Hollywood’s Diseased Culture

[EasyAce]

The Harvey Weinstein scandal should make movie-industry luminaries take a long, hard look in the mirror.
By Ben Shapiro

The tsunami of outrage that has washed through Hollywood over the past two weeks is staggering in
both its scope and its implications.

First, the scope: Megaproducer Harvey Weinstein, wined and feted despite his well-known proclivity for
brutalities sexual and otherwise, was kicked out of the Academy; other Hollywood stars are running scared
as Twitter fills to the brim with accusations of sexual harassment and assault.

Next, the implications: Hollywood has long been accused of depravity, but has spent the past two decades
attempting to establish feminist bona fides. All of that collapsed this month. No longer can Hollywood
pretend to be a forum designed for female betterment; no longer can many of Hollywood’s most burnished
elites proclaim their love for female empowerment. They stood by and did nothing because Harvey Weinstein
was powerful. And now, too late, they proclaim their mea culpas.

All of this reeks a bit of Queen Gertrude: Hollywood doth protest too much . . .

. . . Whenever scandal erupts in a public institution — be it schools, churches, synagogues, or Hollywood
— the temptation for those loyal to the institution is to close ranks. Sometimes, that’s necessary in order
to prevent the destruction of that institution’s ideals, if those ideals have been betrayed by the sinners.
But when the sinners are baked into the cake — when the institution prizes, treasures, rewards, and even
jokes about them — it may be worth looking more deeply at the values of the institution itself. Not every
institution’s sinners mirror its existential sins — but we should ensure that our institutions’ existential
sins don’t enable more sinners.

[EasyAce]

For the record: It's also worth wondering where Hollywood was when a certain former
president was behaving like a Harvey Weinstein and committing perjury, suborning
perjury, and obstructing justice on behalf of covering up a few of his Weinsteins. Oh, yes
---they were saying it was no big deal and all his opponents' fault, at the same time his
wife was dismissing it as a vast right-wing conspiracy . . .