Category: Celebrities

Fame Whore Update: Relationship Expert Fails and Good-Bye, ‘Reasonable’ Man

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Julia Baugher, ‘Internet Famous’ on the cover of Wired magazine, 2008.

Friday and Saturday, I worked for hours to research and write my report on “fame whore” Julia Baugher (a/k/a Julia Allison), who was once featured on national magazine covers, who appeared as a frequent guest on Fox News, who had her own Bravo reality-TV series in 2012, who has written for Cosmo, Elle, Huffington Post and other publications.

This Georgetown University alumna, who 10 years ago was the illustrious example of becoming “Internet Famous,” has left more burning bridges behind her than Sherman marching through Georgia. And while my Saturday report hit most of the highlights (and lowlights) of her biography, even 3,000 words did not suffice to encompass every noteworthy debacle in the descending spiral of this erstwhile celebrity who has outlived her 15 minutes of fame. Where to begin with collecting the remaining debris from this shipwrecked life? Well, in February 2014, Miss Baugher spoke on a journalism school panel at the University of Pennsylvania entitled “Feminism/s Presents: Sex in Journalism,” and her biographical blurb in the event program read thus:

Julia Allison, 32, is a nationally recognized journalist, relationship expert, public speaker, former BRAVO star and 2008 WIRED cover girl. She is currently at work writing her first book, Experiments in Happiness, to published Spring 2015 by St. Martin’s Press. A veteran tv commentator and host, Allison has made hundreds of appearances on CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, E!, MSNBC, VH1 and MTV, and has published several hundred articles for publications as diverse as ELLE, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, New York magazine and The New York Post, covering everything from Burning Man to Comic Con to NY Fashion Week to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as well as interviewing unconventional experts in the realm of happiness and relationships, and examining the impact of technology and social media on culture. She has spoken at conferences around the world as well as universities like MIT, Wharton, Harvard on new media, personal branding, unconventional purpose driven marketing, and hacking happiness. Allison got her start as the (sometimes controversial) dating columnist for Georgetown University when she was an undergraduate. A recovering social media addict with over 300k combined Facebook and Twitter followers, she’s lived in New York, LA, DC and Chicago. Now she lives, loves, and experiments with happiness (and a lot of yoga) in San Francisco.

Among the many items on this list, “former BRAVO star” might catch your attention. Her reality-TV series flamed out like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst after eight episodes. The premise was this: Three “relationship experts” (Miss Baugher, a freelance columnist; Emily Morse, host of a San Francisco radio show called “Sex With Emily”; and New York “executive matchmaker” Amy Laurent) would be shown doing their professional work, and also in their private lives because (ironic twist) all of them were past 30 and didn’t have relationships of their own. No husbands, no steady boyfriends — they were personally failing in the precise area of life at which they were selling themselves as “experts”!

 

Not surprisingly, like everything else in Julia Baugher’s life, the Bravo series Miss Advised ended in disappointment and failure, although she claimed to have gained valuable insights from her experience:

Julia Allison has (finally) experienced a much-needed breakthrough when it comes to love and finding Mr. Right.
“I was completely delusional,” the Miss Advised star admits to TV Guide about her search for a husband. “I thought the problem was I couldn’t find the right guy but … I had created an idea of what marriage should be based on my parents involving the suburbs, monogamy and daily routines I’m not interested in. I was setting up a situation where I’d fail.”
But that’s not the case today. “I realized I can make my own rules and I don’t have to have the relationship my parents had,” explains the Illinois native, who also learned another valuable love lesson recently — turn it down a notch.
“The skillset I have learned to utilize in my career — which is aggressive, masculine, focused, directed — that is not the energy you want to bring on a date,” says the expert on personal branding. “I was interrogating these guys and I always thought that was very charming and it was not charming to watch! There was no romantic energy. I’m starting to believe the things that make you good in a career make you bad in a relationship.”
Add one more newfound belief to the pile. “I’m starting to believe people who have chronic problems need to have a camera crew follow them. It was massively effective.”

 

Did she solve her “chronic problems”? Did the discovery that she could “make my own rules” lead her to happiness without all those “delusional” routines of suburban monogamy? Well, she’s an expert on happiness, too. Remember her book, Experiments in Happiness, which she said would be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2015? That didn’t happen.

Experiments in Happiness
How I Learned to Live a Life Filled With Love,
Creativity, Meaning…and a Little Bit of Magic
When Julia Allison — acclaimed journalist, relationship expert, and lady-about-town — set out to discover what was holding her back from happiness, she didn’t just pick up a self-help book: she wanted to write her own. Chronicling her unconventional experiments as a “guinea pig of happiness,” Allison takes readers through her journey with her characteristic charm, humor, and warmth. For anyone feeling unsettled in their hectic urban life, and for devotees of Allison’s trademark style, Experiments in Happiness is a road worth travelling on.

This “road worth travelling on” proved to be a road to nowhere.

Miss Baugher scored her book deal in September 2013, based on an 81-page proposal that included a lot of revelations about herself. Did you know that she used to have a big nose, and had not one, but two nose jobs, the first at age 19? Did you know (well, anyone could easily guess) that she “felt like an outcast, an unpopular misfit” in high school, was bulimic and, during her peak of fame circa 2007, she would “cry myself to sleep, then wake up the next day, aching with emptiness”?

Ah, but her proposal promised the cure for unhappiness, via numerous “experiments,” and it also promised interviews with all kinds of people, from Mark Zuckerberg to Tina Fey to the “Duck Dynasty” family. Her marketing proposal involved selling herself as the Happiness Expert™ with lots of media tie-ins, perhaps including a movie based on the book. Her proposal included “20 reasons this book will be a runaway bestseller” that promised a blog (“URLs . . . already registered”) aimed at “creating a worldwide following of people who are excited to evangelize and take action.” The term for this is: Bipolar, manic phase.

It never happened. Her boyfriend dumped her, she fell into a depression, turned in a manuscript that did not deliver what she’d promised in her original manic-phase proposal and, when re-writes couldn’t fix it, the publisher finally demanded she return the advance money.

The story of that debacle is highlighted by Melayna Lokosky who calls Julia Baugher “the poster child for The Sociopathic Business Model.” Ms. Lovosky is a corporate whistleblower-turned-consultant who specializes in protecting against a type of fraud where would-be entrepreneurs use exaggerated promises to attract venture capital. “Fraud fears facts,” as Ms. Lokosky says, and one way scammers seek to suppress the “negative truth” about themselves is to denigrate as “haters” any truth-teller who tries to hold them accountable. This resembles the tactics of DARVO (Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender) in which wrongdoers play the victim by maligning the motives of their accusers.

In the case of Julia Baugher, the people she calls “haters” are the operators and commenters at a blog called RebloggingDonk which has chronicled and mocked everything she’s done for years. All her failures and excuses, every attempt to “re-invent” herself — RebloggingDonk is the dossier, the archival source on Miss Baugher’s spectacular descent from Manhattan socialite to . . . well, what is she anymore?

For two years, she was a fixture on the hippie festival circuit, following around her DJ boyfriend “Rain Phutureprimitive” (a/k/a Chad McNally) but that ended last year when he decided he was into “polyamory” (a/k/a, screwing around, threesomes, orgies, etc.). In June, in a column for the New York Post, Miss Baugher said she had recently “started seeing someone I never would have dated 10 years earlier,” a guy she called “a very reasonable choice.” Guess how that turned out? Continue reading Fame Whore Update: Relationship Expert Fails and Good-Bye, ‘Reasonable’ Man →

‘Gender-Neutral Parenting’ and the Problem of Unintended Consequences

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Megan Fox and her ‘gender-neutral’ sons.

The actress Megan Fox and her husband, Brian Austin Green, have three sons, but things are a little weird at the Green-Fox household:

Growing up in the South, Fox was labeled a tomboy. When her peers were playing dolls, she was playing outside, climbing trees and getting dirty. Being called a tomboy informed her sense of self and is still present in her life.
“Much of my ego has been constructed around this idea that I’m not like most girls”, says the 31-year-old mother of three boys with husband Brian Austin Green, 44. “I’m somehow more masculine, tougher, less permeable or feminine.”

(Look, “tomboy” behavior is a phenomenon that existed long before feminism, and which certainly predates this kind of Gender Studies discourse about what “masculine” and “feminine” mean. Why do people believe that constantly jabbering on like this about “gender” signifies superior intellect or moral virtue? But please, continue . . .)

Fox is not into labeling herself or others, especially her children. The “Transformers” actress faced backlash in the press and on social media after her oldest son, Noah, now 5, was photographed wearing princess dresses.
“When I became pregnant with Noah, I could feel, through my mother’s intuition I suppose, that he was not subscribing to gender stereotypes, so I decided to provide an environment for him early on that would allow him to discover how he wanted to express himself,” she says. . . .

(OK, I’m going to rant about this at length later, but just note that Fox invokes “mother’s intuition” — a highly gendered concept — as authority for knowing that her son “was not subscribing to gender stereotypes” before he was even born! But please, continue . . .)

“If a boy loves princesses and a girl loves baseball, that’s not indicative of their sexuality,” Fox says. It’s indicative of their communication and creative expression. We can’t limit children by telling them how they should play.”
Trying to control how kids play sends them subtle, constant messages that their instincts are wrong. All those attempts to control, “will only lead them down a complicated and difficult path full of self-criticism and emptiness,” she says.
Her advice? If a child’s innocent play triggers a negative emotion, use the situation as an opportunity to expand their awareness and heal old wounds.
Fox encourages other parents to implement non-gender binary lifestyles for their children. Start by giving kids “the space to find the things that resonate with them,” she says. Then encourage them.

(Pardon me for interrupting again, but what is the basis for assuming that Megan Fox is an expert qualified to advise other parents? For all we know, 20 years from now, he children might be drug addicts or violent felons. But please, continue . . .)

For example, when a boy shows interest in painting or dancing, he should be given an art set or signed up for a dance class.
“Don’t insist on buying him a football for Christmas,” she says, explaining a child’s soul is pure and knows what feels right.
She emphasizes parents need to respect children as individuals and not try to control them.
“It’s not our job to shape them into the people we think they should be,” says Fox. “It’s our job to receive, with grace, the lessons they bring us. Children are mirrors that reflect back to us our shadow selves, our shame and our insecurities.”

(What deranged nonsense is this? It most certainly is the job of parents to shape our children “into the people we think they should be,” to equip them for success in life, to teach them proper behavior — courtesy, moral virtue, etc. — for otherwise we might as well just abandon them to foster care and let them be raised by strangers hired by the government social-services bureaucracy. But I remind myself I intend to rant about this at length later, so please continue . . .)

“I think most mothers feel a pull on their hearts to let their children be who they are but because of their own conditioning and because of their current environment they acquiesce to pressures to raise the children in a more rigid traditional way,” says Fox.
She wants other parents to know it’s okay to let kids be themselves. “If by speaking out, I can validate any of those latent feelings, any of those small whispers in a mother, then I am incredibly grateful to have used my voice for something so honorable.”

Where to begin excavating this mountain of bovine excrement?

It might help to know that (a) Megan Fox’s parents divorced when she was only 3 years old and (b) she doesn’t have any brothers. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but she’s kind of kooky. In a 2010 interview with Allure magazine, she used the F-word 24 times, described herself as afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder and said she has such a fear of germs that she won’t eat in a restaurant or use public toilets.

Promoting this notoriously neurotic woman as a parenting expert is so irresponsible that only the liberal media would think it’s a good idea.

We cannot at this time know how Megan Fox’s children will turn out, and this is a fundamental problem with any innovative theory of parenting.

It is rather easy for anyone — whether a professor or a neurotic actress — to deride “a more rigid traditional way” of raising children, to wax enthusiastic about the need for parents “to let their children be who they are,” or to praise “not subscribing to gender stereotypes.” This kind of rhetoric sounds benevolent and caring, positing an implied contrast to those bad parents who, supposedly, are forcing their children into “rigid” stereotypical gender roles, limiting their self-expression. However, we can point to functional, successful, happy, well-adjusted adults — actual living human beings — as evidence of what outcomes are likely (or at least, optimally possible) as a result of more traditional parenting. The argument for so-called “gender-neutral” parenting, on the other hand, suffers from a lack of evidence, simply because this “non-binary” approach is a recent fad among a small group of trend-conscious parents.

Megan Fox has told us why she’s raising her children in this unusual manner, avowing her idealistic goal of letting her son “discover how he wanted to express himself” — good intentions, which proverbially pave the road to Hell. The problem with any such innovation is not benevolent intentions, but unintended consequences. For more than a century, Americans have been subjected to a series of social-engineering projects that liberals have foisted upon us by via court rulings, legislation, bureaucratic regulation and the public school system. Many of these innovations have yielded obvious catastrophes (e.g., public housing projects like Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green) whereas in other cases, we have more difficulty identifying a cause-and-effect relationship between liberal good intentions and various social problems. In some cases, the catastrophic outcome still looms in the future, as with the unsustainable actuarial basis of Social Security and Medicare. Liberals may claim certain projects have “succeeded,” but conservatives must stipulate that (a) anything might “succeed” if one had many billions of dollars of taxpayer money to spend on it, (b) the beneficial outcome you claim might have been achieved by less costly policies, and (c) the whole thing could go disastrously wrong at some point in the future.

However, why must we concede that liberals always act in good faith? Liberals certainly do not extend this courtesy to their opponents. Disagree with a liberal and you’ll be accused of malign intentions — racist! sexist! homophobe! — without any evidence whatsoever. In the case of Megan Fox’s enthusiasm for “gender-neutral” parenthood, why should we suppose that her justification of this is sincere? As I’ve pointed out, Ms. Fox came from a dysfunctional family backgroound and has publicly described herself as suffering from serious psychiatric problems. She speaks of herself using therapeutic jargon, recounting a youthful “tomboy” phase as explaining why her “ego has been constructed around this idea that I’m not like most girls.” In justifying why she has publicly displayed her son wearing a princess costume, Ms. Fox speaks of her fear of leading her children “down a complicated and difficult path full of self-criticism and emptiness” — as if dressing a boy like a boy was inherently harmful. All of this suggests that Ms. Fox’s unusual parenting methods are not the result of any noble concern for her children’s well-being, but rather are an expression of her own personal frustrations, neurotic impulses and leftover resentments about her own unhappy childhood.

It is by no means a great leap of logic to guess that her son is “not subscribing to gender stereotypes” (something Ms. Fox claimed she knew before he was even born) because his mother has deliberately encouraged this behavior: Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Having a “gender-non-conforming” (GNC) child is very en vogue among a certain clique of liberals, who are perfectly willing to exploit their children as a sort of political fashion accessory: “Hey, mom, turn your son into a ‘girl’ and get your own cable-TV reality show!”

This isn’t just about transgenderism, however. Remember how creepy it was the first time you saw those photos of Jon-Benet Ramsey dolled up for kiddie beauty pageants? And who can forget the weird pedophile vibes emitted by the TLC series Toddlers and Tiaras? Or what about that popular exercise in trauma-inducing childhood, Dance Moms?

When we see children exploited as a public display for the sake of TV ratings or to satisfy some weird parental whim, our common sense tells us that this is wrong. It may be legal, and it may even be popular or fashionable among certain people, but we ought to trust our gut instinct that there is something basically wrong about TV shows like I Am Jazz or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Whatever justifications are offered to rationalize this kind of programming, it offends our sense of human dignity that parents would permit their children to be exhibited like carnival sideshow freaks for the amusement of a TV audience. We expect bad things to result, both for the young reality-TV “stars” themselves, and also among viewers, a consequence of the “monkey-see-monkey-do” effect as such programming serves to normalize deviant behavior.

Liberals expect us to believe that Megan Fox’s son Noah just “wanted to express himself” by wearing a princess costume in public, and to believe that more boys would do this if parents weren’t afraid to “let their children be who they are.” We are also expected to remain silent while we are lectured by this self-declared parenting expert, rather than to express our common-sense hunch that this child’s abnormal behavior is being actively encouraged by his abnormal mom.

Here’s a question: If the only reason boys exhibit masculine behavior is because parents raise them in “a more rigid traditional way,” why is it wrong to believe that Megan Fox’s son exhibits effeminate behavior because of how his mother has raised him? That is to say, doesn’t her own explanation of how she thinks traditional parenthood operates imply that Ms. Fox has deliberately trained her son to be effeminate?

Parents shouldn’t buy their son a football for Christmas, Ms. Fox tells us. Why not? She doesn’t really explain that, does she? Where is the evidence that you are harming your son by getting him a football for Christmas? The parenting “expert” Megan Fox offers us no such evidence, even while expecting us to believe that it is entirely harmless for her to take her son out in public wearing a princess costume. Common sense tells us that there is something deceptive about these claims.

Skepticism is not paranoia. As a general rule, it is correct to suppose that abnormal behavior doesn’t emerge randomly in children, but rather is symptomatic of some disturbance in the normal developmental process. Something has gone awry in Megan Fox’s son’s life, but in a liberal community like Hollywood, it’s doubtful that social workers at Child Protective Services would intervene in this case. In fact, given how widely the idea of “gender-neutral parenting” is now promoted in academia, you’d be more likely to be reported to Child Protective Services in California if you were raising your son to be normal.

“Hello? . . . Yeah, there’s a family in my neighborhood who are stifling their children’s self-expression. . . . Well, I’ve noticed the boy spends a lot of time playing football, and they’ve got a little girl who always wears dresses. It must be abuse!”

The decadent cultural elite — including academics, journalists and Hollywood liberals like Megan Fox — have embraced a worldview where normal behavior is stigmatized, and perversion is celebrated.



 

Fear and Loathing in a Highgate Mansion: Johnny Depp Is Decadent and Depraved

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Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in 2003 (left) and as a loser in 2018 (right).

If you haven’t read Rolling Stone‘s 10,000-word profile of Johnny Depp, I can summarize it briefly: He’s wrecked. He’s ruined. The Pirates of the Caribbean star has utterly destroyed his career and reputation, and is rapidly approaching financial ruin. The drug-addled 55-year-old actor is living out a 21st-century version of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.

Do you realize that the five Pirates films grossed a combined $4.5 billion? And that Depp’s cut of that gold mine was $600 million? Basic arithmetic tells you that Depp was making $40 million a year — about $750,000 a week — for more than a decade, and there is no logical explanation for why he should be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy now, except for the unfortunate fact that Johnny Depp is a fool. When he first starred as Jack Sparrow, Depp was 40 and had been a celebrity for almost 20 years. He became a teen idol in the late 1980s for his role on the TV series 21 Jump Street, and it’s bizarre to compare the pathetic wreck Depp has become to the handsome young star whose face was once a pinup on the bedroom walls of nearly every 14-year-old girl in America.

Johnny Depp as a teen magazine pinup idol in 1988.

What happened to Johnny Depp? It’s a long and sordid story. Rolling Stone reporter Stephen Rodrick spent three days interviewing Depp at the mansion the actor is renting in London’s Highgate neighborhood, and found Depp mired in self-pity, bitterly scapegoating others for a series of personal and financial misfortunes that are actually his own fault.

Depp is suing his former business manager, accusing Joel Mandel’s firm of swindling him out money. The lawsuit itself was evidence of Depp’s bad judgment because, by suing Mandel’s firm, he gave them a pretext to countersue. When the press got hold of their complaint, detailing the prodigal extravagance of the actor’s lifestyle, the result was a devastating public-relations disaster for Depp, who was already radioactive because of his nasty 2016 divorce from actress Amber Heard. One of the little details Rodrick captures is that one of Depp’s tattoos has been recently altered from “SLIM” (his nickname for Heard) to “SCUM.”

Amber Heard was Mrs. Johnny Depp just long enough to destroy him.

Never marry a bisexual. Excuse me for saying that, but Depp’s marriage to the openly bisexual Heard certainly isn’t the first example of a discernible pattern — guy with a kinky streak marries a bisexual woman thinking he’s found the gold mine of sexual adventure, only to discover that “bisexual” is a synonym for emotionally disturbed.

As a young man, Johnny Depp cut quite a swath through Hollywood, dating actress Winona Ryder and supermodel Kate Moss before settling down in 1998 with French actress Vanessa Paradis, with whom he had two children, Lily-Rose and Jack. In 2006, Depp credited fatherhood with helping him hit his stride as an actor. “You have to have some sort of legacy in truth and honesty that you leave to your kiddies and the people you love,” he said in an interview after the release of the second Pirates film, saying fatherhood gave him a “real foundation, a real strong place to stand in life, in work, in everything.”

Five years later, Depp threw that foundation away. Heard was cast as Depp’s romantic interest in The Rum Diary, based on Hunter S. Thompson’s early novel about his dissolute life as a young reporter in Puerto Rico. Since Depp was executive producer of the movie, obviously he must have approved Heard for that role and, if he was casting his new girlfriend, so to speak, he certainly had an excellent eye for beauty.

Beware of pretty faces that you find.
A pretty face can hide an evil mind. . . .
Odds are you won’t live to see tomorrow.

The lyrics of that old R&B hit might have saved Johnny Depp a world of woe and a lot of money. The plot of The Rum Diary has Depp’s character stealing Heard’s character away from her fiancé, a real-estate developer who is also his boss, which is rather ironic, in retrospect.

Amber Heard was only 22 when she starred with Depp in The Rum Diary.

When filming of The Rum Diary began in 2009, Heard was not yet 23, and Johnny Depp was 45, although he was playing a much younger character. (Thompson was 24 when he wrote the novel.) Heard was a lapsed Catholic girl from Texas who had become an atheist libertarian and a lesbian — or, at least, a lesbian’s girlfriend. In 2008, Heard became the lover of L.A. photographer Tasya van Ree, a woman 10 years her senior. This could not have been a secret to Johnny Depp. Heard publicly “came out” in 2010 at a gay media gala in Hollywood:

I think when I became aware of my role in the media, I had to ask myself an important question “Am I part of the problem?” And I think that when millions and millions of hard-working, tax paying Americans are denied their rights and denied their equality you have to ask yourself what are the factors that are an epidemic problem and that’s what this is. Injustice can never be stood for. It always must be fought against and I just was sick of it being a problem. . . .
I think that the injustice of people staying in the closet is more than I can bear with a clear conscience and I couldn’t sleep at night if I was a part of that problem, if I was part of the lies.
I personally think that if you deny something or if you hide something you’re inadvertently admitting it’s wrong. I don’t feel like I’m wrong. I don’t feel like millions of people are wrong because they love who they love or they were born how they were born. I’m proud to be on the right side of history and I can do nothing more than encourage people to look at their lives and ask “What side of history am I on? Am I doing the right thing or am I doing the wrong thing?”

Oh, no, “the right side of history”!

If her atheism and bisexuality were not enough to warn any man to avoid Amber Heard, that phrase should have been the final deal-breaker. Never date anyone who thinks they’re on “the right side of history.”

Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot — totalitarians always claim to “be on the right side of history,” as Johnny Depp was about to learn.

What was Johnny thinking when he decided to abandon the mother of his two children to take up with a girl half his age who’d been dating a lesbian since she was 22? Well, of course, he wasn’t thinking at all, at least not with the frontal lobes of his cerebral cortex.

Feminists insist that human sexual behavior is “socially constructed,” as if nothing as simple as primal urges could be involved. The thin veneer of civilization which restrains humanity’s animal instincts is more fragile than some allegedly enlightened intellectuals would have us believe. What do we expect to happen when a former teen idol who has made a fortune playing a pirate — by definition, an outlaw — encounters a beautiful young atheist lesbian who considers her sexuality a political statement about being on “the right side of history”?

 

“Don’t do it, Johnny!” the ghostly voice of Hunter S. Thompson might have been heard warning Depp. “Can’t you see that girl is crazy? She’s as decadent and depraved as Churchill Downs on Derby Day!”

Alas, Depp didn’t heed any voices of caution, ghostly or otherwise. Basic common sense, or the lyrics of that 1966 Johnny Rivers song, should have been enough to tell him that Amber Heard was just poison in a pretty package, but when a guy’s making $40 million a year, he probably figures he can afford to take a long-shot gamble like that. Depp, who had never bothered to marry the mother of his children, dumped her for Heard in 2012, and the couple were married in February 2015. All the omens of the Depp-Heard romance were bad from the start. The Rum Diary was a box-office disaster, panned by critics and ignored by audiences, earning barely half the $45 million it cost to produce. Depp’s marriage to Heard lasted barely a year. She filed for divorce in May 2016, and in December of that year, Heard publicly accused Depp of domestic violence.

She’s on “the right side of history,” remember?

It’s as if a terrible curse has befallen Johnny Depp:

Over the past 18 months, there has been little but bad news for Depp. In addition to the financial woes, there were reports he couldn’t remember his lines and had to have them fed to him through an earpiece. He had split from his longtime lawyer and agent. And he was alone. His tabloid-scarred divorce from actress Heard is complete, but not before there were persuasive allegations of physical abuse that Depp vehemently denies. Depp’s inner circle had begged him to not wed Heard or to at least obtain a prenup. Depp ignored his loved ones’ advice. And there were whispers that Depp’s recreational drug and alcohol use were crippling him.
During my London visit, Depp is alternately hilarious, sly and incoherent. The days begin after dark and run until first light. There is a scared, hunted look about him. Despite grand talks about hitting the town, we never leave the house. As Depp’s mind leads us down various rabbit holes, I often think of a line that he recited as the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland: “Have I gone mad?”

You can read the rest of that sad tale, and if you have sons — I’ve got four of them — you should send it to them via email or Facebook, as a warning of what horrors might await them, should they ever be foolish enough to think they can live like a Caribbean pirate in real life.

Captain Jack Sparrow is now shipwrecked, and probably doomed beyond all hope of redemption. Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum.



 

 

Another Dead Cishet White Male

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If you are a heterosexual white man, feminists want you to die. So you can be sure that Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman and all their man-hating supporters are cheerfully celebrating the suicide of CNN’s celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain:

Chef Anthony Bourdain was found dead in his hotel room in Paris, by a close friend. CNN has reported that the cause of death was suicide. He was 61 years old. . . .
The announcement of Bourdain’s death, so soon after the suicide of Kate Spade, follows a report from the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) that the U.S. Suicide Rate has increased over the past twenty years. According to the study, not only have the rates of suicide “increased in nearly every state over the past two decades” but in half of those states, the rates have gone up “more than 30 percent.”
Suicide has accounted for 45,000 deaths in 2016, according to the CDC, which is what prompted the CDC division in Atlanta to investigate the rates of suicide from 1999 to 2016. . . .

Consider this: From 1992 to 2012, Democrats won four of six presidential elections, controlling the White House for 16 out of 24 years, interrupted only by the eight-year tenure of G.W. Bush. If many people now feel that life in America is not worth living, maybe there’s a reason why. It’s not just a matter of who wins or loses elections, or which party possesses the governing majority. What has happened is that the remorseless expansion of the bureaucratic Welfare State slowly drains meaning and purpose from the private lives of individuals. An idolatry of power takes hold in the public mind, so that government replaces God as the source of moral value, and the individual is diminished to insignificance.

Does any of this explain the suicide of any particular person? Probably not, but there is a social trend, you see, that can be traced by many different metrics — more divorces and fewer babies, increasing numbers of fatherless households, drug addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, etc. — indicating a downward slide into decadence and depravity.

We do not know why Anthony Bourdain hanged himself at the luxurious Le Chambard hotel, while so many other people without fame and fortune choose every day to keep living amid poverty and obscurity, struggling to survive against the odds. What inspired Bourdain’s despair?

While accepting the Peabody award in 2013, Bourdain described how he approached his work.
“We ask very simple questions: What makes you happy? What do you eat? What do you like to cook? And everywhere in the world we go and ask these very simple questions,” he said, “we tend to get some really astonishing answers.”
Bourdain was twice divorced. He was married to Ottavia Busia from 2007 to 2016 and Nancy Putkoski from 1985 to 2005.
He leaves behind one daughter, Ariane, whom he had with Busia.
The celebrity chef was dating Italian actress Asia Argento — who has accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault and has since become one of his most vocal victims.
Bourdain recently gushed over Argento’s explosive speech about Weinstein and sexual harassment in the film industry at Cannes Film Festival, according to Vulture.
“It was absolutely fearless to walk right into the lion’s den and say what she said, the way she said it. It was an incredibly powerful moment, I thought,” he said. “I am honored to know someone who has the strength and fearlessness to do something like that.”

“What makes you happy?” Bourdain asked, but apparently nothing ever truly made him happy. He had everything, but it was not enough.

He was a heterosexual white man — a possessor of “privilege” — and his death will no doubt bring happiness to the wicked hearts of feminists.

There is something about being hated by bad people that should give us hope, and inspire our determination to survive just one more day. When evil people quite literally want you dead (and that’s what feminism’s anti-male agenda is about) every day you keep living is a victory.

Y’know, if you can just hang on until Nov. 6, it’s possible Donald Trump and the Republicans can turn back the “red wave” in the mid-terms. This would break the hearts of every feminist who wants Nancy Pelosi to take back the Speaker’s gavel so Democrats can impeach the President.

Consider that in late December, Democrats held a 13-point edge (49.1% to 36.1%) in the so-called “generic” congressional ballot. By June 1, that advantage had faded to barely 3 points (43.0% to 39.8%), and the economic news lately is so good as to defy all expectations. There is every reason to hope that the evening of Nov. 6 will be a crushing disappointment to Jessica Valenti and her hateful allies, and don’t you want to live to see them crying the tears of unfathomable sadness?

Your satanic enemies want you dead. Therefore defy the Devil, and live.

 

Latest #MeToo Target: Morgan Freeman

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What? You thought Oscar-winning elderly black men were exempt?

A young production assistant thought she had landed the job of her dreams when, in the summer of 2015, she started work on “Going In Style,” a bank heist comedy starring Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin.
But the job quickly devolved into several months of harassment, she told CNN. She alleges that Freeman subjected her to unwanted touching and comments about her figure and clothing on a near-daily basis. Freeman would rest his hand on her lower back or rub her lower back, she said.
In one incident, she said, Freeman “kept trying to lift up my skirt and asking if I was wearing underwear.” He never successfully lifted her skirt, she said — he would touch it and try to lift it, she would move away, and then he’d try again. Eventually, she said, “Alan [Arkin] made a comment telling him to stop. Morgan got freaked out and didn’t know what to say.”
Freeman’s alleged inappropriate behavior was not limited to that one movie set, according to other sources who spoke to CNN. A woman who was a senior member of the production staff of the movie “Now You See Me” in 2012 told CNN that Freeman sexually harassed her and her female assistant on numerous occasions by making comments about their bodies. . . .
At 80 years old, Freeman is one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, with a movie career that spans nearly five decades. His starring roles in movies like “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Shawshank Redemption” in the late 1980s and early 1990s made him a household name. He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for 2004’s “Million Dollar Baby,” and has earned four other Oscar nominations. . . .
In all, 16 people spoke to CNN about Freeman as part of this investigation, eight of whom said they were victims of what some called harassment and others called inappropriate behavior by Freeman. Eight said they witnessed Freeman’s alleged conduct.

Well, he didn’t drug them and rape them, as far as we know, nor has anyone (yet) alleged that Freeman masturbated in front of women, but there is no scale of wrongdoing in the Sexual Harassment Apocalypse — no standards of evidence, no due-process, no statute of limitations. Just one allegation by one accuser would be enough to destroy any man’s reputation and livelihood. Eight women? Sorry, Mr. Freeman.

Your career is over. How’s that #Resistance workin’ out for ya?



 

#CPAC2018: Fighting for Freedom

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
There was an epic moment here at CPAC when Dana Loesch called out the “legacy media” for their coverage of the Parkland massacre:

National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch said Thursday that members of the media “love mass shootings” because it provides high ratings.
“Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it,” Loesch said when addressing a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. “I’m not saying that you love the tragedy, but I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media.” . . .
“There are thousands of grieving black mothers in Chicago every weekend and you don’t see town halls for them, do you? Where’s the CNN town hall for Chicago? Where’s the CNN town hall for sanctuary cities?” Loesch said. “… If it bleeds it leads, but it has to be the right people from the right communities at the right time.”
Loesch said that much of the conversation in the wake of last week’s shooting has centered around the need to ban assault rifles, but said often times when mass shootings occur, law enforcement including the FBI misses red flags that would’ve prevented the gunmen involved from purchasing firearms.
“We will not be gaslighted into thinking that we’re responsible for a tragedy that we had nothing to do with,” Loesch said of the NRA. “It is not our job to follow up on red flags. It is not our job to make sure that states are reporting to the background check system. It is not our job. A failure of law enforcement is not a failure of the law. It is a failure of enforcement.”

Watch it on video (beginning at 1:55):

 

Seven years ago, in Tampa, Florida, Dana explained to me the tattoo on her arm — Ephesians 6:12-13 — and she fights with the “whole armour.”

In the past 24 hours, the hashtag #TweetYourNRAMembership went viral on Twitter, and I decided to pay $40 and join the NRA, which is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.

Meanwhile, on another front, my friend and former co-defendant John Hoge and I have decided to start a podcast — The Other Podcast, we’re calling it — and we make our debut tonight at 7 p.m. ET.



 

 

No, Our Boys Are Not ‘Broken’

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Talk about “toxic masculinity” interests me, because I know very well what that looks like — the domineering behavior of the brittle ego, the obnoxious braggart who feels that every social encounter is a contest in which he must demonstrate his superiority. Nobody likes a bully, and if the critics of “toxic masculinity” were serious about addressing such problems, I would be happy to suggest experience-based solutions.

Michael Ian Black is a comedian who hates Donald Trump and who used the Parkland shooting as a pretext to launch a Twitter lecture about masculinity that was, in fact, irrelevant to what happened last week. The shooter in Parkland was psychologically disturbed, the product of an unusual family background. He was adopted at age 2 by a middle-aged couple. His adoptive father died when he was 5, and his mother died last year. The shooter was diagnosed with depression, autism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. To make such an obviously damaged person — who was recognized by school officials and his fellow students as having profound personal problems — symbolic of an allegedly pervasive “crisis in masculinity” is not a logical inference.

 

As I said yesterday, the Parkland massacre raises “serious questions about adolescent mental health — why were so many red flags about this teenager’s dangerous behavior ignored?” However, the media avoid these questions, instead offering formulaic liberal “solutions” while ignoring evidence that such “solutions” are part of the problem:

Broward County used to lead the state of Florida in sending students to the state’s juvenile justice system. County leaders responded with a perfectly progressive solution: “lower arrests by not making arrests.” . . . One particular motivation behind programs like Broward County’s was the pressure from multiple sources to reduce the statistical disparity between black and Hispanic student arrests on one hand and white and Asian student arrests on the other. . . .
By virtue of his name alone, Nikolas de Jesús Cruz, the adopted son of Lynda and Roger Cruz, became a statistical Hispanic. As such, authorities at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland had every reason not to report his troubling and likely criminal behavior to the police.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Whatever policy changes might be suggested in response to the Parkland massacre, the liberals who caused the problem have discredited themselves as a source of “solutions.” Yet the media continue to pretend that liberals have a monopoly on wisdom, so that Michael Ian Black’s Twitter rant earned him an interview on NPR:

What do I mean by boys are broken? I think it means that there is something going on with American men that is giving them the permission and space to commit violence. And one of the main things we focus on correctly is guns and mental health, but I think deeper than that is a problem, a crisis in masculinity. . . .

(Question: Was the ISIS-inspired Orlando gunman Omar Mateen, whose family is from Afghanistan, part of “something going on with American men”? Or what about Syed Rizwan Farook, perpetrator of the San Bernardino massacre? Why is it that only “American men” are considered appropriate subjects of discussion about a “crisis in masculinity”? But please continue your lecture, Mr. Black.)

I also think that masculinity doesn’t have a language in the way that femininity has come to have a language. We understand that femininity can be much more broadly encompassing than masculinity now. When you think of a strong woman, that doesn’t rob her of any of her femininity. But when you think of a fragile man, that has the effect culturally, I think, of neutering that guy. And so much of masculinity is rooted in sexuality. . . .

Blah, blah, blah — it’s the same tired old Freudian nonsense, recycled in the jargon of postmodern feminist “social justice” wokeness. Stuart Schneiderman is not deceived by such rhetoric:

If leftists believe that feminism is the solution, the truth is that feminism is the problem. If you ask who broke boys or why boys are broken, you might turn to Christina Hoff Sommers’ book The War Against Boys.
Thanks the feminist schoolteachers, in particular, boys have been beaten down at school.

One of the most important aspects of healthy masculinity is that a good man must be able to endure pain, to shrug off insults, and to avoid complaining about his suffering. When I’d take my sons on mountain hikes, the younger ones would sometimes get tired and start whining. “There is no crying on the Bataan Death March,” I’d say, and tell them about how soldiers survived that brutal ordeal. Also, I’d point out to them that the greatest triumph of Muhammad Ali’s career was a fight he lost, when Ken Norton broke his jaw, and yet Ali still went the distance, fighting on to finish the 12th round and lose a split decision. Take the pain and keep going — that’s what a man has to do.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

“Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”

“I don’t believe in God. How can I say the Pledge of Allegiance if I don’t believe in God?”
— Michael Ian Black

Michael Ian Black is an atheist, and thus lacks the wisdom necessary to advise anyone about anything, especially about “the duty of man.”

As a child, I was taught to “turn the other cheek,” to resist the temptation to wrath, because “vengeance is mine . . . saith the Lord.” Mercy ought not to be confused with weakness, and only “the fear of the Lord” can make a man truly courageous. Knowing that “the wrath of God” is directed against the “unrighteousness of men” should inspire in us a spirit of humility, because “the judgment of God” condemns us all: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

The Rev. Billy Graham died today at age 99, and I think his ministry was far more helpful in teaching non-toxic masculinity than anything a Hollywood liberal like Michael Ian Black might say. Being conscious of our own sinful nature, and our need for divine mercy, is the only possible solution to every evil temptation in our lives. While probably few of my acquaintances would say I am a good Christian, I married a godly woman, who never ceases praying and who has been a tremendous force for good in the lives of all our children. It is an insult — and one I deeply resent — for Michael Ian Black to suggest that my sons are “broken,” trapped inside a “rigid, outdated model of masculinity.” Oh, really?

Godless atheists like Michael Ian Black know they can insult Christians — disparaging even honorable men like my son — because they know that “the fear of the Lord,” and a concern for doing “the whole duty of man,” requires us to “turn the other cheek.” Yet the truth has not changed in the past 2,000 years, and when hateful degenerates like Michael Ian Black mock God, they invite God’s wrath against themselves. Selah.



 

 

Guys: Don’t Date Abby Nierman

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When I wrote a long article about “Grace,” the 22-year-old who accused comedian Aziz Ansari of sexual assault, I guessed from textual clues that she was a student at New York University, an elite private school where the annual cost of attendance is $68,128. A rich girl, right?

Wrong. In fact, my guesswork was unnecessary, as “Grace” had already been identified as Abby Nierman, who attended a community college in northern Illinois before enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2016. Also, I had guessed that “Grace” was very good-looking, because she attended the 2017 Emmy awards as someone’s date:

If you’ve got tickets to the Emmys, do you invite an ugly girl as your date? No, of course not. We can assume Grace is quite a looker, and one with lots of Daddy’s money.

Talk about getting it wrong! It’s embarrassing to admit how badly wrong I was, but let this be a lesson: Speculation is not journalism.

So instead of being a spoiled-rotten Daddy’s girl attending a $68,128-a-year elite school, she’s the ambitious small-town striver who worked her way through a trade school with a variety of jobs. And while I don’t wish to derogate her looks, she’s not magazine-cover beautiful.

 

Abby Nierman attended the Emmys as the date of Ibanda Ruhumbika, who plays tuba in the band on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” And that’s why guys should be warned: Don’t date Abby Nierman. She went to the show with Ruhumbika, but during the after-party, she was making eyes at Aziz Ansari across the room. She eventually gave Ansari her phone number, which is how she ended up going on a date with him a few weeks later. Mick Jagger wrote a song about girls like her:

 

All classic rock-and-roll songs are now “rape culture,” of course, but what are we to surmise from Abby Nierman’s behavior? Aziz Ansari probably figured, “Well, if she dates tuba players . . .”

Readers may have noticed that Ms. Nierman’s feminism is, as the Gender Studies majors would say, intersectional. Free-speech advocates might defend the use of some other adjectives (and perhaps a few derisive nouns) to describe Ms. Nierman, but really, why give the SPLC any further pretext to accuse us of Thoughtcrime? Let’s just say she’s a “composite” girlfriend and leave it at that. However, others haven’t been so reticent or tactful in criticizing Ms. Nierman’s intersectional feminism: “How a White Woman Destroyed a Brown Actor’s Name.”

You forgot to include the word “trash,” sir. I’ll notify the SPLC.