IT LOST LEGITIMACY THROUGH OVERREACH: #MeToo movement starts to fade, men ‘desensitized to the issue.’

Overall, 62 percent of adults believe sexual harassment is a “major problem.” That is down from 69 percent in 2017.

Among men, 53 percent see it as a major problem, down from 66 percent in October 2017.

For women, 70 percent call it a major problem, down from 73 percent in 2017.

While still in the minority, more also see that “people in the workplace are too sensitive” to the issue, said Gallup.

For men, 45 percent said people are “too sensitive,” while 46 percent said they aren’t “sensitive enough.” At the height of the movement, 54 percent said people were “not sensitive enough,” versus 33 percent who felt people were “too sensitive.”

I predict that the chief long-term consequence of #MeToo will be less mentoring of female employees by male supervisors.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF HOLLYWOOD INTERRUPTED AND THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: A Nation of Felicity Huffmans.

The latest elite-college admissions scandal rests on a foundation of pure silliness; as Jim Geraghty writes, people with rich, famous, well-connected parents are the ones who least need the imprimatur of a famous college to speed them through life. Yet these same people are the ones with the means to indulge the status obsession that plagues most of us. Let’s not think of Felicity Huffman et al. as unusual: Everybody with the means to steer their kids into top-drawer colleges is thinking about how to game the system. This is because an elite-college degree isn’t an instrument or a tool; it doesn’t have to lead to anything. It’s a status symbol in itself. Yale is Louis Vuitton is Piaget is Mercedes.

* * * * * * * *

Somehow those of us who don’t own an Audemars watch or a Birkin handbag manage to muck on without them, and we don’t fret about whether our children will someday own one. Few of us have a hole in our soul because we don’t own the fanciest car in town. Because we realize worship of material goods is beneath us. Diploma worship ought to be equally so.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is about to toss another star down the memory hole: Let’s face it — Lori Loughlin has committed career suicide.

Make no mistake: however this turns out, it’s an enormous blow — on the public relations front, emotionally and (bottom-line) financially — to Hallmark, a network that prides itself on fluffy, family-friendly programming, which it sells (very successfully) to advertisers buying onto their bland, greeting-card world of handsome architects, city women fleeing back to their hometowns and finding true love or innumerable sappy Christmas movies. (Loughlin starred in “Homegrown Christmas” in 2018). It’s a world in which crime hardly exists, or if it does, is never very serious — as in Loughlin’s “Garage Sale Mystery” movies, in which she plays antiques-dealer-turned-sleuth Jennifer Shannon. She’s made 15 of these “Murder, She Wrote”-type movies so far (they air on Hallmark Movies & Mystery) and several are in pre-production.

All of Loughlin’s movies have proven very popular and generated hefty cable viewership (on both networks) for Hallmark Channel. That, in turn, translates to advertising dollars. And when any business feels its financial health threatened, it takes action and cuts bait.

Loughlin’s career is sunk. Deal with it.

Ed Morrissey spots “Fellow celebrities, late-night comics tee[ing] off on Huffman, Loughlin college-admission corruption.” It’s bipartisan scorn:

Earlier this morning, I guest-hosted for Hugh Hewitt — and for three hours, this was the story listeners wanted to discuss. We had callers in almost every segment, even if we couldn’t get to them. The disgust and scorn for everyone involved in this scheme, but especially for the celebrities, was palpable. This crosses partisan lines, regions, and all other demographics in its bald affront to fair play. These families had all of the advantages possible and still committed fraud to game the system. It’s a story practically built for ridicule and satire.

Between Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, Michael Jackon, Jussie Smollett and now this, our “Progressive” betters in Hollywood have sure been covering themselves in glory over the past years.

MICHAEL JACKSON’S ERASURE FROM HISTORY BEGINS:

James L. Brooks, co-creator of The Simpsons, says that the 1991 episode guest-starring Michael Jackson is being yanked, permanently.“It feels clearly the only choice to make,” Brooks told the Wall Street Journal. “The guys I work with—where we spend our lives arguing over jokes—were of one mind on this,” he added.

* * * * * * * *

Brooks says the episode in question will be removed from all platforms including DVD sets and streaming services. “I’m against book burning of any kind. But this is our book, and we’re allowed to take out a chapter,” he told the Journal.

But tossing his episode down the memory hole is in itself is a form of book burning. Should Michael Jackson have appeared on the Simpsons? In retrospect, of course not. But the assumption that 21st century audiences can’t handle knowing that he once did seems beneath a series that once — a long time ago — contained some of Hollywood’s smartest comedy writing. (When does Apu start getting spliced out?)

Pop culture of the past exists in part as an unintentional time machine, showing us how its creators viewed the world at that time. We laugh at the stilted acting and $1.99 production design of Jack Webb’s 1960s version of Dragnet, but millions of mid-‘60s Americans shared Webb’s views on narcotics and crumbling social mores. The original Star Trek had at least one episode that can be viewed as grudgingly defending the Vietnam War, and its (very silly) final episode was premised on the sexist notion that even in the 23rd century, women won’t be allowed to command a starship. M*A*S*H’s first three seasons were awash with sexism – and contained the series’ funniest writing. What about Archie Bunker’s racism? Will network execs give 21st century audiences the benefit of the doubt that they can figure out that Bunker was a parody, not a role model?

As I warned a year ago, when the #MeToo crowd started looking askance at Hollywood’s sex-obsessed 1970s sitcoms, I Felt a Grave Disturbance In The Force, As If Millions Of Sitcoms Suddenly Cried Out In Terror And Were Suddenly Silenced.

“I WON’T LISTEN TO MICHAEL JACKSON’S MUSIC ANYMORE. BUT I’LL STILL WATCH WOODY ALLEN’S MOVIES. HERE’S WHY.” A presumably left-leaning media critic at The Week named Jeva Lange justifies her entertainment choices:

To summarily dismiss “Woody Allen films” because Allen himself is accused of despicable behavior is to also inadvertently write off the symphonic city shots of Gordon Willis in Manhattan, the zany costumes designed by Ruth Morley for Annie Hall, or the underrated Ingrid Bergman-esque performance by Geraldine Page in Interiors. Perhaps you believe that one bad apple spoils the barrel; I would strongly caution that this dismissal often brushes off the contributions particularly of women, whose incredible work is all too frequently in non-directorial positions. To never watch Polanski’s Chinatown or Rosemary’s Baby is to erase, likewise, some of the best work of costume designer Anthea Sylbert, or performances by Faye Dunaway and Mia Farrow.

Music, though, is neater than the messy collaborative efforts of filmmaking. Although creating an album is indisputably also a group effort — think of Quincy Jones’ work producing Thriller — music is generally a much more individual effort than filmmaking, and especially so in the case of a solo artist like Jackson. While I regret not being able to appreciate Jones’ work on Thriller by cutting it out of my life, I am lying to myself if I claim it is not Jackson’s voice that I am actually enjoying when I listen to the album. Filmmaking, by its very nature, is much more ambiguous.

Separate and apart from continuing to listening to his music, I’m not at all sure that this is an appropriate analogy, at least for Jackson. A band like Led Zeppelin (whose surviving members must be absolutely thanking their lucky stars in today’s #metoo era that they achieved superstardom before social media) was remarkably self-contained, with in-house songwriters, an in-house producer (Jimmy Page) and arranger (John Paul Jones), and used outside session musicians very infrequently, mostly to add strings to sweeten a handful of their more epic songs.

But Jackson’s records — particularly Thriller — were the audio equivalents of the same sort of film productions that Lange mentions above. That album took nearly six months to record, about the same length of time it takes Allen to write, shoot and supervise the editing of a film. Jackson is credited with writing the music and lyrics on only four of the album’s 13 songs, and “writing the music” simply means he supplied at least top line melody and chord changes. The album’s credits boast not just Quincy Jones as producer (and veteran engineer Bruce Swedien as engineer, mixer, and Jones’ second set of ears), plus a roster of first-call L.A. session musicians and arrangers. Wikipedia lists nearly 50 of them appearing on Thriller. Lange’s comments dismissing their contributions is reminiscent of a scene early on in the 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a film that explored the vital contributions of the Funk Brothers, Motown’s house band, whose members played (in various combinations) on virtually every song Motown recorded in the 1960s. But prior to that movie’s release, the public at large had no idea the Funk Brothers even existed:

As for Woody Allen, I can’t fault anyone for enjoying what Allen himself, in his grousing 1980 film Stardust Memories dubbed his “earlier, funnier movies.” Regarding the incident that permanently transformed his audience’s perception of Allen (well, what was left of that audience, after Allen blew up his own domestic career with Stardust Memories), as Rod Dreher quipped yesterday, in a post titled, “The Bonfire Of Michael Jackson,” “Allen made it easy to quit watching his movies after his creepy Soon-Yi affair became public. Why? He stopped making good movies. Still, even when I go back and watch his old good ones, I can’t get out of my head what he did. It took all the joy out of Manhattan for me. This wasn’t so much a moral decision as it was one of involuntary disgust.”

Exit question from Dreher: “About Jackson, what are the rest of you going to do? Keep listening to him? Swear off of him? Not sure? Whatever your choice, please explain your reasoning.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Democratic Virginia Scandals Evaporate from ABC, CBS, NBC.

Flashback: “Jim Geraghty of NRO estimated that in 2006, the Washington Post ran ‘approximately 100 articles, op-eds, [and] editorials’ spotlighting Republican George Allen’s moronic ‘macaca’ gaffe involving his botched effort at calling out a mohawk-wearing video tagger hired by his opponent, Democrat Jim Webb, to stalk the Allen campaign,” and then repeated the same playbook (this time unsuccessfully) three years later when Republican Bob McDonnell ran for the governship of Virginia.

As for the Virginia Democrats’ current racism and #metoo-related scandals being tossed down the memory hole, just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

M. CATHARINE EVANS: The Virginia train wreck has set the stage for 2020.

Thanks to Virginia’s embroiled leaders, the Democrats have become not only the party of drugs, human-trafficking, open borders, MS-13, a Green New Deal, and socialism; they have now outed themselves as the Party of Infanticide, Racism, the KKK, Sexism (“F— the B—-“), and Rapists.

President Trump and the Republican Party should get a lot of mileage out of the Racist & Rapist party’s double standard. There’s little doubt among conservatives in Virginia and across the nation that if these were three Republican leaders simultaneously being accused of racism and rape, Antifa, MoveOn, Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, and #MeToo would be blocking traffic, threatening riots, and surrounding the capitol in Richmond until all three resigned.

In spite of the Democrats’ long history of getting away with everything, including murder (Ted Kennedy), the explosive and quickly moving chain of events in Virginia these past few weeks has made ignoring this political earthquake impossible for the media.

Yes, but… in recent years the media has largely taken a different tack on stories too big too ignore, but too damaging to their (D) friends:

• Coverage that’s as perfunctory as can be gotten away with

• Framed whenever possible as a (D)-said/(R)-said “controversy”

• In which “Republicans Pounce!”

• While applying no direct pressure on (D) for an investigation/resignation/etc

• And then when nothing like an investigation or resignation happens, present the story, if at all, as “old news.”

Oh, and one last thing. “Old news” is usually combined with “Republicans still obsessed with ‘old news’.”

It’s dirty work, but our media elites seem to thrive on it.

HYPOCRISY: Men run the news, 2 to 1, despite demands for diversity, equality everywhere else.

America’s big media, which has celebrated #MeToo, decried the lack of women in the Trump administration, and called for the recognition of female artists, appears to be run by a big boys club, according to a new newsroom survey.

The Women’s Media Center has just released its “Divided 2019: The Media Gender Gap,” and it found that the majority of news is produced by male journalists.

The key findings from the report:

69 percent of news wire bylines (AP and Reuters) are snagged by men, 31 percent by women — by far the biggest gender gap in news media.

63 percent of TV prime-time news broadcasts feature male anchors and correspondents; 37 percent feature women.

60 percent of online news is written by men; 40 percent by women.

59 percent of print news is written by men; 41 percent by women.

Across all media platforms, men receive 63 percent of bylines and credits; women receive only 37 percent.

In the print sector the widest gender gap was at USA Today, where 69 percent of articles were written by men and 31 percent by women.

Sad.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Another Side of #MeToo: Male Managers Fearful of Mentoring Women.

“The business case for women had been made,” Ms. Milligan said. “We were rocking it. And then #MeToo happened.”

Big deal. All men have to do is not be rapists, right? Uh, no:

One challenge is to assess the risk of sexual harassment in a company and to identify men who make women uncomfortable — or worse, harass them.

Uncomfortable. See it’s not men’s actions, but women’s feelings, that are in the driver’s seat. Shocking that men would want to limit their risk by limiting their exposure.

KYLE SMITH ON THE GREAT FORGETTING: Cultural Icons: Popular Today, Unknown Tomorrow.

These days, in a cultural sense, the only two pre-1960 singers who still linger in the memory are Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Bing Crosby, as Terry Teachout recently pointed out in Commentary, has more or less disappeared. A case could be made that, in addition to being one of his era’s most popular singers, Crosby is the single most popular movie star in Hollywood history. Certainly he is in the top ten. Today he survives in the memory of specialists and historians and suchlike boffins. To the broader populace, the words “Bing Crosby” no longer have meaning.

Looking back on his four decades as a movie critic, John Podhoretz points out that even if you go back only to the 1980s, hardly anything survives. People still talk about Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride (but not E.T., the biggest hit of the decade). Rain Man not only swept the Academy Awards in 1988 but was the biggest hit of that year, selling the equivalent of $380 million in tickets in today’s dollars. Bring up that movie in a classroom today and I suspect the reaction will be the same as if you brought up Mickey Rooney or Shirley Temple. Step forward, 1990s movies, and report to the vaporization facility. You’ve got a few years left, but only a few.

As the Who suit up for what I suppose will be their final tour (“Who’s Left”?), Chuck Klosterman points out in his book But What if We’re Wrong? that whole forms die out. He compares rock to 19th-century marching music: nothing left of the latter except John Philip Sousa. That’s it. And Sousa himself is barely remembered. In 100 years rock might be gone too, Klosterman guesses. Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century. As for the novels of the second half of the 20th century, the clock is ticking on them. The Catcher in the Rye is moribund. Generation X was the last to revere that book. Teaching it to young people today would get you ridiculed. To Kill a Mockingbird? It had a good run but it’s now being labeled a “white savior” story by the grandchildren of those who revered it. Soon schools and teachers will be shunning it.

Speaking of The Catcher in the Rye, as Cathy Young noted last week at Quillette, “The Posthumous #MeToo-ing of J. D. Salinger,” is helping to dramatically speed up his once universally known novel’s memory holing, despite this being the 100th birthday of its author.

THE INSTA-WIFE: The Gillette Ad: The War on Men Is a War on Trump. Just like #MeToo was, though that kinda backfired.

INTERESTING: Republican Women Have Grown Much More Hostile To #MeToo. “They have gone from barely worrying about false accusations of sexual assault, with only 8% agreeing in November 2017 that these were worse than unreported assaults, to 42% saying so, according to two polls conducted for The Economist by YouGov, a pollster. They are now the most likely group to agree that a man who harassed a woman 20 years ago should keep his job, and that a woman who complains about harassment causes more problems than she solves.”

#METOO FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE: Terry Crews on lack of support after sexual assault reveal.

SCHIZOPHRENIC HOLLYWOOD: Enough Already. The Golden Globes Should Just Host a ‘Naked’ Show Next Year:

I guess the #MeToo movement has turned into #THOTSrUs. Do they want to be ogled and sexualized now? I can’t keep up. Here’s Taylor Swift, the queen of being offended when someone reaches out and grabs what she has nakedly on display.

I thought this sort of thing was banned in Mike Pence’s America.

UPDATE: Golden Globes: Anti-Gun Hollywood Surrounded By Security Walls and Armed Guards.

LOUIS CK’S POLITICALLY INCORRECT COMEDY DIDN’T CHANGE. YOU DID:

You might not think this kind of humor is funny, and that’s fine. Moreover, you might think Louis C.K., who initiated sexual situations with unwilling women, is a creepy person who has lost the right to joke about uncomfortable subjects. That’s also fine. But it would be silly to pretend that Louis C.K. has undergone some sort of change or deliberate pivot. He’s just doing his same old shtick.

But many in the media have seized upon the idea that Louis C.K. has suddenly became a right-winger—that his new material is some dramatic departure from his pre-scandal days as a woke comedy icon. “Audio of a New Louis C.K. Set Has Leaked, and It’s Sickening,” warns Slate, striking the tone of a nun listening to Eminem for the first time. The Daily Beast accuses Louis C.K. of “pandering to the alt-right,” which is quite the broad categorization; the tons of people—New Yorkers, presumably—who can be heard laughing in the background of the leaked footage would probably be surprised to learn that they take their cues from Richard Spencer.

I can’t recall very many people on the left complaining that Louis C.K. was pandering to pedophiles when he joked about normalizing child rape so that rapists would be more likely to let their child victims live. On the contrary, GQ placed that joke on its list of the 10 best Louis C.K. skits, hailing him as the most transgressive and celebrated comedian “of his generation.”

Those who suddenly find themselves balking at Louis C.K.’s edgy material should admit that the comedian didn’t really change. They did.

As Richard Fernandez has said, the torpedoes the left fired into the water to get Trump keep circling back on them. To the point where the left have become the far right Moral Majority of the late 1970s. Or as Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in a piece titled “Hugh Hefner, Gangsta Rap & The Emerging Moral Majority,” after Hef entered his “After Dark” mode permanently in September of 2017, on the eve of Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K.’s fall from grace, and the concurrent dawn of the #MeToo era, “Moral concerns pop up one decade in right-wing clothes, and, in the next, change into another outfit.”

“WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD MEN STOP MENTORING WOMEN POST #METOO?”:  Yes, I am five months late in posting this, but it’s remarkable how naive the writer is.

AS I SAID, THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON: With the ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ Uproar, Islam and #MeToo Intersect.

#METOO PROBLEM: Sacramento Bee Editorial Board to Kamala Harris: You Should Have Known Better. “There are only a few possible interpretations here, and they are unpleasant. Wallace wasn’t out on the periphery of Harris’ staff; he was a senior aide she knew for 14 years — hardly a stranger. For Harris to flatly deny any knowledge of this settlement seems, shall we say, far-fetched. For the moment, let’s take her at her word. A second and equally troubling interpretation is that Harris isn’t a terribly good manager, and that her staff was insulating her from information critical to the performance of her duties. This is hardly a propitious beginning to a presidential candidacy.”

#METOO: Grassley wants answers about FBI raid on whistleblower with information on Clinton Foundation, Uranium One.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Wall Street Rule for the #MeToo Era: Avoid Women at All Cost. “Now, more than a year into the #MeToo movement — with its devastating revelations of harassment and abuse in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and beyond — Wall Street risks becoming more of a boy’s club, rather than less of one.”

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON GETS THE #METOO TREATMENT: Two More Women Accuse Neil deGrasse Tyson of Sexual Misconduct.

And since I didn’t link yesterday: This New Les Moonves Accusation Changes Everything.

Beginning with first Roger Ailes in July of 2016, and then Harvey Weinstein in October of the following year, the media has been flooded with similar headlines regarding powerful men in showbiz, the news, and politics, culminating in the efforts last month to entirely upend Brett Kavanaugh’s life in a (fortunately failed) attempt to keep him off a Supreme Court seat. Add to all of the above toxic identity politics, which gave us the phrase “male privilege.” And then media scratches their brows and runs headlines such as this item at Time in late October, “Why Are We All Having So Little Sex?,” and a similar one at the Atlantic last week, “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?”

It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, as the man who was the bête noire of both national socialists and modern international socialists would say.

Or to put it another way: The Sexual Revolution Is Over.

NOAH ROTHMAN: The Social-Justice Injustice. “What Brett Kavanaugh’s trial by fire was really all about.”

For the social-justice left, Brett Kavanaugh represented a dominant demographic group, and he was therefore due a comeuppance for that reason alone. To those for whom Kavanaugh’s guilt was a foregone conclusion, not only was the presumption of innocence an overly charitable dispensation; so, too, was the notion that he should be allowed to defend himself. At the very least, his most fervent critics appeared to suggest, Kavanaugh should have had the decency to let the allegations against him stand, as a courtesy to his accuser and those like her.

To Quartz’s Ephrat Livni, Kavanaugh wasn’t entitled to “any process” whatsoever. Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution argued that “Kavanaugh cannot blame or attack or seek to discredit a woman who purports to have suffered a sexual-assault at his hands.” If he did, he’d be no better than Harvey Weinstein, smearing his victims in a final, flailing effort to save himself. Yahoo’s Matt Bai said Kavanaugh “makes a victim of [Ford] all over again by essentially calling her delusional.” As a service to the #MeToo moment’s reckoning with the abusive men hiding in plain sight, Bai suggested that Kavanaugh should at least allow for the possibility that he was guilty of a sex crime. Bai even drafted a confession for the judge.

Plus: “This is nothing less than an assault on the rule of law, which is based on the proposition that we judge allegations of malfeasance on a case-by-case basis according to the facts alone.”

Well, yes. But mob rule is always the goal of power-seekers skilled at whipping up mobs.

WHY ARE MILLENNIALS HAVING SO LITTLE SEX? THIS COULD BE A REASON: “He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.”

Plus: #MeToo, women hardest hit: “The 2017 iteration of Match.com’s Singles in America survey (co-led by Helen Fisher and the Kinsey Institute’s Justin Garcia) found that single Millennials were 66 percent less likely than members of older generations to enjoy receiving oral sex. Which doesn’t bode particularly well for female pleasure: Among partnered sex acts, cunnilingus is one of the surest ways for women to have orgasms.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: Men afraid to mentor young female lawyers, solicitor chief claims. “Senior male partners at law firms are refusing to mentor younger women because of fears that unjustified allegations will be made against them, the head of the profession claims. There has been an unanticipated and unwanted backlash caused by the #MeToo movement, Christina Blacklaws, president of the Law Society, argued last week. Ms Blacklaws told a conference on gender diversity that senior men were reluctant to engage in formal mentoring schemes with younger female colleagues for fear they might leave themselves open to allegations of inappropriate behaviour.”

Unanticipated and unwanted.

CAMILLE PAGLIA ON #METOO: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World.

What I see spreading among professional middle-class women is a bitter resentment toward men that is in many cases unjust and misplaced. With divorce so easy since the sexual revolution, women find themselves competing with younger women in new and cruel ways. Agrarian women gained power as they aged: young women were brainless pawns whose marriages, pregnancies, childcare, cooking, and other chores were acerbically supervised and controlled by the dictatorial crones (forces of nature whom I fondly remember from childhood).

In short, #MeToo from a historical perspective is a cri de coeur from women who are realizing that the sexual revolution that many of us had once ecstatically embraced has in key ways devalued women, confused their private relationships, and complicated their smooth functioning in the workplace. It’s time for a new map of the gender world.

It’s Camille Paglia, so read the whole thing.

HOW JIM ACOSTA KILLED #METOO: “This is an important cultural moment. There is now a comic meme about being physically violent to a woman. Notice how it’s upping the violence that makes it funnier and funnier.”

CHANGE: Under Armour’s #MeToo Moment: No More Strip Clubs on Company Dime.

JAMES BOVARD: We Need a #MeToo Movement for Political Consent.

ALL THOSE #METOO TORPEDOES THEY PUT IN THE WATER FOR TRUMP KEEP CIRCLING AROUND ON THEM: No One Wants to Campaign With Bill Clinton Anymore. “In an election shaped by the #MeToo movement, where female candidates and voters are likely to drive any Democratic gains, Mr. Clinton finds his legacy tarnished by what some in the party see as his inability to reckon with his sexual indiscretions as president with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, as well as with past allegations of sexual assault. . . . Rebecca Kirszner Katz, a veteran Democratic strategist, says many Democrats have reassessed the party’s support for Clinton’s behavior in light of changing views about women, power and sexual misconduct.”

SCOTT GREENFIELD: The Angry Mob Within Google. “All of which presents an interesting dilemma as the early tech companies fueled by geeky excess and impropriety find themselves operating in the moment of #MeToo and hurt feelings: spewing the rhetoric of emotional well-being of its sensitive employees is easy, but when it comes at the cost of spurning the profitability of someone who created Android, even Google has to make a judgment call. If they want the technology, and the money it brings, from people who fail to meet the current standards of sexual propriety, or at least are believed to fail, are they prepared to put feelings over profit? What’s a business, even one as fabulously successful as Google, to do these days?”

Breaking these behemoths up would make these decisions less consequential.

RHYAN DOXEY: #MeToo movement, we need to talk. Sincerely, a survivor.

MEGYN KELLY IS BEING FIRED BECAUSE SHE SHONE TOO MUCH LIGHT ON NBC’S #METOO PROBLEM:

But most damningly, Kelly has made it clear that she will not welcome back abusers. When asked about Matt Lauer, NBC’s lovely, $20 million anchor who had a door lock on his desk to more easily prey on female subordinates, Kelly minced as few words as she could without condemning her employers for their complicity in Lauer’s persistent harassment.

“I know too much that others don’t know,” Kelly said when asked about the allegation. Kelly interviewed his accusers on her morning show, sending a public warning shot not just to Lauer, but to his many remaining NBC loyalists, that a remorseful comeback would not be tolerated.

Hollywood gossip giants have known of the tension between Kelly and NBC News chairman Andy Lack due to her reporting for half a year. But beware of the all-too convenient narrative that Kelly’s demise would come from a since-rectified gaffe. NBC knew they bought an anchor used to Fox News prime time rather than the ease of morning shows. But Kelly also fought a president and a prime-time guru. No doubt Andy Lack underestimated her potential to doggedly cover her own company’s malpractice.

Gentlemen (and ladies), you can’t do journalism here — this is NBC News!

BOLD: Super PAC’s ‘Lynching’ Ad in Arkansas Congressional Race Claims #MeToo Is Dangerous to Black Men.

UNLESS THEY’RE ACCUSING CORY BOOKER, ANYWAY: Men Need To Share Their #MeToo Stories Too.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “If the Blue Wave collapses before it hits shore, Democrats may need to ask whether #MeToo and other forms of identity politics are really the wave of the Democratic future.”

Democrats have been waiting for that wave to crest for a long time, at least since the 2002 publication of “The Emerging Democratic Majority” by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. That book’s modest thesis suggested that demographic trends would increase traditional Democratic constituencies while slowly shrinking the GOP’s base, as long as Democrats could find a way to hold their then-current coalition together.

By 2016, many saw that as prophecy: All they needed to do was wait for the GOP’s atavistic denizens to die off, leaving the country to those on the right side of history.

Yet salvation keeps failing to arrive.

Yeah that “emerging Democratic majority” stuff was the best disinformation op ever.

#METOO: Judge denies Ellison’s petition to keep divorce file sealed and redact ‘sensitive’ information.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Alec Baldwin: We Need To Overthrow The Government. And note this detail:

Fresh off his first appearance of the season as President Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” actor Alec Baldwin headlined the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s inaugural Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner Sunday night at the Manchester Downtown Hotel.

* * * * * * * *

Sunday’s event was previously known as the “Jefferson-Jackson Dinner” before being switched in 2016 to the “Kennedy-Clinton Dinner.” The national controversy over sexual harassment fueled by the “#MeToo” movement earlier this year prompted the name change.

(Via Byron York.)

IT’S WRONG TO LIE: #MeToo setback: Austrian politician convicted of libel for accusing man of sexual harassment on Facebook.

A #METOO PROBLEM FOR NEW JERSEY’S DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR: “Gov. Phil Murphy, seen in this file photo, has yet to answer questions about a former official who worked on his campaign and his administration and who has been accused of sexual assault.” And who was kept on for months after the accuser was promised he’d be fired.

Journalists everywhere: “#MeToo? What’s that?”

OLD AND BUSTED: #BELIEVEALLWOMEN.

The New Hotness? Hillary Clinton: Bill should “absolutely not” have resigned over Lewinsky scandal.

Robyn Urback of the CBC writes that Bill Clinton is massively overdue for a #MeToo reckoning.

But today is not that day, Hillary “Aragorn” Clinton shouts. As Amanda Carpenter tweets, “Hearing Hillary defend Bill’s affair with Monica is a 2018 plot twist I did not expect.”

#METOO GOES FULL EMMET TILL: White woman calls cops on black child she says touched her butt.

LEFTY WOMEN SHOCKED TO ENCOUNTER LIBERAL MEN who are tired of angry #MeToo feminism. “I’m frustrated and embarrassed, my boyfriend of three years said to me, with how worked up you are.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: H’Wood’s Silence on Clintons Final #MeToo Straw.

DAVE CHAPPELLE ON #METOO: ‘I Wish They Would Speak to Black Women More.’

A MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Campus mob that attacked ‘Confirm Kavanaugh’ group may face punishment.

Earlier this week a mob of students, enraged by a pro-Brett Kavanaugh tabling effort at the University of Texas at Austin put together by its Young Conservatives of Texas chapter, encircled and yelled at its members while chanting obscenities. Several students were also filmed grabbing the young conservatives’ signs out of their hands and ripping them up.

One student told the conservatives if they did not want their signs ripped up they should not have written such offensive things. The signs stated phrases such as “#MeToo gone #TooFar,” “KavaNotGuilty” and “No Campus Kangaroo Courts in Congress.”

In the wake of that melee, campus authorities are reviewing the incident, UT Austin spokesman J.B. Bird told The College Fix.

“Because of federal privacy law, the university does not talk about specific student discipline cases,” he said. “Damaging another person’s sign is a violation of university rules. The Dean of Students has reached out to students involved to determine appropriate action. University Police are also reviewing potential criminal violations.”

Meanwhile, members of Young Conservatives of Texas have had their names, phone numbers, places of work and personal social media accounts published by an activist group that describes itself as “anti-oppressive, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist.”

This is a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights.

Plus, from one of the conservative students: At the end of the day, we’ve let the campus descend into this level of far-left madness because conservatives have ignored it, but through actions like what we did today we embolden people to stand up for what they believe in.” Yes. End the culture of leftist impunity.

MAYBE TRUMP REALLY IS PLAYING 6-DIMENSIONAL CHESS. So there’s this:

And there’s the strangely assertive Lindsey Graham 2.0:

And it makes me think about what Trump’s game was. I would have rather he picked one of the more libertarian members of his list: Willett, or maybe Kethledge. And because some sort of trumped-up #MeToo thing was almost certain, a lot of people thought he should have picked Amy Coney Barrett. Kavanaugh was a fine, safe pick, but kinda milquetoasty DC Establishment for my taste.

But that was the reason to pick him. Trump knew he’d been vetted enough that there would be no real skeletons, and he no doubt expected that the Democrats would be so desperate they’d invent some. They would have done that with anyone he put up — but, precisely because Kavanaugh was a milquetoasty DC Establishment type, seeing the Democrats go into full batshit assault mode on him galvanized the other milquetoasty DC Establishment types. You could see the lightbulbs go off in their heads: The Democrats don’t hate Trump because he’s Trump. They hate all Republicans and want to ruin them. Even me! And they always will.

The result is that the Kavanaugh affair has welded the Trump and NeverTrump forces (except for a few sad outliers who don’t matter) into a solid force. And it’s simultaneously galvanized GOP voters around the country, closing the “enthusiasm gap,” as the normals become more militant. Plus, it seems that minority voters aren’t as excited about empowering neurotic upper-class white feminists as you might — well, actually, I guess they’re just about exactly as excited about empowering neurotic upper-class white feminists as you might expect, but it seems Dems didn’t give that much thought. So Kavanaugh was, in fact, the perfect pick to trigger this reaction.

I’m reminded of the scene in Absence of Malice where Wilford Brimley asks Paul Newman, who has cleverly set a trap that the press and the rogue DOJ guy fall into, “Are you that smart?”

I mentioned this analysis to the Insta-Wife, a Trump fan who has followed him closely since the 1980s and her comment was, “Of course.”

UPDATE:

MORE: Seen on Facebook: “‘You’ll get tired of winning.’ Yet another failed prediction from Drumpf.”

#METOO AUTOPHAGY UPDATE: Asia Argento files police report accusing Rose McGowan’s partner Rain Dove of ‘deception’ for obtaining texts about her underage sex with Jimmy Bennett.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Campus mob enraged by ‘Confirm Kavanaugh’ display (VIDEO).

Signs ripped up in anger. Chants of “we believe survivors.” Furious finger pointing.

A large group of students became enraged Tuesday afternoon by a pro-Brett Kavanaugh tabling effort at the University of Texas at Austin put together by its Young Conservatives of Texas chapter. A crowd of furious students encircled the group and yelled at its members while chanting obscenities and destroying their signs.

The conservative group had decided to set up a “Confirm Kavanaugh” display in an effort to show support for the embattled U.S. Supreme Court judge nominee and argue for the need for corroborating evidence, said student Anthony Dolcefino, vice chairman of the group.

They drew up signs stating phrases such as “#MeToo gone #TooFar,” “KavaNotGuilty” and “No Campus Kangaroo Courts in Congress.” They also put up a “Change My Mind” sign, a call to debate peers.

“We did want people to talk to us, but unfortunately it’s hard to do that when you have an angry mob ripping our signs and screaming in our faces,” Dolcefino told The College Fix in a telephone interview Tuesday.

The lefty privilege on display here is disgraceful. They know they won’t be punished, because they know administrators share their political views. Outside powers like the Justice Department, the Department of Education, and the Texas legislature need to force a degree of responsibility here.

CAUGHT IN THE #METOO UNDERTOW? Bredesen Brags of ‘Zero Tolerance’ Harassment Policy as Tennessee Governor: All reporting indicates major issues with Bredesen’s handling of abuse claims.

Bredesen, who was Tennessee’s governor from 2003 to 2011 and is now running for U.S. Senate, defended himself from criticism from Republican opponent Marsha Blackburn for his handling of harassment claims as governor.

“Both as mayor and governor, I had a zero tolerance policy with any kind of harassment of women,” Bredesen said. “Whenever this has happened in my purview it’s been something I’ve come down on very, very hard.”

Bredesen’s claim during the event flies in the face of reported facts during his tenure as governor, when reporters caught his administration covering up details of sexual harassment allegations and helping the accused land jobs elsewhere.

Most egregious in the findings was the Bredesen administration’s practice of shredding documentation of the accusations, which was found by both The Tennessean and the Associated Press to be done only when the accused were high-profile members of the administration.

The most public case came with Mack Cooper, who was Bredesen’s top lobbyist in the governor’s office before he was fired for violating the state’s workplace harassment policy. All the details of Cooper’s offense were shredded.

Bredesen insisted the decision to shred documents wasn’t part of a “cover up,” but acknowledged he had no way of proving that. He eventually ordered his administration to put an end to its practice of shredding documentation in harassment cases.

Bredesen also appeared to push back against a comment he made regarding sexual harassment in 2005 when he said, “Anytime you mix men and women together in a work environment there’s going to be issues.”

As an old white guy running against a woman, he’s going to have to deal with this.

#METOO:

NETS SKIP RANK HYPOCRISY OF WEINSTEIN PAL MATT DAMON PORTRAYING ‘FRAT BOY’ KAVANAUGH ON SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.

In addition to Damon admitting that he’d fight any accusations these days tooth and nail himself:

In December 2017, Damon appeared on ABC’s “Popcorn” with Peter Travers and explained that in the years before the #MeToo movement, false allegations were often settled monetarily. But after the fall of Harvey Weinstein, all that changed.

“If you make the same claim to me today,” he said, “it would be scorched-earth. I don’t care if it would cost me $10 million in court for 10 years, you are not taking my name from me, you are not taking my name and reputation from me, I’ve worked too hard for it, I’ve earned it, you can’t just blow me up like that.”

Back in July, USA Today columnist Hannah Yasharoff asked, “In the era of #MeToo, is it still OK to laugh at ‘Animal House’?”, which starred SNL’s John Belushi:

National Lampoon’s raunchy frat house comedy “Animal House,” which celebrates its 40th anniversary Saturday, is widely regarded as an all-time great movie. But four decades later, it feels less like a comedy classic and more like a toxic showcase of racism, homophobia and jokes about sexual assault.

While parts of the film are still genuinely funny and enjoyable in 2018, the crueler moments beg the question: In the era of #MeToo, is it still OK to enjoy “Animal House”?

(As Jim Treacher responded at the time, “My goodness. Whatever you do, don’t show this young lady Porky’s.”)

In his column yesterday, Ross Douthat wrote, “The Year of Our Lord 1982, upon whose disputed summertime events a Supreme Court nomination now hinges, was part of the Reagan era but not a particularly conservative year:”

Most contemporary discourse about the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s imagines a consistent “left” that created those revolutions and a consistent “right” that opposed them. But glancing back to the debauched world of 1982 suggests a rather different take, one that clarifies what happened to American politics in the age of Bill Clinton and what’s happening now in the age of Donald Trump.

The world of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford’s youth, the world that’s given us this fall’s nightmarish escalation of the culture war, was not a traditionalist world as yet unreformed by an enlightened liberalism. It also wasn’t a post-revolutionary world ruled by social liberalism as we know it today. Rather it was a world where a social revolution had ripped through American culture and radically de-moralized society, tearing down the old structures of suburban bourgeois Christian morality, replacing them with libertinism. With “if it feels good, do it” and the Playboy philosophy. With “Fear of Flying” for women and “Risky Business” and “Porky’s” for the boys. With drunken teenage parties in the suburbs and hard-core pornography in Times Square.

Which means that the culture war as we’ve known it since has not been a simple clash of conservatives who want to repress and liberals who want to emancipate. Rather it’s been an ongoing argument between two forces — feminists and religious conservatives — that both want to remoralize American society, albeit in very different ways.

Additionally, when the Harvey Weinstein story broke right around this time last year, as with NBC News’ efforts to block Ronan Farrow’s reportage, very likely because they knew it could lead to stories about their own Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, and Chris Matthews surfacing, Saturday Night Live’s creator-producer Lorne Michaels told reporters that his show also wouldn’t touch the Weinstein story, dismissing it as merely “a New York thing.”

As John Hinderaker wrote last year at Power Line, political reporters and wire services love to recap SNL episodes, because it allows them to get their biases in print while still maintaining a thin veneer of objectivity.“‘Respectable’ news outlets like the AP can’t publish absurd comedy skits ripping President Trump, much as they might like to,” Hinderaker wrote. “But by covering Saturday Night Live, they turn such meaningless attacks into fake ‘news.’”

To borrow from Douthat’s phrase above, reading Jeff Weingrad and Doug Hill’s 1986 book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, it’s obvious that SNL impresario Michaels also wanted to remoralize American society. He certainly wanted to remoralize NBC’s formerly staid and morally conservative censors, fighting tooth and nail to coarsen the culture at NBC, and ultimately winning that battle, and on the big screen. The histories of SNL and the National Lampoon of the 1970s and early 1980s are heavily intertwined — Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner and original senior writer Michael O’Donoghue were all recruited by Michaels fresh from the Lampoon. After SNL made them superstars, Chase and Belushi would in turn go on to star in the Lampoon’s movies. So it makes sense that SNL would much prefer to have the media generating stories about its host mocking Kavanaugh, rather than risk a look back on its role in shaping the culture of the late ‘70s and ‘80s.

While the Kavanaugh hearings were going on this past Thursday, Dan McLaughlin of NRO tweeted that they “mark a milestone: this is the first true Gen X culture war moment in national politics, relitigating not the Boomers’ Days of Rage or Summer of Love but John Hughes [another Lampoon alumnus – Ed] movie tropes, drinking ages, yearbook quotes & Trapper Keeper day planners.”

If the left is going to take #metoo — let alone their charges against Kavanaugh — seriously, that would require a hard reassessment of SNL’s role in reshaping the culture of the period from 1975 to 1985 or so. I wonder how this aging NBC institution would look, afterwards. SNL’s attack on Kavanaugh was actually more of a defensive head fake, by yet another leftwing institution begging to be devoured by the mob last.

Related: Victor Davis Hanson’s Epitaph for a Dying Culture.