WELCOME TO THE BACKLASH TO THE BACKLASH: Academy members now regret banning Weinstein so hastily.
When Hollywood’s most prestigious organization, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) — the group of nearly 7,000 actors, directors and other industry types who dole out the Oscars — expelled Harvey Weinstein on Oct. 14, audiences applauded. But by acting so swiftly, a mere nine days after the New York Times first reported allegations of sexual assault against the movie producer, the outfit now finds itself facing a dilemma.
Put simply: What to do with the rest of them?
“Harvey opened the floodgates,” said one male Academy member. “Now the Academy’s drowning in a tide of s—t. They don’t know what hit them.”
As Twitchy notes, “They’re not worried about the fact that Hollywood is full of sexual offenders, they’re worried about what will happen to the Academy.” Why is Democrat-dominated Hollywood such a cesspit of abuse and misogyny?
But note that this is of a trend, of the left having second thoughts on what Claire Berlinski dubbed the “Warlock hunt” they’ve ginned up:
● Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.
● Senator Al Franken’s Resignation Is Deeply Unfair.
Pervnado began in 2016 with the since-deceased Roger Ailes being toppled from Fox, followed eventually by Bill O’Reilly, and NBC leaking the Trump pussy-grabbing tape to the Washington Post. At the time, the left and the news media (but I repeat myself) were happy to sit back and pass the popcorn, because they assumed this was simply a rightwing issue, and it served them in 2016 as battlefield prep for Hillary.
But the firings of the Fox News icons created a template: In his twitter thread in October on Harvey Weinstein’s career demise, Brian Cates wrote, “What took out Ailes/O’Reilly was so many women coming forward at once. The usual playbook of legal threats/buying them off didn’t work. Watching Ailes & then O’Reilly being suddenly toppled, it COULD be some women in Hollywood realized there was hope.”
Couple that with the left’s “we’re all victims” mentality, and as Richard Fernandez says, the Democrats’ torpedoes aimed at Trump and Fox News have circled back, bigly. As Jonah Goldberg once wrote:
Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them. McCarthyism was a direct consequence of both the Red Scare and the Brown Scare. And when the tactics they mastered were turned on them, they acted as if they came from nowhere.
As Kurt Schlichter tried to warn them, the left don’t seem to be enjoying living under the new rules they created. Particularly when the tactics they’ve mastered end up devouring too many of their own, and those who are left are likely too powerful to airbrush out of history.
QED: Bill Clinton, still doing Democratic fundraisers.