From the print edition of The New American

Hurricane Harvey — Weinstein, that is — blew into Hollywood and now has blown his career. Taken down by his own sexual depredations, the once-omnipotent film executive recently fled to a $2,000-a-night Arizona “rehab” center and will likely face criminal charges. Yet he merely reflects a Tinseltown that, even more than Las Vegas, is the real city of sin — and that wants to make the whole nation a reflection of itself.

No Clintonesque denials will help Weinstein, nor can he continue buying his way out of trouble (the New York Times reported that he reached at least eight settlements with women over the years). The New Yorker obtained a damning audio recording of the mogul pressuring model Ambra Gutierrez into watching him shower. Moreover, this appears the least of his trespasses. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow reports that during the course of a 10-month investigation, he spoke to 13 women who accuse Weinstein of serious sex crimes, including rape, between the 1990s and 2015.

The result is that Weinstein, once ensconced in a protective bubble of power and pocketbook, is now receiving the Mussolini treatment: His once servile subjects are piling on. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has expelled him; the Producers Guild of America has moved to terminate his membership; his name will be scrubbed from the credits of films and TV projects; and Deadline.com informs that The Weinstein Company, whose board the film producer just resigned from, is nearing “the brink” as talent agencies cut off the talent supply. Even prominent Democrats (such as Hillary Clinton) — who received more than $2 million in personal and “bundled” donations from him — have found their once-silent tongues and are denouncing the mogul. It’s the bravery of those who’ll kick a man when he’s down (this isn’t to imply he doesn’t deserve the kicks, only that the kickers deserve to break some toes).

Worse still for the film executive, the law has found some fortitude as well. Weinstein is now being investigated on both sides of the Atlantic, with Scotland Yard looking into sexual assault claims and the New York Police Department re-opening a 2004 case involving him. The Los Angeles Police Department also may investigate the producer.

Of course, better late than never, but the phoniness here is, well, Hollywood worthy. It’s not just that the Tinseltown figures finally emerging to condemn Weinstein long knew about his crimes but said nothing. Anti-American actress Jane Fonda, for instance, has come out and said she was “ashamed” of herself for not speaking up sooner. Now, one could suspect that Fonda must have known about Weinstein’s improprieties for longer than she claims (a year); the 79-year-old star has been in Hollywood for ages, and the 65-year-old film executive has been a sexual abuser for ages. But that’s not what’s most shameful. Rather, there’s another question.

What are Fonda and the others currently still silent about? What will they be “ashamed” of in 10 years?

For not only is Weinstein the iceberg’s mere tip, but something worse than even his brand of abuse is still suppressed: Hollywood pedophilia, which is widespread. More on this in a moment.

While some are hopeful the Weinstein affair may burst Hollywood’s protective perversion bubble, our politically correct physicians’ poor diagnoses don’t breed optimism. Just consider New York Times’ film critic Manohla Dargis and Girls creator Lena Dunham. They both correctly point out how Weinstein reflects wider Hollywood culture. Yet this culture’s nature escapes them. So just as they hurl stones at Weinstein only now, that he’s vulnerable, they also oh-so bravely blame the most politically correct of targets: men.

Dunham penned an October 9 New York Times op-ed entitled “Harvey Weinstein and the Silence of the Men” in which she condemns Hollywood men for not speaking up. Then Dargis wrote October 11, “It is the perverse, insistent, matter-of-factness of male sexual predation and assault — of men’s power over women — that haunts the revelations about Mr. Weinstein. This banality of abuse also haunts the American movie industry. Women helped build the industry, but it has long been a male-dominated enterprise that systematically treats women — as a class — as inferior to men. It is an industry with a history of sexually exploiting younger female performers and stamping expiration dates on older ones.” This is nonsense.

Dunham and Dargis may certainly believe their own propaganda, yet this just means they’re biased, only recognizing harsh realities when they befall a group they identify with or have an affinity for (women, in this case). But the problem here isn’t the “silence of the men.”

It’s the silence of the leftists.

Note that both men and women in Tinseltown knew about Weinstein; both men and women stayed silent. Dunham admits she herself had heard the Weinstein rumors. But she believes men are responsible because they had the power to speak out. Yet most men in Hollywood are like most of its women: powerless relative to a Weinstein. And few people seek martyrdom.

Then there’s the hypocrisy. The Left claims men and women are “equal,” and, why, it’s condescending to even hold a door for a lady, you chauvinist pig! But then when it’s time to assign blame, it’s, as Dunham essentially asks, “Where were the white knights in shining armor?!” (Answer: Those are the traditionalist guys who don’t get work in Hollywood. They aren’t around to save damsels in distress.)

As for “expiration dates,” ask most former child actors — including and perhaps most notably, the boys — about this. Performers Freddie Bartholomew, Macaulay Culkin, Jay North (Dennis the Menace), and many others learned that the doors closed once they ceased being little and cute. Entertainment is a business, and once your marketability is gone, so are you. Yet there’s a downside to being little and cute, too, and it’s something else from which possessing an XY genotype offers no protection. As I reported in “Hollywood Dearest: Seared Souls and the Silver Screen” (The New American — March 24, 2014):

My meaning is best summed up by one quotation: “I can tell you that the number one problem in Hollywood was, and is, and always will be pedophilia.” These are the words of one of the 1980’s biggest child actors, Corey Feldman, in the August 10, 2011 edition of ABC News Nightline. Feldman, who starred in ’80s hits such as Stand by Me, The Lost Boys, and Gremlins, claims that he himself was a victim of a “Hollywood mogul” pedophile. Asked in the interview if there was a “casting couch” for kids, Feldman said that there was, but “it’s not done the same way [as with adults]; it’s all done under the radar. It’s the big secret.” He also said ... it took him a while to understand the nature of the Hollywood environment. Said Feldman, “I was surrounded by them [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. Surrounded — literally. Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realize what they were and what they wanted, and what they were about.... They were everywhere, like vultures.”

Feldman ... also attributes the untimely death of his friend and fellow child star Corey Haim to child sexual abuse. Haim, who starred in so many films with Feldman that the duo became known as “the two Coreys,” said in 2008 that he had been “raped” by a Hollywood figure. Haim died two years later at age 38, overdosing on illegally obtained legal drugs.

After the Feldman interview, Hollywood child sex abuse received some rare attention, and other actors chimed in. As Fox News’ Meagan Murphy wrote in her 2011 piece “Recent Charges of Sexual Abuse of Children in Hollywood Just Tip of Iceberg, Experts Say”:

Another child star from an earlier era agrees that Hollywood has long had a problem with pedophilia. “When I watched that interview [with Feldman], a whole series of names and faces from my history went zooming through my head,” Paul Petersen, 66, star of The Donna Reed Show, a sitcom popular in the 1950s and ’60s, and president of A Minor Consideration, tells FOXNews.com. “Some of these people, who I know very well, are still in the game.”

“This has been going on for a very long time,” concurs former “Little House on the Prairie” star Alison Arngrim. “It was the gossip back in the ’80s. People said, ‘Oh yeah, the Coreys, everyone’s had them.’ People talked about it like it was not a big deal.”

Then there’s Anne Henry, co-founder of child-actor protection group BizParentz Foundation. She has stated that “75 per cent of the child actors who ‘went off the rails’ suffered earlier abuse,” wrote the Times (London) last year. Moreover, “Hollywood is currently sheltering about 100 active abusers,” she estimates.

Ex-child actor Elijah Wood, who played hobbit Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, also spoke to the Times. He alluded to how some abusers host orgiastic parties where young boy actors are seduced. This echoed the 2014 documentary An Open Secret; it reported that the owners of web TV company Digital Entertainment Network, Marc Collins-Rector, Chad Shackley, and Brock Pierce, “threw lavish parties where young boys were encouraged to drink and take drugs before mandatory skinny-dipping sessions in the swimming pool and hot-tub,” reported the Daily Mail in 2014.

This aligns with comments alt-Right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos made in a 2015 edition of the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. While discussing the issue of pederasty (he was a victim himself), he mentioned that, as a grown man, he attended high-status Hollywood parties where he saw things that “beggared belief”: namely, grown men using for sex boys who were, as Yiannopoulos describes it, “very young — very young.”

Photo: AP Images

This article appears in the November 6, 2017, issue of The New American. To download the issue and continue reading this story, or to subscribe, click here.

Unsurprisingly, though, the media were more focused on attacking Yiannopoulos than Hollywood (not that he didn’t deserve criticism for his flippant treatment of pederasty). This is for the same reason why, while a government-sponsored study found child sex abuse in government schools to be 100 times the magnitude of the Catholic Church scandal, the 61 largest California newspapers ran 2,000 articles about the latter during a certain time period, but only four about the school scandal. The left-wing media just isn’t interested in targeting left-wing entities. Yet children are targeted in Tinseltown, and, as Arngrim said, it’s apparently no big deal there. Just consider the case of homosexual director Victor Salva. As the Daily Beast wrote October 3, after 12-year-old actor Nathan Winters confessed to his mother that Salva molested him while making the 1986 film Clownhouse, police raided the director and former child-care worker’s home, where they found child pornography — including a homemade pornographic tape that showed Salva engaging in oral sex with his pre-adolescent star. “He spent the better part of a year grooming me and my parents,” Nathan Winters recalled in an interview earlier this year. “Developing the trust. It was very calculated, and a long process, as it is with most pedophiles.” In April 1988, Salva pleaded guilty to five felony counts — lewd and lascivious conduct, oral copulation with a person under 14, and three counts of procuring a child for pornography. He was sentenced to three years in prison, and was released in 1989 after serving only 15 months. The kicker? He was released into Hollywood’s welcoming tentacles. Jeepers Creepers 3, which successfully opened in September, is a Salva film. So was Powder, the 1995 movie the pedophile wrote while in prison. In addition, he had gone on to “write and direct Jeepers Creepers (2001) and Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003), which were both executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola and made a combined $122 million worldwide. He also helmed the features Peaceful Warrior (2006), Rosewood Lane (2011), and Dark House (2014),” the Daily Beast further informs. Also on the Hollywood walk of shame is director Roman Polanski, who raped a 13-year-old girl and then skipped the country. He was later honored at the Oscars. In fact, as American Thinker’s Trevor Thomas wrote October 15, “Hollywood is littered with men — and women — who are sexual predators and provocateurs ready and willing to take advantage of most anyone and any situation in order to satisfy their lust and greed.… Thus, when these ‘nasty’ Hollywood harlots, gigolos, pimps, perverts, and like-minded stooges ... don their vagina hats and Antifa masks and start howling about the sexual misconduct of President Trump — or any other politician or pundit of whom they disapprove (read: Christian, conservative, or Republican) — we know it’s not really the sexual immorality that troubles them.” Thomas should stop mincing words and tell us how he really feels, but it’s hard to escape his conclusion: Hollywood doesn’t much care about sexual abuse. And Harvey Weinstein? He was thrown under the bus likely because he became a liability; he made the mistake of getting caught. Salva gets it, too, and said as much himself. He told the San Jose Mercury News in a 1999 interview that, reports the Beast, “I think [studio execs] saying, ‘He’ll never work again’ [Salva referencing himself] was all for show. My God, if they were to take the [arrest] records of every filmmaker or actor, they’d have to shut this town down…. Let’s face it, anybody can work here who makes money.” And those are Hollywood values. Tragically, more and more they are America’s values, too — partially by Hollywood design. Millennial-oriented news site Mic.com wrote in 2014, “Hollywood Has the Power to Change the World,” and that’s no joke. Only a subset of the population imbibes news and commentary, but entertainment touches most everyone. It is powerful. Greek philosopher Plato is paraphrased as having said, “Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the State always changes with them,” and the English idiom informs that a “picture is worth a thousand words.” So how many words are moving pictures worth? And what is the impact when you put sight and sound together in the emotion-engaging package called a film? Just as significantly, who are these people packaging “values” for us? It’s no surprise Hollywood is replete with sexual deviants — it’s populated by the ideologists we today call “liberals.” But aren’t these merely people with different politics? Isn’t it mere ideological bias to paint them in such dark colors? It’s no radical statement to say that people who rejected Bolshevism in 1917 Russia and Nazism in 1938 Germany were, generally speaking, more moral than those passionately embracing these totalitarian ideologies. Ideologies comprise ideas, and, generally speaking (again), virtuous people hew to good ideas and the vice-ridden to bad ones. As George Orwell noted in The Road to Wigan Pier, “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” Fruit juice is pretty much universal today, and the socialists have perhaps lost the Quakers. Yet Orwell’s observation was nonetheless quite astute, as writer Peter Schweizer noted in his 2008 Daily Mail piece, “Don’t listen to the liberals — Right-wingers really are nicer people, latest research shows.” As Schweizer summarized it, “There is plenty of data that shows that Right-wingers are happier, more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide — and even hug their children more than those on the Left.” They also are less likely to indulge sexual perversion. But what is the real connection between vice and “liberalism”? Bill Maher, the liberal and libertine comedian-cum-commentator, once said on his old show Politically Incorrect, “The concept of Absolute Truth is scary.” It’s no wonder he finds it so. People bent on indulging vice seek to justify themselves. To this end, would they embrace a worldview upholding Truth — a standard of objective, unchanging morality — that condemns their sin as sin, that states they are absolutely, eternally wrong? Or would they be more likely to glom on to one stating everything is relative and “Who’s to judge?” Liberalism is the Ideology of No Responsibility, of “whatever works for you” — it is characterized by moral relativism, the notion that right and wrong are mere perspective. Now, people often embrace relativism to justify their misdeeds; after all, my wrongs can’t be wrong if there’s no objective right or wrong. Thus, the more vice-ridden people are, the more likely they are to latch on to relativism and, hence, its current correlative ideology, liberalism. Yet this liberalism is not just an effect of sin; it’s also a cause. For upon embracing a worldview justifying anything, you’re even more likely to commit misdeeds. It’s a vicious circle yielding some very, very vicious people. Yet there’s still more to it. Sin could be called psychological poison, and, as with all poison, it affects a person whether he realizes it’s poisonous or not. One effect is that people generally feel bad about themselves when they sin and desire absolution. Moreover, even more simply, everyone quite naturally wants to feel like a good person, so he needs something to hang his hat on. Now, cultivating actual virtue in oneself — chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, humility, prudence, etc. — is difficult. It requires discipline, hard work and, most of all, sacrifice; the party will be over. Also, developing a personal world of virtue doesn’t bring praise in a world of vice. The solution is simple: You project your time’s faux virtue, by making the fashionable utterances that cause people to say, “My, he’s such a good person.” In certain times and places this meant paying lip service to communism or Nazism. In our time, it means being politically correct. So liberalism is a home for the libertine, providing him the justification for his vices and the opportunity to burnish his image and self-image via what we now, apropos to the affectation, call “virtue-signaling.” But the effect on the wider society is anything but virtue-enhancing. Hollywood peddles corruption for both conscious and unconscious reasons. As to the latter, consider how Paul Gebhard, right-hand man of “sex researcher,” pedophile, and scientific fraud Alfred Kinsey (whom, surprise, surprise, Hollywood portrayed heroically on screen), answered the question about how Kinsey “researchers” collected data on the sexual responses of young children and infants (which they did do). He said, on video presented in the documentary The Kinsey Syndrome, that they used “oral and manual techniques.” Why would he let such a thing slip? Because after engaging in perversion, or anything else, habitually, people become habituated to it. It then doesn’t seem so abnormal anymore, and the mask sometimes slips and they utter some remarkably revelatory things. People can’t help being what they are, for, as poet William Blake put it, “the Eye altering alters all.” Likewise, Hollywood libertines’ hearts will quite naturally infuse their work. But then there are the conscious justifications. They know that, to put it simply, “if these church people get their way, I won’t be able to indulge ________ (fill in the personal perversion du jour).” They don’t want their fun spoiled. They don’t want to be judged. They don’t want to be destroyed, so they must destroy the standards by which they would be judged. Lastly, there’s the “Misery loves company” factor. Just as dirt shows most readily on white, others’ goodness reveals, by contrast, libertines’ vice for all its ugliness. It reminds me of a small-scale landlord I heard call a radio show years ago and say she wouldn’t rent to Christians because they made her feel bad about herself. Whether those who merely rent or those who can rend society, this shaming by example creates a strong desire among the dirty to create equality in iniquity by soiling the fabric of civilization. These are some reasons Hollywood fare is infused with sexuality. Of course, it also sells; as ancient Chinese sage Confucius put it, “I never knew anyone who loved virtue as much as sex.” Yet mere marketing imperatives don’t explain Tinseltown’s mainstreaming of homosexuality, with homosexual characters prominent in movies and shows and often portrayed as voices of reason (e.g., Sling Blade, 1996). What does explain it is something homosexual activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen wrote in their 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s. To wit: The authors called for a desensitization of Americans to homosexuality through a “continuous flood of gay-related advertising,” a “conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.” Of course, while homosexuality couldn’t have been legitimized without sexual mores already having been degraded, doing so opens the floodgates. For if it is morally licit, so is everything below it in the hierarchy of sexual sin — and this encompasses vast territory. And, not surprisingly, Hollywood has pushed the envelope further, disgorging the 2001 film L.I.E., in which a middle-age pederast named Big John is portrayed in (at worst) a neutral light. All this, not to mention the relativistic messages; attacks on Christianity, America, and the West; revisionist history; exaltation of evil; and the general politically correct themes present in toxic Hollywood effluent. Philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1926 that the “next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality.… The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan.” For sure. The Soviet Union collapsed, but as American Chesterton Society president Dale Ahlquist put it, “The sex industry … is a silent, slippery beast that slithers in the dark and has its tentacles everywhere and is destroying our society.” Hollywood can posture all it wants as it sacrifices Harvey Weinstein to its false gods of hedonistic pleasure. It can “virtue-signal” as it turns the matter into a politically correct crusade. But the problem isn’t one man, some men, or “men”; it’s that, as Victor Salva put it, if they were to hold accountable every sullied “filmmaker or actor, they’d have to shut this town down.” Come to think of it, though, that’s not a bad idea. Photo: AP Images

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