In 2017 at the Academy Awards, Meryl Streep went hard after Donald Trump for mocking a disabled reporter (Trump vehemently denies he mocks the man’s disability, but no one doubts he was insulting). In doing so, she eloquently stated the moral imperative that the strong not prey on the weak:
“But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”
Ms. Streep illustrated for us all the hypocrisy of her angst at Donald Trump when just a few minutes later at the Oscars, she rose to her feet with hundreds of other Hollywood elites to welcome one of their heroes who was awarded an Oscar. Why would she doing so be hypocritical?
The recipient of that Lifetime Achievement Award was the famous director Roman Polanski. No doubt, he directed some highly acclaimed movies in his career. He made producers a whole lot of money in doing so and made some actors and actresses famous in those hits. But Polanksi was not there in Hollywood to accept his Oscar. Why? He years earlier fled the United States to keep from being arrested and still lives in Europe.
For those who don’t remember, Roman Polanski pled guilty to statutory rape and admitted in open court to having sex with his victim when he knew she was only 13 years old. Polanski was 43. In so doing, he avoided trial on a number of more severe charges. His victim’s grand jury testimony was chilling:
According to Gailey’s April 4, 1977, grand-jury testimony, Polanski drove her to Jack Nicholson’s house. The actor wasn’t home, but his ex-girlfriend Anjelica Huston was there when they arrived. Polanski poured Gailey champagne and they took more photographs. After they shared a quaalude, he instructed her to strip and enter a Jacuzzi, where—despite her protests—he soon joined her, after removing his own clothes. She lied about having asthma as an excuse to leave the hot tub. Although Gailey repeatedly told him “no” and asked him to drive her home, he proceeded to perform oral, vaginal, and anal sex on her inside the house. Gailey told the grand jury she was reluctant to resist because she was “afraid” of Polanski.
Gailey said Polanski asked her to keep their encounter a secret before taking her home, later telling her, “You know, when I first met you I promised myself I wouldn’t do anything like this with you.”
As bad as it is to mock a man’s disability (again, Trump has denied that was his intent), Polanski’s conduct is several orders of magnitude worse. Compounding the injustice, Polanski fled the United States rather than serve his sentence. He lives overseas, where he has directed a number of films starring a cavalcade of Hollywood liberals.
The choice of any actor to work with a man on the run from prison for rape is absurd, the partial standing ovation (including from Streep) is disgusting, and the decision not to tell the audience why the Academy was accepting the award on his behalf is cowardly.
Do these people purport to be our moral betters? Millions of Americans look to them for inspiration and guidance? Talent is no substitute for wisdom, and one can appreciate the art while still being wary of the artist. There are good people in Hollywood, including good, misguided people, but the American film industry lacks the moral standing for its many lectures — including Streep’s address that night. It’s a shame that more people can’t see the empty moral core behind the glittering facade.
And this is just one of many examples of Selective Hatred that have overtaken our nation.
The Issues
American hatred is everywhere. Any single group of people does not own it, is not gender-related, race-related, sexual-preference related, religiously-related, place of origin related, language-related, or even politically-related. It is United States related and encompasses everyone who is here in the U.S. No one is exempt — either from being targeted or being the target-“ER” of hatred.
Hatred is nothing new. I think the first historical reference of an act of hatred was when Cain, who was fueled with jealousy-turned-hatred for his brother Abe, murdered his brother. And things for humans headed downhill from there.
We continually argue about anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia, Homophobia, Xenophobia, and even Politiphobia — my word — that all seem together to soak up all the air in our Nation.
What is the source of all this hatred? Who creates it and who determines what is and what is not hatred?
The Sources
Headlines like this appear far too often: “The uptick in right-wing terrorism comes amid a renewed national focus on hate-driven terrorism.” Then there was this headline: “Since the election of President Donald Trump, news outlets and social media accounts have swelled with reports of swastikas at schools, racist taunts, and other hate-fueled attacks and acts of intimidation.”
If anyone pays attention to media reports regarding acts of hatred committed in the U.S. over the last three years, almost universally, the universal source has been President Trump. If you disagree with that premise, pause for just a moment and do an internet search using the words “acts of hatred in the U.S.” You’ll see page after page blaming President Trump for virtually every one of them.
But is the President responsible?
Anti-Semitism
“Several Democrats have blamed President Donald Trump for the repeated attacks against Jewish people in New York. There have been at least eight reported incidents of anti-Semitic violence in New York during the last few weeks; the latest saw five people stabbed at a rabbi’s home during a Hanukkah celebration.”
(October 2018) “Donald Trump has fuelled a climate of hatred in general and antisemitism in particular, with the Republican party acting as his enabler,” experts warned on Monday. “The U.S. president’s tone has been under renewed scrutiny after Saturday’s massacre of 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, believed to be the deadliest attack on Jewish people in American history.”
(New York Times Editorial) “Mr. Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald Trump, and members of the administration are mostly to blame for the rise of violence and discrimination against the ‘other’ here in this country, including Jews. I would be more apt to support the president’s executive order if I weren’t overwhelmingly disgusted by the overt racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism displayed by this president and his supporters over the last three years. It is the president who has engaged in divisive, dangerous rhetoric, fueling the flames of white supremacy and anti-Jewish sentiment.”
National story after story throughout Mr. Trump’s first term as President have all subscribed to this theory: anti-Semitism in total lies at the feet of Donald Trump!
Think about that: His son-in-law is Jewish, his daughter in Jewish, his grandchildren are Jewish, and everyone who knows anything about the “personal” Donald Trump knows just how devoted he is to Jared Kushner and those grandchildren. Yet the Left continue to bash the President as the source of violence against Jews.
Could the onslaught of these reports of horrendous violence against Jews and other minorities have a racial basis? Nope — according to the Lame-Stream media. Donald Trump causes them each. He’s a “White supremacist, Homophobic, Islamaphobic, Xenophobic old guy” that has called his “followers” to constant attacks on Jews — most recently in New York. But, consider these:
- In a recent spate of hate crime attacks on Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, virtually all the perpetrators have been African-American, according to local activists, elected officials, and victims. Yet at a recent news briefing reporting an 82 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the city, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was asked about the attacks, he connected the attacks to national trends, blaming “white supremacy” and “nativism.”
- Four people were murdered recently, and two assailants killed in an anti-Semitic attack on a kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was one of the deadliest strikes against Jews on American soil in the history of the United States; if the perpetrators had succeeded in detonating a pipe bomb they had built, the carnage could have been even worse. The assailants were all African-Americans.
- Orthodox Jews in New York City, specifically in Brooklyn, have experienced alarming rates of physical assault over the past year. The New York Police Department says that hate crimes in the city were up 67 percent in 2019. Of those, a whopping 80 percent have been anti-Semitic hate crimes. This story is an all-too-familiar story in Brooklyn these days, and there is a reason it isn’t being treated as a crisis by our media or government. That reason is that many, if not most, of the assailants, are black or Hispanic men.
Story after story detailing anti-Semitic attacks plainly states the assailants are acting at the beckoning of the racist and anti-semitic language of the President. These claims are blatantly false. So why does no national media source refute those claims to clarify the picture?
Besides that almost universal hatred for President Trump by members of the “Lame-Stream Media,” it would be politically incorrect for those media reports to suggest any other person or sect of people could be responsible. It just HAS to be Donald Trump!
And their methods are working. A lazy American populace when asked today, “Who is responsible for the scourge of recent anti-Semitic attacks?” most would answer: “President Donald Trump.” That mindset is the fuel of hatred fomented by today’s Media.
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