In a year in which Trump has often showed bad judgment, one of his smart choices was to stay away from the Kennedy Center on Sunday night. In this case, discretion was the better part of valor, as the ceremony — like the equally cheesy Hollywood, theater, and music-industry awards shows that don’t pretend to be the same as a royal investiture — was an occasion for hours of liberal virtue signaling at Trump’s expense.
.. cheers for television producer Norman Lear. Indeed, it wasn’t entirely clear whether Lear was being honored for giving us Archie Bunker and a passel of shows that mock the prejudices and values of working-class Americans, or if he was being celebrated for his liberal activism.
.. His fellow liberals may have thought that honoring Lear in the first year of the Trump presidency was a way to poke a stick in the eye of the Donald. But the invocation of Lear’s groundbreaking All in the Family also should have given those in attendance food for thought about why it is that so many real-life working-class Americans refused to take the cues they were given by the left-leaning pop-culture world and voted for Trump last year.
.. His fellow liberals may have thought that honoring Lear in the first year of the Trump presidency was a way to poke a stick in the eye of the Donald. But the invocation of Lear’s groundbreaking All in the Family also should have given those in attendance food for thought about why it is that so many real-life working-class Americans refused to take the cues they were given by the left-leaning pop-culture world and voted for Trump last year.
.. His fellow liberals may have thought that honoring Lear in the first year of the Trump presidency was a way to poke a stick in the eye of the Donald. But the invocation of Lear’s groundbreaking All in the Family also should have given those in attendance food for thought about why it is that so many real-life working-class Americans refused to take the cues they were given by the left-leaning pop-culture world and voted for Trump last year.
.. For the television audience that will watch the show when it appears later this month on CBS, this will confirm what grassroots conservatives and working-class voters already thought about Trump’s critics. Displays like this are why so many Americans have stopped listening to sermons from their supposed betters in the arts. If liberals want to make a case against Trump that his voters will listen to, they are going to have to stop talking down to them.
George Soros Transfers $18 Billion to His Foundation, Creating an Instant Giant
The pioneer of hedge-fund investing has transferred the bulk of his wealth to Open Society Foundations
Open Society’s activism has sometimes angered nationalist governments, such as the current one in Hungary, which targeted a university Mr. Soros founded and which has run poster campaigns singling him out for his support of refugees. Mr. Soros has urged developed countries in Europe and elsewhere to share the burden of increased migration from conflict-ridden countries. Anti-Soros politicians in Macedonia, Poland and some other European countries have attacked foreign-funded groups, including Open Society, for what they see as outside interference in their affairs.
In the U.S., where Mr. Soros is a major contributor to liberal and Democratic causes, he is a lightning rod for conservatives. Open Society has supported efforts to overhaul immigration policies and the criminal-justice system, including prisons, and funded mentoring programs for black and Latino young men. It has supported activists working on issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.
.. Mr. Trump, whose campaign cited Mr. Soros in a closing ad as part of a “global power structure” the ad said disadvantaged the working class.
.. Despite regularly telling others he was retired, Mr. Soros occasionally stepped back into active trading, such as during the financial crisis, when he helped guide his firm to big gains. Former employees say some past investment chiefs bristled at how Mr. Soros inserted himself in operations, judging them critically on what they felt was short-term performance.
.. Soros Fund Management’s annual returns have averaged around 11% in the past 10 years, according to a person familiar with the figures, well below the 30% of its early decades.
The Pigs of Liberalism
a certain kind of powerful liberal creep only gets his comeuppance when he’s weakened or old or in the grave. The awfulness of Ted Kennedy, at Chappaquiddick and after hours in D.C., can be acknowledged only now that he’s no longer a liberal lion in the Senate. The possibility that Bill Clinton might be not just an adulterer but a rapist can be entertained now that he’s no longer protecting abortion from the White House. The sins of Woody Allen … well, I’m sure Hollywood will start ostracizing him any day now.
.. If your culture’s code is libertine, don’t be surprised that worse things than libertinism flourish.
.. while not everyone knew exactly how Harvey Weinstein treated women, everyone knew what kind of man he was. The women he harassed didn’t have the power to restrain him, but plenty of powerful people did.
.. Weinstein didn’t like my question about O, there was an altercation; though the recording has alas been lost to time, I recall that he called me a cunt and declared that he was glad he was the “fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town.” When my colleague Andrew (who was also then 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 suffered long-term injury — and dragging Andrew, in a headlock, onto Sixth Avenue.
.. 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.
.. those who had encountered Weinstein often spoke of the conviction that they would never be believed.
.. But another reason that I never considered trying to report the story myself, even, truly, in the years after I did start writing about gender and power as my beat, was because it felt impossible. Sisyphean. I remembered what it was like to have the full force of Harvey Weinstein — back then a mountainous man — screaming vulgarities at me, his spit hitting my face. I had watched him haul my friend into the street and try to hurt him. That kind of force, that kind of power? I could not have won against that.
.. The best reporters out there tried, for years, perhaps most memorably David Carr, for this magazine. But Weinstein didn’t just exert physical power. He also employed legal and professional and economic power. He supposedly had every employee sign elaborate, binding nondisclosure agreements. He gave jobs to people who might otherwise work to bring him down, and gave gobs of money to other powerful people, who knows how much, but perhaps just enough to keep them from listening to ugly rumors that might circulate among young people, among less powerful people.
.. The accounts in the remarkable New York Times piece offer evidence of the ways in which power imbalance is so key to sexual assault, and in the case of Weinstein, to the ability to keep it from coming to light for so very long.
.. they all speak of the abusive thrill gained not from sex but from the imposition of your will on someone who has no ability to resist or defend themselves from you, an exertion of power on the powerless.
.. Recent years have seen scores of women, finding strength and some kind of power in numbers, come forward and tell their stories about Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump. In all of those cases, as in this case, the history of allegations has been an almost wholly open secret
.. Barack Obama, whose daughter recently worked as his intern.
.. I was also struck by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail, and, when I caught sight of him in May, he appeared to be walking with a cane. He has also lost power in the movie industry, is no longer the titan of independent film, the indie mogul who could make or break an actor’s Oscar chances.
.. His legal team also includes David Boies and Charles Harder, the lawyer who successfully sued Gawker on behalf of Hulk Hogan. Anita Dunn, who worked in the Obama White House, reportedly gave Weinstein pro bono PR advice in recent weeks; Weinstein has also, supposedly, reached out to the Clintons’ crisis PR honcho Lanny Davis.
Will Liberals Give Weinstein the O’Reilly Treatment?
As Camille Paglia noted in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, prominent feminists like Gloria Steinem didn’t waste any time discarding sexual harassment guidelines when it came to Bill Clinton’s sexual predations as president. Principle rapidly gave way to partisanship and political opportunism.
Mr. Weinstein clearly understands this calculus. In the wake of the Times report, he issued a cringe-inducing apology: “I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then,” as if in the good olde days of the women’s liberation movement it was totally acceptable to ask a 20-something colleague to bathe you.
He promises “to do better” and “conquer my demons.” He misquotes Jay-Z. He says he has hired a team of therapists to “deal with the issue head on.”
But the real heart of his message was that he will be an even better progressive if given a second chance: “I’m going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided I’m going to give the N.R.A. my full attention.” He’s also making a movie about Donald Trump.
And if the virtue-signaling isn’t enough, the man who has bankrolled Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand — the list goes on and on — is determined to pay out much more. “One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors” at the University of Southern California
.. And if the virtue-signaling isn’t enough, the man who has bankrolled Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand — the list goes on and on — is determined to pay out much more. “One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors” at the University of Southern California
.. what’s telling is that Ms. Bloom and his other advisers seem to believe their best chance of salvaging their damaged client is, like the Catholic Church of yore, to pay for his sins in the coin of liberal affirmation. The behavioral issues will take time.