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Culture Tag

After Andy Lassner, a producer for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, tweeted the other day that he's "way more afraid of another Melania getting in to this country than" he is of the thousands of migrants in the caravan marching towards the U.S. border. First Lady Melania Trump's office tweeted him an invite to her gathering of children at the White House to talk about kindness and screen the movie Wonder. You can guess how this man child responded.

#MeToo, we are told, is an important socio-cultural movement; we should believe all accusers as "survivors" and treat every incident of alleged sexual assault as a mass attack of white male privilege on hapless females.  This mentality is so ingrained among the #MeToo and #Resistance left that protesters mobbed lawmakers insisting that their stories be heard in conjunction with the Kavanaugh hearings. The idea was that any woman who had been sexually assaulted must be somehow weighed in the Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation vote.  None of these women were claiming that Kavanaugh had assaulted them, just that they had been assaulted . . . and that Kavanaugh must pay.  You know, for their victimhood or as a scapegoat or Christ figure sacrificed for the sins of the many.  Kavanaugh's defeat was to be redemption for these women who had never met him much less been assaulted by him.  He was to be the figure, the totem, of their healing.   Burn him, and they are freed.  Or something.

We covered a bit of the meeting between President Donald Trump and rapper Kanye West at the Oval Office, as they were surrounded by press. Our initial report focused on West's experience with the MAGA hat. But the meeting contained so much more that could be consequential. West used the highly public venue to preach the value of Trump's "Make America Great Again" approach, excoriate the Democrats, and persuade the president to reconsider implementing "stop and frisk" in Chicago.

A judge dismissed one out of six sexual assault charges against movie producer Harvey Weinstein after the prosecutors admitted that the lead detective on the case did not tell them that one witness doubted one of the accusers. From The New York Times:
Mr. Weinstein, 66, was charged in May with raping one woman and forcing another, Lucia Evans, to perform oral sex on him. Ms. Evans, a marketing executive, had testified to a state grand jury that the forced sex act had occurred in 2004, during a casting meeting at the offices of Mr. Weinstein’s film company, Miramax, in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood.

Hollywood legend Burt Reynolds passed away at the age of 82 this week from cardiopulmonary arrest. He will be sorely missed.

The Village Voice was a weekly tabloid style newspaper which focused on arts, culture, and progressive politics. It was launched in 1955 and featured contributions from various cultural luminaries over the years. In 2017, it shut down production of its print edition and now has ceased all operations.

What do you consider the most historical moments of the 20th century? I'd say the Russians raising the Soviet Union flag over the Reichstag when they conquered Berlin (damn, I so wish it was the American flag, though). Liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act. The Miracle on Ice in 1980. The Berlin Wall tumbling down. President Bill Clinton sending the first presidential email to space to Senator  John Glenn. There's obviously one more that happened in 1969. A Gallup poll from December 1999 asked the people that same question and America placing men on the moon came in at #7. I cannot imagine that feeling watching Neil Armstrong walk down the ladder and placing the American flag on the moon. ICONIC. HISTORICAL. Yeah, well, Hollywood has decided to water down history and omitted that iconic piece of history from the Neil Armstrong movie First Man.

The last time we checked on the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the group was at the center of a blue-vs-blue drama after it hired a bikini clad women to hand out non-dairy treats to the crowd at Wimbledon. Feminists were angry, claiming the organization was objectifying women. Now, in response to pressure from PETA, Mondelez International (the parent company of Nabisco), has redesigned the packaging of its Barnum's Animals crackers to "free" them from cages.
PETA, which has been protesting the use of animals in circuses for more than 30 years, wrote a letter to Mondelez in the spring of 2016 calling for a redesign.

On Sunday, the #MeToo movement received a shock when a report dropped that claimed Asia Argento, one its prominent members, allegedly sexually abused a 17-year-old male and paid him off. Argento not only denies the assault, but she has thrown her former boyfriend Anthony Bourdain under the bus and insists he paid off the accuser. Yeah, the same Bourdain that took his own life this year and is not here to defend himself.

The New York Times dropped a bombshell on Monday that revealed actress and director Asia Argento, one of the first females to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, paid off a man who accused her of sexual abuse. From the Times:
But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

Faith and family are two pillars of American culture that Democrats have worked for decades to undermine, so imagine my surprise when I read Obama's former White House Chief of Staff and current Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel making an argument for stronger faith and family values. The left, of course, is livid and think he's "blaming the victims" of the rampant violence that many parts of Chicago experience on a daily basis.  Perhaps they needn't be, however, as the cynic in me wonders if this isn't a geared response to the massive protests organized by pastors from Chicago's South and West sides.