About two weeks ago, O.J. Simpson tweeted a video tribute to Michael Jackson. The athlete who escaped conviction for the brutal slaughter of his ex-wife and her boyfriend sang the praises of the singer who escaped conviction for weaving his wealth and charm into a spider web to snare little boys for his pleasure.
Simpson told how he had had to leave his home, presumably during his 1995 murder trial. He said Jackson offered him and his two children sanctuary in the insidiously child-friendly Santa Barbara compound called Neverland.
“[Jackson] called me and said, ‘O.J., you have got to take the kids to Neverland Ranch. They’ll love it.’ And I did. And it was wondrous. The kids would come up. They would bring some of their friends.” Jackson was never there, Simpson said, “but he always had gifts for the kids.”
I’ll bet he did. Wondrous.
Truly, watching this, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The video seemed to me the ultimate expression of a generation of vipers, an age that has mistaken talent for wisdom, celebrity for authority and politics for virtue.
An (alleged) murderer celebrating an (alleged) child molester. Abandon all hope ye who enter Twitter.
This video travesty of civilization returned to my memory after the arrest of millionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein on charges of raping and pimping underage girls. I knew exactly what would happen to that story. Almost immediately, as in the aftermath of a mass shooting, the media would attempt to shape the narrative for left-wing purposes. Epstein knew Trump! Trump’s Labor Secretary cut a deal with Epstein!
The right would fight back with its voices in rebel media. Epstein was a Democrat donor! Bill Clinton took numerous trips on his private jet and made numerous visits to his private island! And while perhaps conservatives may be forgiven for acting in self-defense, they nonetheless degrade themselves to the level of the left in the effort.
Because by transforming what is a question of good and evil into a question of right and left, we are missing — maybe intentionally missing — the point.
The point is this. A vast network of rich and powerful people, men and women, straight and gay, is colluding in and normalizing the sexual abuse of children.
How do I know? The evidence is circumstantial but compelling.
In 2010, when Jeffrey Epstein finished serving his woefully short 13-month sentence for prostitution, he threw a party at his New York mansion for his pal Prince Andrew of the U.K. Who was there? According to The Daily Beast: George Stephanopolous, Katie Couric, Woody Allen, Charlie Rose, and Chelsea Handler, among others. Party for a sex abuser? Count me in!
In 2009, over 100 Hollywood bigwigs signed a petition urging the release of Roman Polanski, who was briefly threatened with justice for drugging and sodomizing a 13-year-old girl in the 1970’s. Top talent signed the petition: Woody Allen (again), Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Pedro Almodovar. The petition was circulated by Harvey Weinstein, who told the press: “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.”
In 1979, Hollywood used that Weinsteinian compass to nominate Woody Allen (again) for his screenplay for Manhattan, a movie about a 42-year-old comedy writer who dates a high school girl. In 2002, they gave convicted rapist Polanski an Oscar and a standing ovation for The Pianist. In 2008, they nominated The Reader, a film about a sympathetic Nazi woman who has sex with a 15-year-old boy. As my friend John Nolte at Breitbart has relentlessly reported, The Reader was only one of several films that year to normalize child abuse.
Director Bryan Singer has been plausibly accused of assaulting underaged boys — part of a celebrity-filled man-on-boy party scene in an Encino mansion. And yet Singer has been hired to direct some of the biggest pictures in town and was only fired from Bohemian Rhapsody when the publicity got too tough. Victor Salva became a famous director after his conviction for pedophilia. Former child actor Corey Feldman called pedophilia the “number one problem in Hollywood,” but the story, after making a little splash, went nowhere. Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood agreed with Feldman, then dialed back his remarks. “Every single high school king and queen that arrives in L.A. knows what to expect,” says one director.
The Catholic church has been rightly condemned for the institutional cover-up of widespread child abuse among the clergy. But it’s difficult not to get the impression that the church’s real sin is only that it sunk to the level of the rest of the world, that abusing children is just something powerful people do, something they consider normal, something no one — including our corrupt and highly politicized media — takes all that seriously.
If this is so — and I believe it is so — we are living in a culture so sick, so rotten, so lost that political questions need to be set aside and first questions, religious questions, need to be revisited. By all of us.
Because the truth is: there’s nothing to stop this but a culture-wide change of heart in which all good men and women of every political stripe participate. Otherwise, we could go on like this forever — or at least until the Last Judgement. After that, not so much.