harassment, of sexual deviance and ugliness and viciousness and exploitation, the destruction of the good for being the good, the destruction of beauty, For the sake of corruption, this is a big topic in society right now.
And I think this stuff has gone through the roof, largely because of the breakdown of the two-parent family.
I mean, kids of single moms are like over 30 times more likely to be abused by some live-in boyfriend than by their own parents.
So the growth of single motherhood, I think, has been accompanied by the growth of child abuse, child sexual abuse, pedophilia, and so on.
Statistically, this seems almost for certain.
And so there are a lot of people, from rich to poor, from powerful to, quote, powerless, who have a massive vested interest in keeping stories of sexual abuse, harassment, child abuse, and so on, at bay.
And as I talked about before, Donald Trump's presidency has really stepped up.
Infiltration of and prosecution of sex rings, pedophilia rings, and so on, much to the credit of the people involved.
Now, Kevin Smith, he's a guy who wrote Clerks and Mallrats and Dogma and so on.
Well, he started his career with Weinstein.
Weinstein was the head of Miramax Films.
It was named after their parents, I think.
And he wrote that he was, quote, ashamed, right?
Kevin Smith wrote that he was ashamed that while he was making lots of money with Miramax, Weinstein was involved in this kind of alleged sexual misconduct.
And Miramax distributed clerks and stood behind Smith and actually hired, I don't know if you remember this, hired Alan Dershowitz to appeal the NC-17 rating for clerks way back in the day.
They had a long career together, a cozy career together, Weinstein and Smith, chasing Amy, Mallrats, and co-exec producer on Goodwill.
Hunting.
So Kevin Smith wrote on Twitter, he said, He financed the first 14 years of my career and now I know while I was profiting, others were in terrible pain.
It makes me feel ashamed.
Well, Kevin, you are a funny guy for sure.
Not exactly penning the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged there, but the question is, Kevin, why?
Why was Harvey Weinstein so interested in funding your movies?
These slacker, loser, atheism addiction movies that, to a large degree, glorified some of the most decadent and vile and degraded aspects of life.
I'm looking at you, Jason Mewes.
So why? Why did this man want to fund your career?
That is a more difficult question to answer, and I hope that people will meditate on that.
Meryl Streep, who referred to Harvey Weinstein as God.
And you know, it's interesting. There was somebody reviewed, I think it was about 1,400 Oscar acceptance speeches and found that Weinstein was in fact thanked more than God.
God. Weinstein.
Above God in these thank yous.
Now, if Weinstein was the person, the entity, the Force of nature that Hollywood sold its soul to and they praise him more than God.
What does that make the unofficial religion of Hollywood?
Something to think about.
So Meryl Streep told the Huffington Post that she was appalled by the disgraceful Now, she did go on to praise, and I quote, the intrepid women who risked their voices to expose this abuse and calling them heroes.
So it's heroic to expose this kind of abuse.
Now, Dame Judi Dench also issued a statement saying that she was completely unaware of the horrifying...
Claims. This is fascinating.
This, of course, will be the inevitable defense of people, and they think it's going to help them.
And let me tell you how it will both help them and hurt them enormously.
So, first of all, it will help them because they can claim to be pig ignorant of the corruption, the alleged corruption that was swirling around Hollywood at this time.
Oh, I had no idea.
He never did any of that in front of me.
I never heard a whiff of it.
I never heard a thing about it and so on.
In which case, of course, nobody confides in you, nobody talks to you, you're not popular, nobody shares any secrets with you, and so on.
And that's number one. And number two, it means that you have a fundamental inability to identify Immorality or outright evil in your environment.
Zero capacity to identify immorality or evil in your environment.
This, of course, is one of the great tragedies of atheism, the growing atheism from the 18th century and onwards, in that atheists drove God out of human discourse, but did not provide humanity with the capacity to identify evil.
In the absence of God, in the absence of an understanding of the devil, of Satan, of the soul, of corruption, of the corruption that human beings are capable of.
God was driven out. God was a methodology for distinguishing between good and evil, allows you to trust your instincts, to pray, to surrender to your unconscious analysis of other people's body language and their Vocal tones and the pauses and the silences and the sort of sinister disappearances and the rumors and so on.
This is all a huge amount of information that is flowing towards people and in the past they would pray to God for guidance which meant that they would ask their unconscious to assemble this disparate gnat cloud of information into the shape of an angel or a devil in their In their perceptions.
And the driving out of God without the replacement of the capacity to distinguish good from evil was one of the great tragedies and horrors of the atheist movement.
So yeah, they'll claim, oh, I didn't have a clue, I didn't have a clue.
But what that means, of course, is that they don't have any capacity to see corruption when it is right there in front of them.
And again, Harvey Weinstein has said, well, not all of these allegations are true.
It's admitted tacitly that some of them are true.
It's pretty corrupt. And so Meryl Streep and Judi Dench and other people have just confessed that they have no capacity to distinguish corruption when it's right there in front of them, standing over them, orc-like, troll-like, protruding belly, grizzled face, Uncle Spanky fingers all over the nubile wenches.
They can't distinguish good from evil.
But they have been lecturing us about social causes and politics, lo, these many decades.
But they have no capacity to talk about good and evil.
It's like people lecturing you for decades on your diet, and then it turns out that they have no capacity to distinguish between lean people and fat people, between healthy people and unhealthy people.
Seth Rogen, shamed by Surinovich, I think, finally ended up writing, I believe all the women coming forward about Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment.
It takes bravery to do so.
Now, I like his work.
I'll confess. Well, I like Freaks and Geeks, and it's been a while.
But see, this is the guy, like, he's brave.
In the movies, he goes and takes on all of these bad guys.
I mean, he goes and does all of these brave things.
This kind of robotic detachment, there's not a shred of moral passion in there or moral outrage.
It's a perfunctory statement dictated to his Twitter typist, I assume, while blinking for salvation from moral kidnapping to a higher plane.
Michael Moore, champion of the working man moral conscience of America, he said this, A couple of years ago, he said, actually, Harvey Weinstein is one of the best people to work with in this town.
Hashtag, fun fact, never reported.
So again, you see, Michael Moore claims to have the capacity to detect immorality and corruption right in the most abstract forms and the most abstract entities of war and corporatism and financiers and big banksters and so on.
He has the capacity, you see, to drill down and understand corruption.
And man's capacity for immorality and evil.
That's his whole thing!
And he has no capacity to see it in Harvey Weinstein right there in front of him.
It's really hard to believe that people can see what is distant and abstract as clear as day, while what is right in front of their noses remains completely obscured to them, not only to the point where they don't see it, but they see the exact opposite.
He's a great guy. He's a hero.
He's a force of nature. He's a powerhouse.
I cut movies so much they called him Harvey Scissorhands.
The late night hosts. Ah!
The giggly, back-of-the-classroom, idiot conscience of America.
Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher.
Not a single joke. Not a single joke about Weinstein since this story from the New York Times broke recently.
Now that Weinstein has been fired, maybe people are going to be real brave about it.
Oh, is he disarmed? Okay, I'm taking him on.
Oh, is he out of power? Is he out of favor?
Okay, I'm taking him on now.
And this is the funny thing about actors, right?
Actors, they have money, they have fame, they have power.
A lot of them have great looks.
They never usually have to work a day again in their life.
They have all of these things.
All of these... These superhero powers, to most people, having that amount of money, fame, and powers, like, so superhero, like comic book heroes, they have all of this, and they still cannot do the right thing.
Because greed for the unearned, and whatever you earned through this guy, in my view, was earned in a pretty sinister manner, if these allegations are true.
They can't do the right thing.
And this is going to cause a lot of resentment from people towards stars, towards Hollywood stars.
This guy had his fingers, I hate to use the analogy, in just about everybody's pie.
So not only have these people been playing heroes while often being cowards, but they have also stood on their podium many times and lectured America about what is good, And what is bad?
What is kind? And what is immoral?
What is good? And what is evil?
What is right? And what is wrong?
They have lectured and lectured and lectured.
While at the same time, many of them, I believe, covering up this fundamental corruption at the heart of the industry.
Now listen to one of the Corys talking about this kind of stuff.
I mean, how he was preyed upon.
As a child actor, a pedophile surrounded him.
And this is the funny thing too, right?
Because this is the left. This is the Democrats.
This is the superpower that they claim to possess.
They claim that they can detect immorality in the form of like racism or homophobia or sexism, misogyny, Islamophobia.
They can detect these immoralities from like 300 light years away.
Half of America! Are deplorables.
Or half of the half of America are deplorables.
Tens of millions of people.
Moral judgment. They can see so clearly who is immoral, who is wrong, who is bad, who is racist, who is corrupt.
They can see it clearly.
But they take money from this guy.
And they praise this guy.
Barack Obama sent his daughter to intern under this guy.
I don't believe that they can see corruption that is abstract and intangible and collective in nature.
Tens of millions of deplorables, all Trump supporters are racist, Nazis.
I don't believe for one second that they can detect such abstract, distant, collective immorality, corruption and evil.
While again, not being able to see what is right there in front of them.
You understand? This is why I say people don't understand just how powerful this is.
This undermines the entire leftist claim to have a superior sense of morality.
Now, I mean, if this is true, and it may never be proven, it may not be true.
This woman says that Russell Crowe and Matt Damon pressured her to In 2004, into dropping a story on Weinstein.
First of all, guys, ew!
Gross! Vile!
Now, the next time they want to go and do a movie, and they have to do all the publicity associated with the movie, are people going to ask them about that?
Are reporters going to ask them about that?
Or not? See, both situations, both forks in the road, are fascinating.
Because here's what's going on.
There are, and I estimate this conservatively, hundreds of millions of dollars at stake at the moment.
Matt Damon, mathematically, from an accounting standpoint, is the most profitable movie star in the world in terms of what you pay him and what his films generate.
Now, that is based upon...
Likeability. Good actress and so on, but based upon likeability.
You have to like these people.
And if you look at how long Mel Gibson spent in the wilderness, what did he come back last year with Hacksaw Ridge and now he's in some comedy with Will Ferrell?
2006, he had the meltdown and cried out this offensive stuff.
It's 10 years, baby.
10 years of straight-to-video movies.
So there's likeability.
Huge amounts of money.
Rest upon the likability of these actors.
Now, if it turns out to be the case, or if people believe these allegations that these and maybe other actors pressured reporters into covering up the Weinstein affair, that likability goes right down the toilet.
And there are people, like when I posted about some of this stuff, people are like, hey man, don't take the boring movies away from me.
They're great. And people get, people get what is going on.
How many movies are these people attached to that now are going to face similar problems?
How many boycotts are going to be organized?
Because now there's an alternative media.
How many people are going to ask these actors when they're on these press junkets, when they're doing these endless interviews?
And if they don't, what does that mean?
How many times is Laura Looma going to go in there and ask them directly?
Now, it's his personal opinion time, of course, but I will tell you this.
The stuff that has been reported, you know, watch me shower, I'll give you a massage, join me in a bath, and so on, well, other than, you know, him grabbing the boobs and crotch of the Italian model, it seems wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, immoral, immoral, immoral, but relatively tame.
In my estimation, I don't think that there was a particular red line Well, we're not going there.
We're not crossing there. When you have this kind of power and this kind of corruption, I'm just going to assume that what is going to come out is going to be way worse than what has been reported.
And it could be that the board of the Weinstein Company knows more, and this is one of the reasons why they've ditched him like a three-day-old potato.
Huh. And this is the funny thing, too.
It's the funny thing, too. These leftists, these Democrats, these people who, you know, own the media in many ways.
I mean, they really, they really hate conservatives.
Really hate conservatives.
Because, you see, they have such, these people have such a strong moral foundation.
Look at one of the most brilliant, charismatic actresses.
Of recent memory.
James Woods. I have loved that man's work since he was knee-high to a grasshopper.
Just watch The Boost. The final scene of The Boost.
Gets you every single time.
The man is, well, not only a stone genius in terms of his IQ, but a stone genius in terms of his acting capacities.
And I even liked him with Michael J. Fox.
But anyway, James Woods, boom!
I think he just announced his retirement and so on.
So they hate conservatives.
They hate conservatives.
These leftists, but they love Weinstein.
They praise Weinstein more than God.
Doesn't that tell you exactly where their moral foundations are, where their moral standards are or are not?
So this is going to be a huge interruption in how movies get made now.
Movies get made and they rely significantly on the likability and profitability of the lead actor in particular, or the lead actress for that matter.
And then the actors go out and give all of these fluffy interviews to help promote the film.
And again, are people going to be asking about this?
Or not? If not, the hypocrisy and servile Grima, Wormtongue aspect of these supposed reporters is going to be pretty revealed and people are going to be pretty disgusted by it.
So this is going to change how everything happens going forward.
And this is an incredible turn the light on and see what is there in the swamp.
This is the kind of light that sears eyeballs and illuminates 40 feet down in the swamp to all the bones and bodies down there.
This is going to be absolutely astounding.
And, of course, if anything criminal comes out of it, then there may be deals cut, there may be a huge rolling expose going forward from here.
And, you know, the Weinstein Company began this guy.
Nice to see them. Nice to see you guys actually, actually taking action, decisive action when there's a problem.
It'd be nice if it was a little earlier, but they have fired him.
My particular perspective and opinion is, you know, if you want, if you really care about these victims, if you really want the truth to come out, if you really want a clean house, clean shop, Then you release these women, and maybe these men, who knows who's out there.
You release these women, these victims, as they claim to be.
You release them from their non-disclosure agreements.
You send letters to their lawyers saying, you can open up and talk to whoever you want.
We want to bring everything out into the light.
We want to hit the lights.
We want to drain the swamp.
One time only chance.
Because if it gets pulled out or if people slither past them or whatever, then it's going to be a whole other moral situation.
Release people. Release the victims from their non-disclosure agreements.
Let's turn the light on and see what's there.
Now, this last bit, I'm going to just sort of point out that if you're in the arts, if you are interested in making TV shows, in making movies, in anything like this, in making documentaries, man...
You have found the chink in the armor.
Now, if you're not on the left and you're interested in artistic endeavors, now is your opportunity, now is your chance to take the crown.
It's not going to come around again.
You know, these supposed wounds, they seal themselves up pretty quickly.
Everyone takes the silence pill and the confused spell goes out there and, oh, that's old news.
Why are you bringing that up, right? No, no, no.
You hold these people to their standards.
You know, when Trump made locker room talk about grabbing pussies, it was the end of the world.
And now, this stuff.
No, no, no. This is the opportunity.
You get in there, you take the crown.
Look at the hunger people have for non-leftist art, non-leftist music.
People are dying for it.
You have to take this opportunity.
Get your funding. Start your own studios.
Write your scripts. Assemble the talent.
Now is the time!
It may not come again and it probably won't.
Seize the day!
That is the opportunity that you are offered out of nowhere.
This break in the clouds, this chink in the armor.
