Harvey Weinstein, Ashley Judd and the Democrat Party’s Doubtful Future

Posted on | October 8, 2017 | 3 Comments

Harvey Weinstein in 1997 (left); Ashley Judd in Kiss the Girls (right.

In 1997, 29-year-old Ashley Judd was one of Hollywood’s hottest young actresses, and 45-year-old Harvey Weinstein was one of the most powerful movie producers in the world. His company, Miramax Films, had been bought by Disney for $60 million in 1993, and the company’s film The English Patient had won the 1997 Oscar for Best Picture. Photos from the 1997 Oscar party show Weinstein standing next to Judd holding her hand, while her date, Vince Vaughn, hovers in the background.

At the time, Judd was working on Kiss the Girls, a detective thriller for Paramount, and Weinstein was very eager to work with her, IYKWIMAITYD. “I was sexually harassed by one of our industry’s most famous, admired-slash-reviled bosses,” Judd told Variety in a 2015 interview which did not name Weinstein as the boss in question:

I was making “Kiss the Girls” at the time, and here I was, a declared feminist. I had completed a minor in what was then called women’s studies, which we now call gender studies. And yet I did not recognize at the time what was happening to me. It took years before I could evaluate that incident and realize that there was something incredibly wrong and illegal about it. . . .
When I kept saying no to everything, there was a huge asymmetry of power and control in that room.
This will be familiar to all the women to whom this has happened. . . .
The ultimate thing when I was weaseling out of everything else was, “Will you watch me take a shower?” And all the other women, sitting around this table with me, said, “Oh my god — that’s what he said to me too.” In that moment, I told him something like, “When I win an Academy Award in one of your movies.” He said, “No, when you get nominated.” I said, “No, no, when I win an Academy Award.” That was a small moment of power when I was able to contradict him and hold to my reality. And then I got out of there. And by the way, I’ve never been offered a movie by that studio. Ever.

You can read the whole thing. What did it mean, in 1997, for Ashley Judd to be “a declared feminist”? If you’re old enough to remember the 1990s, you know that this meant primarily (a) commitment to defending the abortion industry and (b) fanatical devotion to the Democrat Party. After the Lewinsky scandal made headlines in 1998, feminist Nina Burleigh declared: “I would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.” The “theocracy,” you see, is liberal codespeak for the Republican Party’s Christian conservative constituency, which opposes abortion. And this was the kind of feminism that Ashley Judd embraced as a young actress in the 1990s.

Well, guess what? Harvey Weinstein is down for that agenda, too.

May 2017: Harvey Weinstein and his wife at the 100th Anniversary Gala for Planned Parenthood pic.twitter.com/cGOG0IRBov

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) October 6, 2017

“We need to defend Planned Parenthood and women’s rights.”
— Harvey Weinstein, Feb. 26, 2017

If you’ve ever read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, you understand how easily some people can be deceived and manipulated by advocates for trendy political causes. There is a line in Animal House, where the Deltas are on their way to pick up girls at a liberal women’s college:

FLOUNDER: I hear Dickinson girls are fast. What should l say?
OTTER: Just mention modern art, civil rights or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.

It’s the same thing with feminists and abortion. Ann Coulter once observed that abortion is the holy sacrament of the Church of Liberalism, and this total commitment to promoting abortion has been profoundly harmful to the Democrat Party. Anyone with a shred of human decency knows that abortion is wrong, and the Democrats’ pro-abortion stance has the effect of driving decent people away from their party, while simultaneously attracting dangerous perverts to the party.

 

Say what you will, it was obviously no accident that Democrat Anthony Weiner was married to Hillary Clinton’s assistant Huma Abedin. The Clintons have always surrounded themselves with corrupt and immoral people, because no honest or moral person would support them — at least, not once they realized who the Clintons really are. It is always better to be an enemy of such people than to be their allies. Christopher Hitchens famously chronicled Bill Clinton’s betrayals of his liberal supporters in a book aptly titled, No One Left to Lie To.

Does anyone really believe, as Harvey Weinstein said, that support for the abortion industry is synonymous with “women’s rights”?

Cui bono? Who actually benefits from the abortion industry’s grisly trade? Isn’t it true that the main effect of legalized abortion, and the Contraceptive Culture in general, is to enable irresponsible men to pursue hedonistic sexual activity without being bothered by the potential burden of caring for children? And how is it in the best interest of women to be treated as “pump-and-dump” sexual commodities?

Years ago, I remarked that many Democrats go into politics for the same reason teenage boys learn to play guitar. And in 2013, after Anthony Weiner was caught in his second “sexting” scandal, I described Democrats as “The Pervert Party”:

What we know of Weiner’s latest shame is that, in the wake of his 2011 scandal, the married Democrat began an online correspondence with an Indiana girl, identified by BuzzFeed as Sydney Leathers, who says she worked on President Obama’s re-election campaign. To give you an idea of Ms. Leather’s partisan and ideological commitments, after a maniac’s shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, she created an online petition that blamed this deadly crime on Sarah Palin, whom Ms. Leathers condemned for “inciting violence.” (In fact, the Tucson gunman was a schizophrenic inspired by a leftwing conspiracy “documentary.”) Only a liberal girl could admire a creep like Weiner.

Being the pro-abortion party makes Democrats so profoundly immoral that we are scarcely surprised by their dishonesty, corruption and scandalous personal misconduct. And, with a nod toward some of my #NeverTrump Republican friends, this is also a danger to the GOP. The degradation of public morality, in which Democrats have been enthusiastically complicit, has not been without it harmful effects on Republicans. Confronted by a corrupt Democrat machine (including their dishonest party “operatives with bylines” in the media), some in the GOP figure they can play by the same rules. If Democrats were willing to defend Bill Clinton, who was plausibly accused of rape, after all, how can they condemn Donald Trump’s boorish behavior? And so the blatant immorality of Democrats tends to erode moral standards among Republicans as well. This danger cannot be ignored.

 

The fate of Democrats in recent years should be a warning to any Republican who is tempted to emulate them. Whatever selfish gains the Clintons derived from their corruption has come at a painful cost to the Democrat Party’s political influence, as I recently explained:

Democrats have lost power at every level, as Republicans not only control the White House and both houses of Congress, but also hold the governorships of 33 states, and 68 of 99 state legislative chambers. In 32 states, which are home to 61% of the U.S. population, the GOP controls both houses of the state legislature. Hillary Clinton’s supporters like to point out she won the popular vote, with 66 million votes to Trump’s 63 million, yet nearly a quarter of her total — more than 16 million votes — were concentrated in just three states: California, New York and Illinois. Lacking effective leadership, Democrats have become deranged and desperate, and are being attracted to lunatic fringe movements.

Of course, it is possible — likely, even — that an anti-Trump backlash will reduce some of that GOP advantage in next month’s off-year elections, but the long-term trend over the past 25 years will probably continue: No matter how much Democrats increase their margins in big cities and the coastal states, these gains are more than offset by Republican gains among suburban and rural Middle American voters. Consider these three data points from Wisconsin exit polls:

 

“Family values” still matter. When push comes to shove, marriage and religion are decisive influences in electoral politics. When we look at these factors in Wisconsin — a state that Trump won by a narrow margin — the only demographic groups that went for Clinton were (a) unmarried women and (b) those who never attend religious services.

Once you begin extrapolating from those data points — and if you understand the selection effects involved — you see why the pro-abortion feminism of Ashley Judd must ultimately be fatal to the Democrats.

 

Ashley Judd doesn’t have any children. Indeed, if you look at the four women featured on the cover of Ms. magazine in 2003 — “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” — you find that two of them (Camryn Manheim and Whoopi Goldberg) have one child each, while Judd and Margaret Cho have zero, so that their average is 0.5 children per woman. Because feminist ideology is anti-marriage, anti-motherhood and anti-religion, the Democrat Party’s embrace of feminism creates a long-term problem for the party. And the rising feminist resentment toward hypocritical male “allies” like Harvey Weinstein will only exacerbate this problem.

There was a time when liberal feminism attracted males whose idea of “women’s rights” were similar to Weinstein’s, but in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s feminist-themed campaign, an angry anti-male radicalism has taken hold among women on the Left. The “male feminist” type of left-wing man is now openly mocked and scorned for his attempts to get laid by spewing talking-points about women’s “empowerment,” etc.

 

 

 

If a young man is interested in politics, is there any reason he should support a Democrat Party controlled by enraged man-hating feminists? After the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, which ought to have been seen as a lesson in why feminism fails, Democrats are instead doubling down. They are talking about nominating Sen. Kamala Harris in 2020, reinforcing the message that men are no longer welcome in the Democrat Party. Taking a look at exit polls in Ohio — where Trump won male voters by a 23-point margin — it’s clear that this message is already well understood, the same way the “Black Lives Matter” movement made clear that Democrats are against white people. All signs indicate that the Democrat Party’s agenda will become even more extreme, as they embrace the radical “Resistance” movement. And who can forget Ashley Judd’s “Nasty Woman” rant at the Women’s March on Washington?

 

Yes — that is what a feminist looks like, and that’s also what the future of the Democrat Party looks like, if they have a future at all.

 

 

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