In his book The Moral Center, David Callahan writes
In a strange way, religious traditionalists and liberal idealists are in the same boat. Both are increasingly powerless to shape the culture. None of the restraints on moral behavior imagined by the left or right have succeeded in an age of turbo-charged global capitalism. Today it is private actors—developers, corporations, entertainment conglomerates, advertising firms, technology companies—who often determine how people live, and more important, what they value. In general, these actors increase their bottom line by fanning our impulses toward personal gratification and individual autonomy. They work at odds with such quaint notions of self-restraint and duty to others.
These days it’s easy to get caught up in the “culture war" talk. And make no mistake: the polarization between traditionalists and modernists is real. But there is another rift in America that we need to think about. It is between the Cares and the Care-Nots. Cares worry about the spread of self-interested behavior and the misfortunes of others, and they want to do something about it..The Care-Nots, in contrast, are insular and self-absorbed. Many have embraced the logic of self-interest as a way of life.
Put a another way, the corporate-controlled media feeds the masses a fattening diet of whatever they believe will keep their attentions away from their efforts to lead the country to self-destruction merely for their own short-term profit, providing millions in gratuities to Supreme Court justices like Thomas and Alito to insure the courts don’t get in their way. While Fox News delivers “opinions” which it sells to its listeners as “facts,” the equally corporate-controlled “liberal” media spends most of its time refuting far-right propaganda instead of offering "alternatives."
Both the “right” and the “left” have their “issues” of self-interest, but that of the “left” has not only not been called out for what it is, but its myths and conspiracies in the realm of "culture" is just as actively pursued and allowed to spread and perpetuate like a virus, with the vaccine of truth withheld to make you too sick to respond, unless you want more of it injected into you and make you even more ill.
For example, I have made it no secret of my belief that I see little difference between MAGAmania and the “MeToo” movement insofar as they are principally motivated, regardless of their level of credibility, by power and how it can be utilized for maximalist effect to harm people for real or “re-remembered” grievances, and the need for “retribution.”
Let’s take the case of shock-rocker Brian Warner aka Marilyn Manson. I’ve talked about this before, but recent news story coming out of the UK suggests that many people are not up-to-date on the present state of the accusations against him. We have been told that a Manson concert was cancelled in Brighton, and that his music video made especially for a tribute to Black Sabbath in its “final show” was not taken “well” by those who thought he should have attended the event in person.
Commentary mainly focused on the accusations of Evan Rachel Wood and those who joined her parade. I didn’t really have an opinion on the case when it first came up, but the Johnny Depp trial, in which Amber Heard was found guilty by a Virginia jury of defaming him with “actual malice” with apparently false accusations of abuse (I’ve talked about this before) established a precedent to not “believe all women”—especially one who had the incredible audacity to insist on telling obvious lies when telling the truth would not have hurt her, such as concerning the “donations.”
By insisting on such lies, Heard had only herself to blame for her credibility to be completely shot with the jury and most of public opinion. Today, Depp’s “reputation” is largely restored (you saw all those supporters at his trial, as opposed to virtually none who bothered to show up to support Heard), and while Depp has returned to “work,” Heard is living off child support for another one of Elon Musk’s “kids,” at least of the surrogate mother variety with his implanted sperm.
Unlike with Depp where most people on social media (as opposed to the mainstream media held in the political grip of gender activism) supported him and had plenty of reason to do so as the trial progressed as Heard’s false claims and “evidence” were exposed, YouTuber Colonel Kurtz was virtually alone in her public defense of Manson against the accusations made against him, although there were others who claimed not to have an opinion on the case but were “curious” about the Colonel’s open defiance of what was generally “understood”—or what was politically forced on people to believe.
My own “contribution” to the defense of Manson was a “Wow, I didn’t know about that” response from commenters on one of her posts about something that was claimed about Wood a decade earlier and six years before she and her co-conspirator Ilma Gore—yeah, that Ilma Gore who deployed her body for "art"…
..,or anything if it pays…
…cooked-up a new “explanation” for it, that the Colonel herself wasn’t aware of. In 2014, Lindy West wrote a post in the feminist website Jezebel about the breakup of Wood and her husband, Jamie Bell, who was also the father of her son. The post has since been deleted, but I had already saved the webpage for reference, and the proof of its existence is right here in these screen captures:
The author of the piece offered her own subtle estimation of the character of Wood:
It should be noted that Wood was forced by a California judge to give up custody of her son last year because of her mental health issues that involved conspiracies and fabricated evidence like that fake FBI letter to justify her kidnapping of the son to Tennessee.
Note also that Manson wasn't mentioned in the article, and we have to wonder how "very edgy" devolved into "sexual assault." I suspect that Wood found out about the article and convinced Jezebel’s editors to delete it because it put a much different “spin” on her and her co-conspirators accusations against Manson, which involved allegedly being “forced” to engage in sexually “explicit” music videos against their will, which they deemed in retrospect as “sexual assault.” These accusations were made a decade after these videos were made, and Wood's "activism" helped convince the California legislature to pass a law that extended the statute of limitations specifically for such "crimes."
Of course the problem that the Los Angeles DA had to face was that many of the "accusations" were simply responses to a "quesitonnaire" cooked-up by Wood and Gore to women who had any kind of contact with Manson, and that many of the accusations were put in the mouths of women who not only denied that they felt “victimized” by Manson, among them Paz de le Huerta, Dita von Teese, and Ashley Smithline, that latter who backtracked on her initial accusation, claiming that she had been pressured by Wood and her associates to make a false claim against Manson.
There were also “witnesses” to the alleged assaults who made statements to investigators (and appeared on the Colonel’s YouTube channel) that contradicted the claims, asserting that the alleged victims not only were not “coerced” but seemed completely at “ease” with their “performances” that only later became personally "embarrassing" for them. Other accusers were “groupies” who chose to redefine their rationalization for hanging out with famous rock musicians who thought it fit their "persona" to act contrary to their youthful religious training.
But it only took a relative handful of people who had their voices multiplied by a few thousand times at those UK events to drown out the fact that this past January, with almost no "fanfare" and largely ignored by the mainstream media, the Los Angeles DA's office announced that
We have determined that allegations of domestic violence fall outside of the statute of limitations, and we cannot prove charges of sexual assault beyond a reasonable doubt.
Funny how that really didn’t make the mainstream media rounds. But it certainly served to make the Colonel happy that she was “right” about Wood and her fellow accusers whose support appeared to be cultish in nature:
Of course the district attorney, Nathan Hochman, was too cowardly to further explain more in depth why the accusations against Manson “could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt,” instead holding a press conference with another one of the discredited accusers and insisting that he still “believed” them.
We recognize and applaud the courage and resilience of the women who came forward to make reports and share their experiences, and we thank them for their cooperation and patience with the investigation, While we are unable to bring charges in this matter, we recognize that the strong advocacy of the women involved has helped bring greater awareness to the challenges faced by survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault.
The DA’s announcement came after the case brought by his former personal assistant, Ashley Walters, was allowed to move forward after previously being dismissed for "too few facts to have this complaint in court." Her accusations against Manson sound "bad," but they are mainly a compendium of gofer “abuse” and throwing an object or two at people.
Although the original dismissal also pointed out that the accusation was even outside the new law extending the statute of limitations, it was reinstated on appeal, since a new set of judges accepted Walters claim that her “repressed memories” prevented her from “remembering” the “bad” things Manson had allegedly done to her until recently, and thus the statute of limitations should reflect that.
This despite one of the judges, perhaps in a “joking” and not serious mood, wondered if they were to accept as “true” all “allegations,” no matter how improbable, implying that Manson was an “alien abductor”:
I mean, what if the plaintiff alleges ‘I suppressed it for 10 years because I was abducted by aliens, and the aliens controlled my mind, and therefore I had no ability to remember, and when I finally escaped from the aliens, it all came back to me.’ Do we have to accept something like that is true?
The problem for Manson of course is that he is low-hanging fruit for accusations of abuse even if he isn’t technically guilty of it because of his weird persona and people who are not fans of “shock-rockers”—or heavy metal music in general—think there is something “wrong” with these musicians psychologically, so they are capable of “anything.” People like Manson think it must be "cool" to deliberately live their lives like “alien beings”…
…quite unlike that of “normal” people. And there are "fans" who find this kind of existence “cool” and something “different” from the “normal,” boring existence—especially when someone else is paying for it.
Of course I could be “wrong” about all of this; after all, Sean “Diddy” Combs was convicted of “transportation to engage in prostitution” and Danny Masterson from That 70s Show was convicted of rape against fellow Scientologists, but when the testimony against the accused seems motivated for vindictive reasons (in the case of Depp, in retaliation against his intention to end his toxic relationship with Heard, just as Heard’s relationship with Musk ended amidst screaming matches initiated by Heard, according to that Musk bio book), we shouldn’t be throwing due process out with the bathwater simply because gaslighting is so easy.
Gaslighting the country with false claims is something that Trump and his spokespeople like Bondi, Leavitt and McLaughlin are tasked to do every day to the American people to justify this administration’s racism and cruelty toward immigrants, whose principle crime is that they are supporting the country’s economy that “100 percent Americans” will not do, even those “able-bodied” people on Medicaid. The question then is does anyone "care," especially when one is bullied not to care what the truth is.
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