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Piers Morgan: Spare me Hollywood’s hypocritical horror over Harvey Weinstein – the same people, led by moralizing Meryl, gave a standing ovation to child rapist Polanski

I spoke to Harvey Weinstein on Monday night.

‘Harvey…how’s your life?’ I asked, winning myself the Most Stupid Question of the Year Award.

He sighed loudly, paused for a second or two, then chuckled, wryly.

‘My life? It’s really not that great right now to be honest, Piers…’

At the time, he was still fighting to save his movie mogul career, and his marriage, after the New York Times bombshell report disclosing he had paid off eight women for sexual harassment.

Weinstein asked to go off-the-record, and we talked for another minute or so before I heard urgent mutterings and he suddenly said: ‘I have to go….this is a very important call… I’m sorry… I’ll call you straight back.’

He didn’t call back.

Within 24 hours, a blizzard of horrific new revelations erupted in the New York Times and New Yorker magazine featuring fresh allegations against Weinstein from myriad famous and non-famous women of rape, sexual assault and harassment.

Perhaps that ‘very important call’ was from one of those publications, or his lawyer, who knows?

It doesn’t really matter now.

As I write this, Harvey Weinstein’s career is gone, his marriage is gone, and his reputation as one of the greatest, and most successful, power brokers in Hollywood history is gone too.

Fired by his own company, and dumped by his wife Georgina, beleaguered Weinstein has escaped to a sex addiction clinic somewhere in Europe.

It’s a staggering fall from grace, even by the brutal standards of Hollywood.

Yet it’s a fall that deserves not a scintilla of sympathy, given the scale of his appalling behaviour.

I’ve known Weinstein for a decade.

He’s an unquestionably brilliant movie producer – his films have generated over 300 Oscar nominations – and a very smart, charismatic guy.

I’ve only ever seen the best side of Harvey: the fast-talking, quick-witted, pugnacious, determined and driven side with a genuinely passionate love for film.

I’ve always got on very well with him and enjoyed his company, and hope he gets the treatment he clearly needs.

But now we’ve seen another side exposed, one that’s made very grim reading: that of a ruthless, selfish, bullying, misogynist prone to harassing women into trading sexual favours for movie roles.

We’ve also heard the tape – that shocking minute-long wire-tapped audio of him terrorizing a young, frightened actress outside his New York hotel room, a woman he admits to having groped the day before.

You can’t hear it without feeling utterly repulsed.

Nor can you hear it without now believing every word all his other accusers are saying.

As Weinstein himself admitted: ‘I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain.’

Yes, it has.

And I applaud the courageous women who first came forward last week to lift the lid off Weinstein’s decades of depravity when he was still in a position of great power to make or break their careers.

Bring Down Leftist Foundations Like the Mafia Prosecute Soros and Ford for funding leftist violence. Daniel Greenfield

The Department of Justice has been investigating DisruptJ20, a “resistance” group that plotted to shut down President Trump’s inauguration. The DOJ has demanded the IP addresses of visitors, along with any emails, photos and names it can get. But the pipeline of Dj20 funding goes back to George Soros.

And not just Soros.

Money from the Global Justice Alliance went to Refuse Fascism, a group founded by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which staged violent protests. “Respectable” big money leftist groups like the Hill Snowdon Foundation and Ben and Jerry’s Foundation fund middlemen like the Alliance. And then the Alliance funds “direct action” groups that are willing to get their hands violently dirty.

The DOJ, better than anyone, should understand this model. It’s commonplace among criminals.

And when you go after criminals, you don’t stop with the street thugs. Instead you go after the bosses. The left’s funding pipelines launder money by moving it from respectable foundations to increasingly radical groups until they reach the thugs that mace, club and set fires. The multiple tiers buy their donors respectability and plausible deniability. But it’s nothing that the DOJ can’t easily penetrate.

It’s not all that different from the Castellano era in the Gambino crime family. And it needs to be treated the same way. Fiscal sponsorship of groups that engage in street violence is a crime. Prosecute it!

The Center for Community Change Action, another “direct action” group, recently had its donors exposed. They included Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Approximately $7 million has gone from these big donors to the “direct action” group.

The CCCA has its own groups for which it’s acting as a “fiscal sponsor”. That’s how it works.

The Ford Foundation has become notorious for its backing of Black Lives Matter through the Black-Led Movement Fund whose goal was to raise over $100 million for the black nationalist racist hate group.

There is big money behind the street violence tearing apart America from Ferguson to Berkeley.

And there are big foundations behind the big money. The DOJ took down the big crime families. It’s time for it to take down the big leftist foundations.

Many of these foundations were born in sin. And they’ve only grown worse since.

Their bid for “campaign finance reform” shifted the axis of political finance from donations to political organizations to “outside” groups that matched their agendas. We all live in the cracks of the shadowy political system created by the Ford Foundation, George Soros, Carnegie and MacArthur. The lefty foundations spent over $100 million to make “campaign finance reform” a reality. And that gave them enormous power to control national politics through unaccountable networks and soft money.

House Members Discuss Democrats’ IT Scandal and Lack of Proper Investigation By Debra Heine

Representatives Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Scott Perry (R-PA) on Tuesday hosted a caucus meeting on the Democrats’ IT scandal, which continues to be ignored by House leadership and the mainstream media.

Investigative reporter Luke Rosiak — who has done most of the investigative reporting on the story for The Daily Caller — was also at the meeting, as was Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who lamented the fact that there have been no House hearings yet on what appears to a humongous scandal. The Capitol Police and FBI investigation appears to be going nowhere, as well.

“A proper investigation into this series of events doesn’t seem to be taking place,” said Rep. Perry. “I think many Americans feel the same way.”

Rep. Gohmert said the purpose of the meeting was “to bring out information that might be of interest or assistance to members of Congress.”

Rep. Perry began by reciting a rundown of the facts in the case as discovered by the Office of the Inspector General.

“The OIG tracked the Awans’ network usage and found that a massive amount of data was flowing from the networks,” he said. “Over 5,700 logins by the five Awan associates were discovered on a single server within the House. The server of the Democratic Caucus chairman, then-Rep. Xavier Becerra of California — 5,400 appear unauthorized. He is now the attorney general of California. According to the reports, the Becerra server was actually housing the entirety of the servers of all the member offices that employed Imran or his associates — a clear violation of House policy. This means up to 40 or more members of Congress had all of their data moved out of their office server or out of their cloud storage system and onto the Becerra server without their knowledge or consent.”

Perry said that the OIG reported their findings to “the speaker’s office, Democratic leadership, and the House Administration Committee, as well as the House sergeant at arms and Capitol Police in late September and early October of 2016.” He said, “Capitol Police began a criminal investigation into Imran Awan and his associates at that time. Capitol Police determined that the image they required Imran to provide was falsified, likely with deliberate attempt to conceal the activities that they knew were against House policy and the law.”

“These facts, standing alone, indicate a substantial security threat at the least,” Perry said. “But the events don’t end there.”

The congressman also brought up Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s mysterious laptop, which was found in a phone booth in the Rayburn Office Building on April 6, 2017, along with several pieces of ID belonging to Imran Awan.

For nearly two hours, the group discussed some of the most disturbing aspects of the scandal — including a possible kick-back scheme that could implicate congressional Democrats and the possibility that Imran Awan may have stolen the identity of a House Intelligence staffer after his own House email address was shut down.

There’s also the question of the Awan brothers’ ridiculously high salaries:

Rep DeSantis said he noticed a double standard in how the DOJ enforces the law.

“Look at the Mueller investigation,” DeSantis said. “Picking Manifort’s lock in the middle of the night and drawing guns on him and his wife for some white-collar crap from three or four years ago — I mean, that’s like scorching the earth, but yet, with Hillary … Comey exonerated her two months before she was brought in for questioning.”

He continued: “My fear on this case is that the ferocity will not be where it needs to be because … on the FBI, U.S. attorney ,DOJ side — I think you can get answers to these questions, and I think you can break it open. I have not seen that as of yet.”

DeSantis asked if anyone on the panel had seen leaks about the investigation. “I mean, we see all these other leaks. … The initial indictme

Democratic IT scandal takes an interesting turn By Rick Moran

The “non-scandal” scandal involving a former I.T. aide to several Democratic congressmen, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, took an interesting turn when the wife of the alleged hacker and fraudster Imran Awan showed up in court separate from her husband and had retained a separate attorney.

Imran Awan’s own wife, Hina Alvi, filed papers in a Pakistani court accusing her husband of fraud and of marrying another woman. The couple did not look at each other when they showed up in federal court on Friday.

Daily Caller:

The couple were in U.S. court to face bank fraud charges related to sending money to Pakistan around the time they learned they were under investigation for abuses related to their work managing IT for members of Congress. Awan was arrested at Dulles Airport in July attempting to board a flight to Pakistan.

Wasserman Schultz, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, and other House Democrats have vigorously defended Awan, claiming the Capitol Police might be drumming up charges out of Islamaphobia.

Alvi was arraigned Friday on four felony counts, and Awan, who has already been arraigned, requested that his GPS monitoring bracelet be taken off – citing the fact that his wife was in America as the reason he was not a flight risk.

Yet the couple entered and left the court separately, have different lawyers, and Awan’s lawyer told the judge that the husband and wife are staying “in a one-bedroom apartment and then also a house.”

Pakistani legal papers published by the news channel show Alvi recently accused Awan of illegally marrying another woman, and of fraud. “My husband Imran Awan son of Muhammad Ashraf Awan, committed fraud along with offence of polygamy,” she charges in the papers.

Hina’s U.S. lawyer, Nikki Lotze, did not dispute the account. “I don’t see how that’s newsworthy,” Lotze told The Daily Caller News Foundation. The Pakistani legal petition named as the second wife is a woman who records show told Virginia police she felt like Awan was keeping her “like a slave.”

Awan’s two brothers have also been implicated in the scheme, and the revelation that Awan’s second wife may also have been involved makes the circle of fraud and deceit even wider.

Although The Washington Post has reported that investigators found that Awan and his relatives made unauthorized access to a congressional server 5,400 times, Wasserman Schultz has said concern about the matter was the stuff of the “right-wing media circus fringe.”

Awan and Alvi have been charged with bank fraud involving moving money to Pakistan, but they have not been charged with crimes related to their work, and the other family members have not been charged at all. Awan’s attorney used Friday’s hearing to argue that he “very strongly” wanted to block prosecutors from using evidence they found in the Capitol Hill phone booth.

The Pakistani legal motion filed by Alvi states: “A few months ago I got apprised of the fact that my husband has contracted second marriage secretly, fraudulently and without my consent with Mst. Sumaira Shehzadi Alias Sumaira Siddique Daughter of Muhammad Akram r/o Township, Lahore. The second marriage of my husband is illegal, unlawful and without justification.”

Nevertheless, They Persisted Obama and the Clintons haven’t had much to say about their pal Harvey.By James Freeman

As the rape and sexual harassment accusations against movie mogul and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein continue to aggregate, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how Mr. Weinstein’s alleged offenses were not reported until the publication of a story last week in the New York Times . Even since the report, many of Mr. Weinstein’s associates are still reluctant to comment.

The website Mediaite takes note of an exchange this afternoon on CNN:

Hillary Clinton finally released a statement condemning Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, but CNN’s Dana Bash had to ask this afternoon, “Where are the Obamas?”

Weinstein was a big Democratic fundraiser, and gave money to both Clinton and Barack Obama (though Clinton’s statement does not mention the donations or whether she will be giving them away).

“Where is Michelle Obama? Where is President Obama?” Bash asked. “Harvey Weinstein was, and probably is, still a big supporter of them and certainly of…the President’s political efforts.”

Chris Cillizza brought up when the former First Lady praised Weinstein during a student film symposium at the White House, saying that the Obamas need to be speaking out now and it’s “odd” that they aren’t.

During the 2013 White House event, Michelle Obama called Mr. Weinstein “a wonderful human being, a good friend and just a powerhouse.”

Wonderful is not the word that comes to mind when reading a heartbreaking new report by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker detailing three separate rape allegations against Mr. Weinstein. The piece also alleges other cases of harassment followed by career setbacks for the alleged victims:

Four actresses, including Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected that, after they rejected Weinstein’s advances or complained about them to company representatives, Weinstein had them removed from projects or dissuaded people from hiring them.

The Times has followed up with a report that Mr. Weinstein also allegedly harassed Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow back when they were on their way to becoming movie stars. Among the saddest details of many of the recent accounts of alleged harassment and assaults by Mr. Weinstein involve the number of people who either ignored or even facilitated the movie mogul’s meetings alone with young women. Since the reports became public a number of actresses including Lena Dunham have also expressed disappointment in the silence of their male co-stars.

At least one guy in Hollywood seems to have been at least annoyed by one of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged offenses. The Times notes that at the time she was allegedly victimized, Ms. Paltrow was dating the actor Brad Pitt. According to the Times, “After she told Mr. Pitt about the episode, he approached Mr. Weinstein at a theater premiere and told him never to touch Ms. Paltrow again.”

Ms. Dunham for her part says the problem goes beyond Mr. Weinstein:

She condemns Weinstein as a “predator” and says he’s not the only one in Hollywood, detailing her own encounters with “everyday sexism” as a young, acclaimed indie-film director.

“His behavior, silently co-signed for decades by employees and collaborators, is a microcosm of what has been happening in Hollywood since always and of what workplace harassment looks like for women everywhere,” Dunham writes of Weinstein…

“The use of power to possess and silence women is as likely to occur in a fast-food restaurant as it is on a movie set, and Hollywood has yet another chance to make a noisy statement about what we should and should not condone as a society,” she writes.

Ms. Dunham’s fact-free smear against the fast-food industry aside, her comments raise the disturbing possibility that one of the reasons Mr. Weinstein got away with the alleged behavior for so long is that it’s not that rare in Hollywood. On Tuesday another accuser named Louisette Geiss came forward and held a press conference along with her attorney Gloria Allred. According to the Hollywood Reporter: CONTINUE AT SITE

Sanctimony Bites Weinstein Democrats Maybe Hollywood progressives will tone down their self-righteousness. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

One of the few successes of John McCain’s 2008 campaign was a 30-second ad called “Celeb.” It interspersed images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears with Barack Obama and his adoring crowds. A narrator said: “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?”

Pundits and political pros dismissed the spot as off-target and unconvincing. Mr. McCain seemed almost embarrassed by it, claiming his campaign was just having “fun.”

Yet the implication that Mr. Obama was a glitzy Hollywood-style confection resonated with voters. Mr. Obama, just coming off his ecstatic appearance in Berlin, saw his poll numbers drop noticeably. His advisers were quoted in the press acknowledging the ad’s power.

Which brings us to Harvey Weinstein. 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.

He was a guest at the Obama White House 13 times. He gave hundreds of thousands to the Clintons. In 2016, he hosted or headlined multiple fundraisers for Mrs. Clinton with people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker.

He was coached by Team Clinton for a campaign appearance on CBS . In turn, he coached campaign chief Robby Mook on how to answer the Bernie Sanders threat.

He’s also a man who the Los Angeles Times now tells us was “generally loathed” in Hollywood. His sexual predations were so well known that they were the subject of a joke on “30 Rock.” His behavior, we now learn, has been the subject of ongoing reporting projects at the New Yorker, New York magazine and the New York Times, which finally blew Mr. Weinstein out of the water with its 3,500-word account last week.

His offenses were the “biggest mess” Disney had to deal with during its 12-year partnership with Mr. Weinstein, a former executive now tells the Times. Actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan, who related their stories to the paper, as well as Lena Dunham, creator of HBO’s “Girls,” have been outspoken in the aftermath about Tinsel Town’s history of covering up for Mr. Weinstein.

Contradictions and Condescension by Mark Steyn

When a decent old stiff such as Mitt Romney talks earnestly about looking for suitable female job candidates and clumsily distills the effort into the phrase “binders full of women”, all the smart sophisticated types jump on it and make it a punchline for an antiquated condescension that only confirms how irredeemably misogynist the GOP is.

By contrast, when Harvey Weinstein corners a TV reporter in the corridor of his restaurant and forces her to watch as he unzips his pants, masturbates, and finally concludes the performance by ejaculating into a pot plant, all you hear, from a couple of larger leaves round the back of the plant, are drenched crickets chirping. Three decades of crickets chirping.

“Binders full of women”: what an appalling sentiment!

“Stand there and shut up while I masturbate in your general direction”: well, say what you like but Harvey has always supported, as Meryl Streep noted today, “good and worthy causes” – like the Hillary campaign.

Not so long ago, picking up a Golden Globe for her turn as Mrs Thatcher, Meryl was happy to salute Harvey Weinstein as God, notwithstanding that the previous occupant of that position was famously antipathetic to the sin of Onan, with or without attendant shrubbery. Harvey, more modestly, saw himself as the “”f**ing sheriff of this f**king lawless piece-of-s**t town”. So, when he pounded the crap out of some journalist on a city sidewalk, a hundred cameras snapped, but, mysteriously, not a single photograph saw the light of day. When a junior reporter at The New York Times noticed that the head of Miramax Italy was a guy who knew nothing about movies but was paid 400 grand a year to procure broads for Weinstein, Matt Damon and (alas) Russell Crowe personally called her to talk her out of pursuing the story (subsequently gutted by an editor). As recently as this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live”, Lorne Michaels, head honcho of the world’s most cobwebbed edgy comedy show, declined to address the Weinstein controversy, presumably in case Harvey was merely temporarily hors de combat and a week or two hence was minded to beat Lorne up, too.

Possibly Lorne, Matt and Russell have Harvey’s name tattooed on their butts. Dame Judi Dench, who played Queen Victoria in another upscale Oscar-bait Weinstein production, does – and she’s happy to lower her knickers and show it to you. Or she was, until Sunday. Maybe, all over town, Hollywood A-listers are frantically booking emergency removals of their Weinstein tramp-stamps.

Harvey thought those “good and worthy causes” would come through for him again. In response to the disclosure that he had attempted to force Ashley Judd into joining him in the shower, he announced that “I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. ” Sure, that seems an even longer shot than Wayne would attempt, but why wouldn’t it work? Twenty years ago, Time’s Nina Burleigh said of Harvey’s pal Bill Clinton, “I would be happy to give him a bl**job 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.” If the chicks’ll swallow that, why wouldn’t Ashley Judd be lining up to give him an assisted shower for regulating bump stocks? Happy the land in which a “semi-automatic” means Harvey reflexively dropping his trousers when a comely reporter enters the room.

Why do Mitt’s binders full of women outrage liberal sensibilities but not Harvey’s pot plants full of semen?

Well, in the old days, the bourgeoisie expected bourgeois values throughout society. The wealthy and powerful disdained them, but discreetly. Now they disdain them openly. Indeed, they wage war on them, relentlessly. Instead, they enforce “progressive” values. Institutions fundamental to the nation-state, such as citizenship, have to be rendered meaningless – so that what matters in any immigration debate is not the citizens but the invaders, to the point where Nancy Pelosi thanks the parents of “Dreamers” for breaking American law and bringing them here, as a precious gift to a nation crying out for even more low-skilled immigrants. As for institutions that pre-date the nation-state – institutions almost as old as humanity – they’re as easy to redefine, so that marriage can no longer be confined to those of opposite sexes. Speaking of the sexes, human biology can be vaporized, so that two sexes become 57 genders, and grade-school boys more interested in Barbie than GI Joe get to be pumped full of puberty blockers and directed to the girls’ bathroom. And after all that, religion has to be put on the back foot, so that any recalcitrant mom’n’pop bakery for whom two men atop a wedding cake is an abomination, must be hunted down, dragged into court and financially ruined pour encourager les autres. And in a revolutionary present it is necessary ultimately to throttle the past – eliminating Robert E Lee, Christopher Columbus, Dr Seuss, Stephen Foster, the national anthem, to dam up the stream of history, the flow of past to present to future, and thus sever the citizenry from their entire inheritance, so that we are mere flotsam and jetsam on the frothing surface of the moment – a world where, in a certain sense, Harvey Weinstein is God.

A Vicious Virtue When tragedy strikes, you probably deserve it — if you’re a conservative. By Victor Davis Hanson

Not long ago, late-night comedian and would-be philosopher Steven Colbert signaled the nation his virtuous outrage over the Trump presidency. Colbert offered that Trump had “a feeble f***ing anemic firefly of a soul.” His puerile efforts at alliteration were not helped by the redundant “anemic.”

Obscenity in service to an announced virtuous progressive cause is apparently now Colbert’s brand — and the more vulgar, the more virtuous.

Of Trump, Colbert had earlier announced crudely on national television: “You talk like a sign-language gorilla that got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c*** holster.” Do Americans stay up late to hear that?

Yet Colbert’s incoherent crudity is mild compared with the epidemic of assassination chic in which politicians, celebrities, actors, and academics vie to kill Trump by symbolically stabbing, decapitation, hanging, shooting, and maiming his likeness. (The various ways of killing or torturing Trump have exhausted the imagination of the virtuous.) It is as if the more macabre one can be in imagining how to eviscerate Trump, the more virtuous one becomes.

Is vicarious violence and crudity the means by which the modern soft suburbanite — like a Colbert, Michael Moore, or Bill Maher — messages his inner bravery and progressive authenticity?

After the recent shootings in Los Vegas, Frank Sinatra’s daughter and former singer Nancy Sinatra tweeted, “The murderous members of the NRA should face a firing squad.”

She later backtracked by insisting that her attributive adjective “murderous” was really discriminatory, not collective, as if she meant that only the NRA members who are actually murderous should be shot, given that not all NRA members are necessarily murderous. But aside from misleading about her intent, which particular NRA members does she think have committed murder, and how would the selective champion of capital punishment, Nancy Sinatra, know them?

Wanting to kill someone because of his politics is now sort of passé. So is the chilling habit of calibrating empathy for the dead on the basis of their perceived ideology. The now-fired vice president and senior legal counsel at CBS Hayley Geftman-Gold posted her feelings after the Las Vegas massacre: “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters [sic].”

When Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson tried to assassinate Republican legislators during a baseball practice game, and almost killed Republican majority whip Steven Scalise, MSNBC host Joy Reid seemed to all but suggest that Scalise had deserved to be killed, given his conservative politics. She tweeted: “Rep. #Scalise was shot by a white man with a violent background, and saved by a black lesbian police officer, and yet . . . ” And then she followed that outburst with a list of Scalise’s conservative agenda items, such as his vote for a GOP House bill on health care, that apparently were meant to minimize the horror of his near-death. Reid’s commentary was not unusual; the Washington Post reported recently on liberal anger that a recovering Scalise was honored by being asked to throw out the first pitch at a Washington baseball game. His opposition to Obamacare and support for the Second Amendment should evidently have disqualified him from receiving sympathy for his near-fatal shooting.

The social-media practice of predicating empathy for the dead or wounded on the basis of their perceived politics first received wide national attention with Michael Moore. Moore posted unhinged commentary on his website the day after nearly 3,000 were murdered on September 11, 2001. Moore seemed outraged at the carnage largely because he deemed the dead to be mostly blue-state Al Gore voters — and thus the incorrect people to have perished:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This is just not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California — these were the places that voted AGAINST Bush.

Message v. Messenger: The Trump Enigma By Victor Davis Hanson

About 90 percent of Republican voters eventually supported the political novice Donald Trump by November 2016. Most conservatives saw him as the preferable alternative to the vision and agendas of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps most still do after nine months of his presidency.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/09/message-v-messenger-the-trump-enigma/

Yet almost half of the elite conservative establishment remains opposed to Republican President Trump.

About a quarter of them, it seems, openly despise him. These are prominent Republican senators, think-tank writers, television pundits, op-ed columnists, and generic public intellectuals. MSNBC and CNN are now homes for disgruntled Republicans or former conservative pundits in the way that those outlets once for a time found it useful to welcome in paleo-conservatives opposed to the Bush Administration during the Iraq War.

Bret Stephens, the NeverTrump former conservative at the Wall Street Journal, now advocates the repeal of the Second Amendment in the pages of the New York Times. Did Trump turn off some of the Republican establishment, or liberate it to espouse progressive views that it always held, but found impolitic to express?

The usual conservative status quo complaint against Trump is that the deficiencies of the messenger outweigh the many positives of the message. Or Trump, the person, nullifies the policies that have accompanied Trump into power.

The anti-Trumpians cringe at Trump’s incessant Twitter and news conference spats with everyone from “fake news” reporters at CNN to the San Juan mayor. His marathon rambling speeches at rallies in red-state America remind them that they find Trump supporters on the screen far more alien than they do their liberal counterparts in their own Washington and New York neighborhoods. Never Trumpers certainly are louder in their opposition to Trump than was the Tea Party’s past criticism of McCain or Romney.

They are embarrassed that someone from their own party has a vocabulary that focuses on about four adjectives (“tremendous,” “great,” “awesome,” “wonderful,” etc.), or that he often exaggerates and errs in a manner of Barack Obama, though without the latter’s mellifluousness or Ivy League brand.

The Republican establishment used to lament that the old Reagan Democrats, Tea Party types, and working-class whites of the Midwest had stayed home in 2008 and 2012, and thus allowed good candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney to be steamrolled by Obama’s fatuous “hope and change” identity politics. Now they are either worried or shamed that these same swing voters came out in droves and left the Republican Party in a dominant position at the local, state, and federal level not seen since the 1920s.

In sum, the NeverTrump lament seems to be that whatever good Trump has done is more than outweighed by his “character is destiny” flaws. Neil Gorsuch and scores of conservative circuit court judges; Nikki Haley at the United Nations, James Mattis at Defense, H.R. McMaster at the National Security Council, Mike Pompeo at the CIA, and Rex Tillerson at the State Department, all restoring deterrence; rollbacks of Obama-era executive orders; green-lighting pipeline construction and increased fossil fuel production; protections of Second Amendment rights; restoring national borders; and genuine efforts to reform Obamacare and the tax code—all of that for them is not worth the spectacle of Trump on the national stage. Or for some, all of the above Trump efforts now are seen as disruptive and unnecessary—once the crudity of Trump enlightened the establishment to what it now sees as inherent wrongs present all along in conservative thinking.

The economy is gaining momentum. The stock market is way up. GDP growth exceeds Obama-era levels. Real unemployment (U6) is falling as labor participation improves. Business confidence is growing. Middle-class incomes and corporate profits increase. Consumer confidence is rebounding—all symptoms of an initial, implicit psychological rebuke to the overregulated and dreary business climate of the last eight years.

But again, should the economy hit an annual GDP growth rate of 4 percent, Trump’s popularity would probably not exceed 50 percent; and the NeverTrump establishment likely would not endorse his reelection, even should he appoint three conservative justices and thereby ensure a conservative Supreme Court for a generation.

The Human Stain: Why the Harvey Weinstein Story Is Worse Than You Think It goes much deeper than one big creep. Lee Smith

The New York Times last week broke the story of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s long record of sexual harassment. Actresses including Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd came forward to detail Weinstein’s depredations, and so did former employees of the man who founded one of the most important independent film companies of the last 30 years, Miramax. The details were so jarring and the trail of abuse so long, that it was impossible to read the story and not come away wondering: How did no one know what he was doing?

But of course people knew about Harvey Weinstein. Like the New York Times, for instance. Sharon Waxman, a former reporter at the Times, writes in The Wrap how she had the story on Weinstein in 2004—and then he bullied the Times into dropping it. Matt Damon and Russell Crowe even called her directly to get her to back off the story. And Miramax was a major advertiser. Her editor at the Times, Jonathan Landman, asked her why it mattered. After all, he told Waxman, “he’s not a publicly elected official.”

Manhattan’s district attorney knew, too. In 2015, Weinstein’s lawyer donated $10,000 to the campaign of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance after he declined to file sexual assault charges against the producer. Given the number of stories that have circulated for so long, Weinstein must have spread millions around New York, Los Angeles, and Europe to pay off lawyers and buy silence, including the silence of his victims. But he had something else going for him, too. He knew his victims would be reluctant to go public because it might suggest that some of their success, their fame even, was a function of their inability to protect themselves from being humiliated by a man who set the bar for humiliating others at the precise level of his own self-loathing.

Hollywood is full of connoisseurs like Weinstein, men whose erotic imaginations are fueled primarily by humiliation, who glut their sensibilities with the most exquisite refinements of shame. A journalist once told me about visiting another very famous Hollywood producer—you’d know the name—who exhibited for my friend his collection of photographs of famous female actresses—you’d know their names, too—performing sexual acts for his private viewing. As with Weinstein, this man’s chief thrill was humiliation, and the more famous the target the more roundly it was savored: Even her, a big star—these people will do anything to land a role; they’re so awful, they’ll even do it for me.

One of the refrains you hear today from media experts and journalists is that they’d known about Weinstein’s transgressions for a long time. The problem, they say, was that no one was able to nail down the story.

Nonsense. Everyone had it, not just Waxman. Sure, reporters hadn’t been able to get any stars to go on the record. But that means the story journalists were pursuing wasn’t really about Weinstein’s sexual depredations. It means that what they wanted was a story about actresses, junior executives, or assistants who had been humiliated, maybe raped, and chose to remain quiet in exchange for money and/or a shot at fame.

Of course no one was going to get that on the record—very few journalists would even want to publish a story like that. But journalists always had the actual story of how a Hollywood producer humiliated and sexually assaulted women. How? Because he victimized journalists.

Fox News reporter Lauren Sivan told Huffington Post that a decade ago, Weinstein masturbated in front of her. She says she didn’t say anything at the time, when she was an anchor on a local cable show, because she was “fearful of the power that Weinstein wielded in the media.” She was right and her fear was understandable.

Writing in New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister remembers the time when she asked Weinstein an interview question at a book party, he screamed at her, spit in her face, called her a “c—t,” and then put her boyfriend in a headlock and dragged him to the street. Traister said nothing at the time because she figured she had little chance against “that kind of force.”