America's leading fake feminist, @HillaryClinton, still silent on Harvey Weinstein. pic.twitter.com/qIandk16pC— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) October 7, 2017
"Have you heard the one about the guys who die and get to the induction center in the sky, and they sort them into heaven or... hell? No, seriously, isn’t that the greatest fear—that in the end it’ll turn out the rabbis were right? That hell is a for-real place?... Listen, guys, I’m talking all-inclusive hell, the whole shebang, with fire, and devils with horns, and those little rakes, the pitchforks, and the wheel of torture and boiling tar and all those gadgets Satan gets to use…I haven’t slept a wink just thinking about it these past few months, I swear, and at night it’s the worst, the thoughts just eat me up and I totally get what you’re thinking now: Son of a bitch, why did I have to go and eat those shrimp on that trip to Paris? And the pitas from Abu Gosh on Passover? And why didn’t we all vote for Torah Judaism?” He lowers his voice and booms: “Too late, scumbags—to the tar!”
As the internet dug into the digitized underworld of out-of-print novels, the plot seemed to thicken. What if the author possessed the technology to jump through history, instead of our president? What if Lockwood were a modern-day Nostradamus...... and a secure, flat-footed return the banality of political opinion in the present day:
If anything, Lockwood’s works are disquieting because their mood of anxiety.... feels so familiar. You don’t need to believe in time travel to worry about that, though. Our own incarnation of Trump taught us that lesson all on his own.
Most memorably, she etched a message on her “bum” that said, “JD loves HW,” with a heart with an arrow through it, in gratitude to Harvey Weinstein for making her a movie star in “Mrs. Brown,” “Chocolat,” “Iris,” “Shakespeare in Love” and other films, after she had been starring in a sitcom with her husband in England.Ugh. So much for queenliness and bowing down. How does the subordination of women happen? I dropped my pants, Dench recalled gleefully....
As a young actress, she said, someone told her she would never make it in movies because “you have everything wrong with your face.”
“I’d like to know where that idiot is working now,” Mr. Weinstein tells me. “Probably for Breitbart.”
Ms. Dench pulled down her pants and flashed the tattoo at Mr. Weinstein at a celebrity lunch she arranged at the Four Seasons in 2002 with Mike Nichols, Nora Ephron, Carly Simon and others, and again at the BAFTA awards when Mr. Weinstein asked Ms. Dench to show his gift to a skeptical Oprah Winfrey at Royal Albert Hall.
“I walked in and I saw Harvey, and I said, ‘Hello, Harvey,’ and I dropped my pants down,” Ms. Dench recalls gleefully.
Ms. Winfrey, Mr. Weinstein recalls, “turned into a 12-year-old squealing girl” after Ms. Dench told her, “I hear you’ve been doubting my love for Harvey?” as she unzipped her pants.
While a number of female celebrities have spoken out since the allegations broke, including actresses Amber Tamblyn, Lena Dunham, and Brie Larson, several A-list stars who worked with Weinstein on Oscar-winning films have remained silent, including Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Anna Paquin, Renee Zelwegger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Judi Dench, and Penelope Cruz.
“I have resigned as an advisor to Harvey Weinstein,” Bloom, 56, wrote on Twitter Saturday. “My understanding is that Mr. Weinstein and his board are moving toward an agreement.”ADDED: The NYT writes that board members of the company, Harvey's brother Bob and Lance Maerov, confronted Bloom after Bloom said she was going to put out “photos of several of the accusers in very friendly poses with Harvey after his alleged misconduct," which Maerov said would "backfire as it suggests they are exculpatory or negate any harm done to them through alleged action."
She did not say whether she plans to continue working with Weinstein on adapting her book about Trayvon Martin into a television show, which Bloom had planned to do through his company.
Lanny Davis, another adviser to Mr. Weinstein, is also no longer representing him, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Davis, a lawyer and crisis counselor who served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton, declined Saturday to discuss his departure. But he and Mr. Weinstein had disagreed over how to handle the sexual harassment allegations, with Mr. Davis advising a more conciliatory tone and approach than Mr. Weinstein seemed willing to adopt....Lanny Davis. Why did he drop Weinstein? Too much connection back to the Clintons? I was surprised that I already had a Lanny Davis tag, and clicking back to old posts, I see that he was acting chair of the Clinton Foundation in 2015 when he was grilled by Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" over a $2.35 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation by the chairman of Uranium One, "that uranium company that the Russians wanted to buy," which Davis brushed off as "not major, even by any definition." Wallace asked Davis:
Do you think it was a coincidence all these Canadian mining executives are giving millions to the foundation, that a company with close ties to Vladimir Putin's government in Russia is giving half a million dollar speech? Do you think that's a coincidence that's happening while the Russian company that wants to buy Uranium One has business before the State Department? Do you think that's a coincidence?Sorry. I'm reminiscing about the 2016 presidential campaign... you know, the one about which there's been so much talk about "collusion" with the Russians.
[Mo] Willems, Lisa Yee ("Super Hero Girls") and Mike Curato ("Little Elliott") said the mural, which illustrates a scene from Theodor Geisel's "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," includes a "jarring racial stereotype of a Chinese man who is depicted with chopsticks, a pointed hat and slanted slit eyes." The authors called the caricature "deeply hurtful."Why didn't they figure this out as they were designing the mural?
Following the uproar, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which oversees the author's estate, said it would replace the mural with another image depicting another of Dr. Seuss' stories.
"This is what Dr. Seuss would have wanted us to do," according to a statement. "His later books, like 'The Sneetches' and 'Horton Hears a Who,' showed a great respect for fairness and diversity. Dr. Seuss would have loved to be a part of this dialogue for change. In fact, Ted Geisel himself said, 'It's not how you start that counts. It's what you are at the finish.'"...
The premiere of “Shindig” ended a relatively short professional journey for Mr. Good that began in 1956 when he became transfixed by an audience’s response to the movie “Rock Around the Clock,” with Bill Haley and the Comets. In rock ’n’ roll’s energy and excitement, he recognized music’s future, especially as a fuel for adolescent rebellion....
He left “Shindig” after a year, exhausted by the demands of producing it but with something else in mind: a rock musical based on “Othello.” It became “Catch My Soul,” with William Marshall in the title role and Jerry Lee Lewis playing an unlikely Iago....
Back then, Harvey could spin — or suppress — anything; there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine.He could only do it because you were complicit. Were you all paid off?
I never really thought of trying to write the story myself. Back then, I didn’t write about feminism; there wasn’t a lot of journalism about feminism.There's been plenty of journalism about feminism for the last 50 years, but why did you need a foundation of plenteous journalism about feminism to write about such beastly behavior?
His behavior toward women was obviously understood to be a bad thing—this was a decade after Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas had helped the country to understand that sexual harassment was not just a quirk of the modern workplace, but a professional and economic crime committed against women as a class. But...The "but" should be, but we the liberal journalists helped everyone forget what we'd learned because it was so important to help Bill Clinton. But Traister's "but" is:
... the story felt fuzzier, harder to tell about Harvey: the notion of the “casting couch” still had an almost romantic reverberation...Oh, bullshit. Harvey was another liberal, like Bill Clinton, so you pushed the obvious principles to the side and protected him. The only fuzziness is the blur imposed by politics, and once you let that in, you have no principle.
But another reason that I never considered trying to report the story myself... I remembered what it was like to have the full force of Harvey Weinstein — back then a mountainous man — screaming vulgarities at me, his spit hitting my face. I had watched him haul my friend into the street and try to hurt him. That kind of force, that kind of power? I could not have won against that.Ridiculous. You were afraid of him because of his physical size and strength in an in-person encounter? What the hell is writing for?! You got your distance. He wasn't around. From a distance, in writing, his "mountainous" physicality is one more thing that makes it easier to portray him as a brute — an ugly brute. The photographs of this man that accompany any article about him stir up only revulsion, not sympathy. Why would you not have won with words?
But Weinstein didn’t just exert physical power. He also employed legal and professional and economic power. He supposedly had every employee sign elaborate, binding nondisclosure agreements. He gave jobs to people who might otherwise work to bring him down, and gave gobs of money to other powerful people, who knows how much, but perhaps just enough to keep them from listening to ugly rumors that might circulate among young people, among less powerful people. For decades, the reporters who tried to tell the story of Harvey Weinstein butted up against the same wall of sheer force and immovable power that was leveraged against those ambitious actors, the vulnerable assistants, the executives whose careers, salaries, and reputations were in his hands.That was even more material to use against him, and it's material that goes against all you reporters now. If you don't know how to get a story where a corrupt miscreant is using legal maneuverings and payoffs to suppress it, how are you a journalist?!
Something has changed. Sources have gone on the record. It’s worth it to wonder why. Perhaps because of shifts in how we understand these kinds of abuses. Recent years have seen scores of women, finding strength and some kind of power in numbers, come forward and tell their stories about Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump.So! Now, we get to the meat of it. When the targets were right wing (or perceived as right wing), like Clarence Thomas all those years ago in the pre-Clinton era, the journalists knew how to get at the story. But they did it so aggressively and brought down such big targets that the protection of Harvey Weinstein was too obvious. The wall of silence broke.
But now our consciousness has been raised.Oh, please. You had consciousness before. Take responsibility for the politically skewed reporting that has infected sexual harassment stories since the Clarence Thomas/Bill Clinton combination that shamed political liberals in the 1990s.
I saw Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, at a Planned Parenthood celebration. I was struck... by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail, and, when I caught sight of him in May, he appeared to be walking with a cane.So what are you saying? You feel better about kicking a weak little guy? You really were holding back because of his erstwhile mountainousness?
He has also lost power in the movie industry....This is a confession of the absence of courage in journalism. You should be going after the most powerful people and go after them when they are doing their damage, not tell us about it after age and bad fortune have done half the work of laying him low.
In the study of German history, there is the notion of sonderweg, literally the “special path,” down which the German people are fated to wander....Thomas Chatterton Williams comes very close to calling Ta-Nehisi Coates a white supremacist.
A similar unifying theory has been taking hold in America. Its roots lie in the national triple sin of slavery, land theft and genocide. In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages — they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin — white supremacy — explains everything, an all-American sonderweg.
No one today has done more to push this theory in the mainstream than the 42-year-old author Ta-Nehisi Coates....
I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.....
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