Twenty seventeen is the year of the purge. After binging for decades on the biting, flat and blank cynicism from The Honeymooners in the Fifties and Saturday Night Live in the Seventies to Seinfeld, The Simpsons and South Park in the Nineties, Americans hardened after Black Tuesday (September 11, 2001) and split apart following the vacant, divisive presidency of Barack Obama. This year, it’s as though some Americans sought to purge America of its founding ideals and proudest practices.
While it is true that the nation’s founding principle, individual rights, has been under attack since the Industrial Revolution, and the U.S. has been coasting on its sense of life ever since, this year in review demonstrates signs that a certain segment of Americans showed real contempt for rights. Whether support for state-run bureaucracies and programs which violate rights such as the TSA, ObamaCare or NSA, or hostility for freedom of speech, property rights and capitalism, these Americans proved eager to violate rights. What once might have been opposition to breaching man’s rights — the Constitutional right to travel unmolested by the state, the right to choose one’s health care and the right to life which is the right to be left alone — turned to silence, submission and explicit sanction. This year saw the regression of the freedom of speech in the executive branch, which threatened to silence the press, and on college campuses.
After this year’s attack on a protest in Charlottesville, one of several assaults including Islamic terrorist attacks and citizen assaults on government officials, came the silence of self-suppression. As foreign and domestic murder of Americans worsens, so does rational discourse between them.
Leading the purge of ideas from political discourse, President Trump failed this year to grasp how to salvage what is left of capitalism, failing to engage Congress and Americans in debate, let alone repeal, over the debacle ObamaCare. Instead, Trump conspired to keep ObamaCare’s worst parts, failing to galvanize support for repeal of the worst law in recent U.S. history (read my post on rational reform). With a barrage of insults, outbursts and vulgarities, Trump — acting as ringmaster distracting people and the press with an abundance of sideshows — also purged decency from the White House.
As deficient a president as Trump is, despite any partial and/or accidental success he’s managed, Trump’s vice-president, conservative Mike Pence, is worse. Pence is a religionist of the Roy Moore ilk who, like Trump, fraudulently claims to be for capitalism when the opposite is true. For instance, he claimed as a congressman to support Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) while, in fact, he refused to support expanding HSAs when it mattered most and would have advanced rational health care reform. Vice-President Pence, who agrees with Roy Moore about persecuting gays, would replace Trump if necessary, even as Pence reportedly schemed in 2017 to purge from Trump’s administration any who doubt or question the authoritarian president. These two politicians — both made possible by today’s cynical welfare state collapsing into faith-based authoritarianism — and their mixed band of government interventionists, such as Steve Bannon, seek to purge facts from the press and the press from reporting on matters of state.
If Washington’s a swamp, Trump-Pence are Swamp Things. They want to drag, not drain, the filth out of the swamp and spread the muck all around.
Harvey Weinstein depicted as predatory clown from “It”.
But Trump-Pence can be (and have been) stopped from implementing some of their worst plans. Another 2017 trend, which ignited this fall, similarly seeks to purge reason and render in its place prejudice: today’s incessant jumping to purge the individual from a livelihood because one is accused of wrongdoing. Whether, in fact, the publicly maligned person is accused in the judiciary or is named via unconfirmed claims is, in this alarming approach, beside the point.
I first noticed the trend with the demise of a TV host I find deplorable, Bill O’Reilly, a conservative whose show on Fox News was awful but whose takedown, based on unsubstantiated claims, was troubling. Then, a left-wing movie businessman, Harvey Weinstein, was suddenly accused of outrageous claims in a frenzy of public shaming and mob action. These two men of wealth, success and power thanks to hard work on extremely enduring and popular enterprises, had something besides accusations of sexual impropriety and worse in common: they were targeted for exposure with intent.
By whom and by what means? To what end? Why? O’Reilly’s demise was more coordinated than Weinstein’s but both were purged in swift and serious campaigns. In a year in which foreign infiltration of media — specifically, social media, though other media have in the past proven corruptible, too — is known and admitted, these questions about the press (which I alluded to here) ought to be examined and resolved. If it is legitimate to ask why NBC News rejected a pitch to broadcast a hit piece on Harvey Weinstein, it is legitimate to ask why The New Yorker accepted the pitch and why the New York Times decided to publish an article without a news peg with unsubstantiated charges against Weinstein. The media now routinely speaks of accused persons in disparaging terms and presumes the accused as guilty by insinuation, mimicking the gossip press. Discerning consumers should ask why. Indeed, NBC News reports that one of the gossip media, an operation called BuzzFeed, recently received a tip from Trump operatives about a Democrat who now stands accused of sexual impropriety.
Is it possible that some, many or all the sex-related claims are part of a proxy war between operatives seeking to influence, disrupt and distract Americans — and, if so, why and to what purpose? — with the press as proxy?
In any case, even if every sex claim is true, and I am not asserting whether I think they are or are not true, when accusation is regarded as a matter of fact, we’re likely to get everything but the truth. Besides Weinstein and O’Reilly, accused producers, artists and businessmen include:
- George Takei
- Louis CK
- Richard Dreyfuss
- Charlie Sheen
- Ryan Seacrest
- Sylvester Stallone
- Kevin Spacey
- Jeremy Piven
- Brett Ratner
- Jeffrey Tambor
- James Toback
- Dustin Hoffman
- John Lasseter
This list of accused men is partial. Add to this list executives, directors and associated persons, agencies or companies branded as perverts or enablers, cast out and smeared, ruined or judged and, in any case, insidiously maligned, often without an opportunity to contemplate, let alone respond to, unsubstantiated charges against them.
Most of the men being swept into oblivion with their enterprises, endeavors, accounts, affiliates and partners are being maligned without the benefit of the doubt or closer scrutiny of allegations, many of which were posted on social media. Some of the men are on the left — David Corn, Russell Simmons, Charlie Rose, as well as persons at NPR and MSNBC. Some are on the right: the late Roger Ailes, who has since died, Bill O’Reilly and Eric Bolling, whose son was found dead within hours of his father’s termination from Fox News. Politicians also accused of sex crimes and impropriety such as Al Franken, John Conyers and Roy Moore, as current or aspiring government officials, ought to be held accountable to the people and taxpayers should not be forced to pay their settlements. But the people should decide elections based on political philosophy, not on rumor and lurid allegations.
The media magnifies the purge and prejudice which, in turn, ultimately harms the media. I think the issue of reporting unconfirmed claims is complicated by major changes in the media industry, changes caused or exacerbated by what I think is a disproportionate boom in technological advances which possibly would not have been brought to market in any but a mixed economy. This boom, in turn, may hasten the major shift in today’s media which, in turn, entices formerly and even currently credible sources, such as the Washington Post, to stop reporting essentially based on facts, the truth and what matters — such as nuclear, Islamic terrorist and domestic government control threats to America’s existence — and instead focus on sensational journalism equivocating on the truth of certain assertions.
The adage that if it bleeds, it leads, applies because sex claims against the famous get clicks and customers and, as actions pertaining to sex are denounced and regulated, the cycle spins faster.
Hollywood’s blackballing — sometimes, without as much as a workplace complaint — is driven, as I wrote here, by Puritanical tyrants allied to control people’s lives, from workplace conduct to moviegoing, through a belief system about sex — a set of sex commandments — which, in turn, becomes government control. As I wrote in the post about Weinstein, today’s priests and priestesses seeking sex commandments, ranging from an ex-beauty contestant and Fox News hostess to Hollywood’s most influential titans and institutions, propose rigid, new work rules and regulations concocted by college professors, activists and feminists prohibiting sex-related association, contracts and action.
Speaking of repressive religious regimes, nonstop coverage of unconfirmed sex claims obscures reporting on news that matters, such as Saudi Arabia purging itself of the closest such a dictatorship could have to freethinkers, such as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The now-imprisoned or detained prince’s wealth among many others’ has been confiscated by the fundamentalist Islamic state in a sweeping purge of what the dictatorship calls “corruption”, even as the kingdom claims it’s liberalizing dictates against women. The Trump administration — the president and his secretary of state participated in a Saudi Arabian sword ceremony this year in a distinctly un-American display — approves of the purge.
With Saudi Arabia in a proxy war with the world’s other Islamic totalitarian state, Iran, the Saudi purge, amid rising religious influence within the oil kingdom, further destabilizes the region and threatens the West. As historian John Lewis told me in our last interview, whichever Islamic dictatorship emerges from the war between these two jihadist states is an emboldened enemy of civilization; the victor, Dr. Lewis forewarned, poses a catastrophic threat to the United States.
Sen. John McCain infamously spoke at the turn of the century of a 100-year war against religious fundamentalists. Unfortunately, America is well into what appears to be a 100-year war for nothing, about nothing, accomplishing nothing but mass death of Americans — citizens and soldiers alike — as America appeases Islamic statism.
Neglecting the national defense and purging men from power based on sensationalized, unsubstantiated claims hastens America’s disintegration into an uninformed, distracted and unguarded nation in which every thought, expression and action is subject to the whims of a bureaucrat — leaving every American at the mercy of those who hate humanity, civilization and progress.
You see this moral submission to evil in the acceptance of mass death as a matter of course. You see this in every trending shooting, vehicular mowdown or stabbing. You see this in the subsequent lockdown, backslapping, praying and candlelighting and the calls for more of the same irrational laws, checkpoints and practices that fail to stop each attack. You see it in the people’s belief in a national leader, surveillance or other statism such as a transportation agency which fails 90 percent of the time, according to its own bureaucrats.
You see it, too, though, when there’s a car chase, a new wave of allegations or another presidential meltdown. Day by day, year by year, America is being purged of thoughtful discourse about what matters, sacrificing reason for gawking over, as against grappling with, unchecked half-truths. Jumping to conclusions to purge those in power comes at the expense of making judgments about defending the nation and achieving nothing less than victory.
The year’s greatest unsolved mystery — why Stephen Paddock opened fire on a musical concert in Las Vegas in an act of mass murder — is, in this sense, emblematic of the year 2017. The act got everyone’s attention for a few weeks. There were the knee-jerk expressions of belief, prayer and political commentary. Then, the unsolved mystery of why a mass murderer did what he did, including basic discrepancies in the timeline, faded into oblivion.
This evil, empty attack, apparently premeditated by Paddock simply to purge life on earth — including his own, reducing himself to zero as we’re told is the highest morality; selflessness — happened, passed and was, like ObamaCare, the surveillance state and the TSA, accepted as the new normal. Slaughter in Las Vegas was as forgotten as every other act of mass murder. In a year in which Americans showed greater outrage over unproven accusations than over unsolved motives for the mass murder of innocents, what is being purged from America is the sound of the voice of reason.