December 2, 2019

"It’s remarkable how quickly even people with a long relationship with you will turn if you if you threaten the centers of power or sources of funding around them... They’re beholden to powerful interests, you become radioactive very quickly."

Said Ronan Farrow, quoted in "Ronan Farrow says relationship with Hillary Clinton cooled when he looked into Weinstein." That's Fox News, reporting on Financial Times interview and writing so badly that it took me a while to be sure it was talking about a new interview:
Farrow told the Financial Times in 2011 he was selected by Clinton, then the secretary of state, to work as a special adviser on global youth issues. He said they worked together for years but noticed a change in their relationship when word got out he was looking into Weinstein - one of her top fundraisers. 
As in a scifi monster movie, becoming "radioactive" energized Farrow and made him scary and dangerous.

44 comments:

tim maguire said...

Nice that he noticed. But what lessons will he draw from it?

AllenS said...

I'm wondering what Ronan Farrow will think when he finds out that he is now a Russian agent.

Quaestor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
The Crack Emcee said...

The poor guy's finding out what happened to me, but my wife and her friends started all this "Believe Me!" bullshit all the way back in the '90s, which gives me a lot of good context for what's happening today. (Just like we wouldn't have today's measles epidemic without Andrew Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy touting her book, or "Dr. Oz" getting iffy, on Oprah's old show, etc. That's just one issue, but there are many like it, that we're still grappling with.)

NewAge liberals will DEFINITELY turn on you (religious conservatives will, too, in my experience), but NewAgers do it in such a sinister manner, it's impossible - even for an atheist like me - not to see them as demonic. I mean, they're believers, right? It only follows their behavior would reflect that Christian outlook for Satan and his minions.

Just nasty Biblical characters come to life.

Of course, I'm working on the soundtrack for NewAge's downfall,...

Quaestor said...

By "scary and dangerous" Althouse means threatening to Hillary's never-ending but always insufficient gravy train of graft.

(Reposted with typo fixed. Too early to be proofreading at 100% efficiency.)

Ann Althouse said...

"The poor guy's finding out what happened to me, but my wife and her friends started all this "Believe Me!" bullshit all the way back in the '90s..."

The early 90s were the "You just don't get it" time of Anita Hill. I take it you missed the Bill Clinton island of opportunity, the late 90s.

Mr Wibble said...

This is also what happened to Trump. The people who were his friends turned on him viciously when he suddenly threatened their grift.

GatorNavy said...

I for one mourn Ronan Farrow’s untimely death at his own hands. My condolences to his family.

Sally327 said...

I'm sure it did happen that way but, on the other hand, Clinton picked Farrow to be a "special advisor", I'm thinking, not because of any particular expertise in the field of "global youth issues" but because of who he's related to and the circles he travels in, which made him useful to Clinton. No one is supposed to have an agenda that doesn't serve the Clintons' interests.

Mike Sylwester said...

Why does the Secretary of State have "a special adviser on global youth issues"?

Mike Sylwester said...

Does the Secretary State have "a special adviser on global middle-age-people issues" and "a special adviser on global old-people issues"?

Robert Cook said...

Of course, Hillary Clinton is accustomed to catering to (and ignoring the misbehavior of) powerful men whose positions allow them to take advantage of young women, if it helps her further her agenda.

Michael McNeil said...

When folks repost — delete your earlier posting, please.

Mike Sylwester said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mike Sylwester said...

I'll bet that the #1 global youth issue was global warming.

gspencer said...

“It’s remarkable how quickly even people with a long relationship with you will turn if you threaten the . . .”

Actually, it isn't remarkable at all. It's what you should always anticipate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene#%22Selfish%22_genes

Krumhorn said...

I don’t know why he should be surprised at the result. That’s what happens when you bust up someone’s rice bowl.

- Krumhorn

Tom T. said...

Does Farrow think they were genuinely friends?

Quaestor said...

Of course, Hillary Clinton is accustomed to catering to (and ignoring the misbehavior of) powerful men... her agenda.

Cook almost nails it — almost, right up to that final word. (Of course, 90% correctness is stellar given his track record, and unexpected, like Lois Lane rescuing Superman from the runaway train rather than vice versa.)

Agenda is far too nebulous. An agenda could be admirable — sufficiently so that even winking at the kind of outrages Weinstein and the other #MeToo ogres are allegedly guilty of is fully justified. Suppose Hillery's agenda is the final defeat of mosquito-borne disease worldwide. That's an agenda that warrants few blowjobs demanded from marginal wannabee starlets. But the Clinton agenda is and always was power and money, the more unbridled and filthy the better. Cook knows this as well as any level-headed gimlet-eyed Althousian, but agenda fits his agenda, which is to have his moral cake and eat it too politically.

rehajm said...

Mmmmmm...moral cake...

Bob Boyd said...

How did Farrow expect Clinton to react?"

"Oh my God! Harvey? He was always a perfect gentleman with me."

"Well..."

"Well what?"

"Nothing. Never mind."

tim in vermont said...

I loved the time when close Clinton friend Bloodsworth Thomson, from Little Rock who worked in Hollywood said that she had warned “top Democrats”... Top. Democrats. about Weinstein. Not the ones she frequently had dinner with, Bill and Hillary though probably I bet.

tim in vermont said...

The email from Weinstein to Hillary’s staff in Wikileaks was so obsequious I was embarrassed for the guy. He could only dare hope that they would pass along his tale of derring do on behalf of liberalism in some media interview to her highness.

JMW Turner said...

Remarkable, given the range of personal, political thought of the commentators, Quaestor, Mike Sylwester, The Crack Emcee, Robert Cook, Ann, Sally327, etc., all agree on one thing: Hillary Clinton is a loathsome creature willing to enable a male predator and commit virtually any act to assume and maintain power.

Michael K said...

It is always about the money, the Benjamins. That is what "Climate Change" is about.

In the climate scam, it is "Green Energy" and the billions to be made from windmills and solar plus the subsidies, which are behind the money to be made in climate scams.

Nobody, except the rubes, thinks the oceans will rise or the temperature will rise enough to create more deserts.

HL Mencken predicted this a century ago.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
H. L. Mencken

The Crack Emcee said...

Ann Althouse said...

"The early 90s were the "You just don't get it" time of Anita Hill. I take it you missed the Bill Clinton island of opportunity, the late 90s."

No, I didn't miss it. But that's just where the focus was because it's where the media's cameras mostly were. Thanks to my wife's interests, I was getting the BIG PICTURE - Anita Hill had no "mystical" element to her story, like, say, the anti-vaxx movement does, with (as we now know) Marianne Williamson, Oprah, and Jim Carrey, etc. behind it - but the Bill and Hill story did and does. Like Brad and Jennifer back then, they were all into the cult leader, Ken Wilber, who works with the sexual predator Marc Gafni (formally "spiritual advisor" to Whole Foods Market) again, reflecting on stuff, like Jeffrey Epstein, that's just coming to light. THAT'S where the REAL hokey-pokey was happening, not with Anita Hill.

Like I said, I've always been able to see it all, almost with a bird's eye view - because I wasn't watching only what the media said to watch. And NewAge is STILL proving to be the story with real legs - and real importance to our lives, and the life of our nation, in the long run.

We're just not focussed on it, as a nation, yet.

daskol said...

ah, the early 90s. not a great song, but a great time capsule.

Black robe and swill
I believe Anita Hill
Judge will rot in hell


tim in vermont said...

I don’t think that Climate Change is about the money fundamentally. I think it is about stupidity, it’s about a reboot of the story of Man’s fall from The Garden of Eden, it’s religion. Then you have the hucksters making money off of that. Gore as the original global warming Elmer Gantry. It’s no coincidence that he studied theology. If you want to spot corruption, look at “clean energy” For instance Hillary’s campaign manager John Podesta had millions of dollars in Putin crony “clean energy” stock that became worthless within a couple days of Hillary losing the election. Nancy Pelosi’s son Paul is a “clean energy” executive in Ukraine, of all places.

Krumhorn said...

Nobody, except the rubes, thinks the oceans will rise

It is certainly a scam, but while the acolytes and high priests in the church of AGW have regularly intoned the warning of the rising seas as a matter of liturgy, the seas have, in fact, been rising for 10’s of thousands of years at a somewhat constant rate. And temperatures have risen since the 1850’s, all having nothing whatsoever to do with greenhouse gasses

Ice cores reveal that centennial variability of earth temperatures have been less than one standard deviation over the last 8000 years.

- Krumhorn

Krumhorn said...


I don’t think that Climate Change is about the money fundamentally


I’m afraid it is fundamentally about the money, but not limited to carbon credits and wind farms. It is part of the leftie one-world agenda and the transfer of wealth from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere. Look at the terms of the Paris Accord. Why does anyone think that that bastion of science, that leading edge of technology that is the UN is behind all this rot? The IPCC is a political body tasked with the job of ensuring that our $$$ flow like the Nile into shithole nations. The receipts of a global carbon tax administered by the jumped up mandarins on the East River is the objective. Climate Justice.

- Krumhorn

William said...

The politics of the libido and the libido of politics. Some rapes are bimbo eruptions and other transgressions are character defining flaws....I waver between admiration and distrust of Ronan Farrow. The journalistic standards he applied to Kavanaugh were far more elastic than those applied to other figures. Mommy dearest was supportive of Roman Polanski. I don't think Ronan Farrow has an agenda, but he has his biases......How were Weinstein, Cosby, Epstein, et al. able to rape women for decades without scrutiny whereas the jokes in Kavanaugh's high school yearbook were matters of concern for hard nosed journalists. I give Farrow credit for his reporting on Weinstein, but the greater scandal is not what Weinstein did but that he was allowed to get away with it for decades. That's the world that Farrow was quite literally spawned by. He's a creature of that world.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Ronan has unfairly accused and demonized his own father, so there's that.

Howard said...

Ronan doesn't dish Frank ever

Maillard Reactionary said...

And in traditional sci-fi fashion, the radioactive scary creature must be destroyed, usually with electricity.

Or these days, encouraged to commit suicide.

Birkel said...

Farrow will not be able to extend this lesson to Donald Trump.

traditionalguy said...

Ronan probably gets a pass.He took on the elites with his Me Too disclosures of sexually abused starlets and models. And that only hurt Hillary indirectly because of Bill and his child trafficking friends. But Ronan stopped short of exposing the elite's child trafficking of younger children meant for sex and sacrifice. That is still taboo info.

Quaestor said...

And in traditional sci-fi fashion, the radioactive scary creature must be destroyed, usually with electricity.

One of the most interesting (IMAO) 1950s sci-fi "creatures" was the artificial element plot point in the Ivan Tors film, The Magnetic Monster. The science was crazy, but less crazy than in any kaiju feature. Briefly, it was this: an artificial element absorbs energy and then converts it to mass along with a burst of gamma radiation. Then it rests quiescent until it hungers for energy again. The element threatens to grow so massive that it finally destroys the Earth. The heroes "kill" it by choking it on more electromagnetic energy than it can "digest". The End.

Yancey Ward said...

That is is just embarrassing to have in a major newspaper. Does no one care for grammar any longer?

Robert Cook said...

"But the Clinton agenda is and always was power and money, the more unbridled and filthy the better."

Of course. Did I need to spell it out?

"Cook knows this as well as any level-headed gimlet-eyed Althousian...."

Hahahaha!

Bill Peschel said...

"How were Weinstein, Cosby, Epstein, et al. able to rape women for decades without scrutiny"

I'd like to look back and find out when and how "Lolita Express" entered the language to describe Epstein's flights. This gives you a starting point on the date.

Be sure to add a few years to allow for that to circulate privately among the Comfy Class.

tim in vermont said...

"Ronan doesn't dish Frank ever”

Do you think Frank needed to coerce women into bed with him? Sexual harassment is a crime only ugly guys can commit. It’s SCIENCE.

hombre said...

“It’s remarkable how quickly even [Democrats] with a long relationship with you will turn if ....”

There. Fixed.

hombre said...
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narciso said...

I found the method of 'catch and release' rather disturbing, he puts legitimate evidentiary claims with circumstantial elements, altogether,