FLASHBACK: HUGH HEFNER, GANGSTA RAP & THE EMERGING MORAL MAJORITY. “Moral concerns pop up one decade in right-wing clothes, and, in the next, change into another outfit,” Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote at the end of last month in NRO when Hef left the Playboy mansion for the last time. With Glenn asking “If people realize the system is exploitative and inhuman, will they still watch movies?”, in USA Today regarding Harvey Weinstein, it’s premise that is also worth re-exploring today:

But as angels sang Hugh Hefner toward his final reward, whatever that may be, I realized very few believe Hefner’s overall effect on the culture was positive. And the anger at him was especially strong on the left. Hef’s pushing of Quaaludes on his “girlfriends” was well-documented going back to the 1970s. (So was Bill Cosby’s. In some rumor mills, the Kennedy family’s use of “poppers” lives on.) But fresher reports about Hefner’s abusive behavior, ornamented with decidedly embarrassing and unsexy details, have circulated in recent years. And he got far more of the “Good Riddance” treatment than any social conservative could have expected ten or even 15 years ago.

If you look for it, you see signs everywhere. A recent, and largely well-done, HBO documentary on the parallel careers of music producer Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre was noticeably squeamish about the details of the early 1990s “gangsta rap” scene. Conservative moral figures such as Bill Bennett and Tipper Gore were trotted out and given a perfunctory whipping for their role in trying to suppress the free expression of artists. But the subjects of the documentary showed little hints of remorse, embarrassment, or shame at their treatment of women, their friends, and the law itself. In the one truly plaintive moment, Jimmy Iovine recalls that, amid the violence between East and West Coast rappers and after Snoop Dogg’s arrest in connection with a murder, he stopped to ask himself, “Am I standing up for free speech, or was I funding Hamas?”

Of course, none of the violence or misogyny troubled the gangsta rappers enough to give back all the money they made and dedicate their lives to moral improvement and uplift. Slowly, however, the elite of our culture seem to be drifting toward a new, far-more jaundiced and suspicious view of popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Read the whole thing. As I wrote yesterday, the emergence of Weinstein’s depravity casts the nihilism and moral relativism on display in some of his biggest films of the past 25 years in a new light. Or perhaps vice-versa: as with Woody Allen after Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanors, we shouldn’t be very surprised at the numerous allegations now facing Weinstein based on the messages in his films.

This Times column I linked to last month after French’s column also seems rather quaint today in its premise: “It’s a tough time to be a male feminist, especially in Hollywood.”

To coin an Insta-phrase, why is Democrat-dominated Hollywood such a cesspit of abuse and misogyny?

UPDATE: The Men You Meet Making Movies.

Would any of these stories be coming out with Bill Clinton back in the White House co-starring in the role of “First Gentleman?”

MORE: And speaking of the emerging new Moral Majority, this post-Weinstein column in The Week explores “The sexual predators everyone still worships:” “What do we do about predators we actually think are cool?…What is the point at which it becomes necessary for us to channel our inner Savonarolas and just start burning? Is one confirmed incident enough? How many Station to Stations or Physical Graffitis are worth the assault of a single woman or child? Are we affirming or materially contributing to their crimes when we watch films or listen to music made by abusers?”

1967: IN 50 YEARS WE’LL HAVE FLYING CARS!

2017: ‘Diet Avocados’ Are Now A Thing.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: X3 Ion Thruster Achieves Record Power and Thrust.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Kmele Foster Gets Shouted Down by Black Lives Matter Activists After Pointing out That MLK Used Free Speech Protections—Wait, What?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Harvey Weinstein can’t wash away Hollywood’s sins: Exiling one mogul won’t bury this question: If people realize the system is exploitative and inhuman, will they still watch movies?

LOTS OF MATERIAL TO READ BETWEEN THE LINES OF THIS BBC ARTICLE ON WOODY ALLEN’S RESPONSE: “Harvey Weinstein: Woody Allen ‘sad’ for producer over sexual assault allegations.”

“The whole Harvey Weinstein thing is very sad for everybody involved,” he added. “Tragic for the poor women that were involved, sad for Harvey that [his] life is so messed up.

“There’s no winners in that, it’s just very, very sad and tragic for those poor women that had to go through that.”

Allen said he hoped the revelations, which emerged after an investigation by the New York Times, would lead to “some amelioration”, but said: “You also don’t want it to lead to a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself. That’s not right either.

“But sure, you hope that something like this could be transformed into a benefit for people rather than just a sad or tragic situation.”

Among those who investigated Weinstein were Allen’s own son, Ronan Farrow, who spoke to 13 women who said the producer had sexually harassed or assaulted them.

Allen was apparently not asked about Farrow’s involvement by the BBC — “unexpectedly,” as they say in old media.

PUSHBACK: OK Google, Get Out of My Face: Ubiquitous computing is starting to get (really) real and I’m kind of afraid of it. Not without reason.

ROSS DOUTHAT: The ’70s And Us.

You can remember some of it with ’70s statistics: Never so many divorces, never so many abortions, a much higher rate of rape, an S.T.D. crisis that culminated in the AIDS epidemic.

But some of it is better grasped through anecdote and social history — particularly the extent to which the ’70s saw the drug-enabled exploitation of kids on a grimly horrifying scale.

As Matthew Walther pointed out recently in The Week, much of rock and roll’s groupie culture was a spree of statutory rape, with the gods of rock as serial deflowerers of girls not much older than Dolores Haze. . . .

Meanwhile despite their moral turpitude the ’70s still occasion nostalgia, for bad reasons but also one good one: They featured our civilization’s last great burst of creative energy. Those predatory directors and rape-y rock stars made great movies and memorable music. Our sclerotic interest groups were born as idealistic causes then; our repetitive religious and intellectual debates were fresh and new. Our era is calmer and safer and less vicious (Trump and Twitter notwithstanding), but its peace feels like cultural exhaustion.

And Harvey Weinstein is a fitting bridge between that world and ours, both artistically and morally. His independent-film work tried to revive or imitate the ’70s auteur spirit, before giving way to lousy Oscar bait for his companies and endless superhero movies for the system.

Meanwhile the way he brutalized young women was a very 1970s way to be a movie-business monster.

But the allegation that when balked in his advances, he masturbated into whatever receptacle presented itself? That’s very 2017.

Sigh.

B-1BS HEADING FOR A RENDEZVOUS OVER THE SEA OF JAPAN: The B-1Bs were preparing to takeoff from Guam. The photo was taken October 10. The mission sounds a lot like the described in this article written in September describing a show of force over the Sea of Japan (east of North Korea).

CHANGE: Austrian Exit Polls Indicate Populist Freedom Party in Second Place, Left Wing Parties Suffer Losses.

ANDREW KLAVAN ON HARVEY WEINSTEIN AND HOLLYWOOD’S MASCULINITY DEFICIT:

Being a man — a real man — is hard. Being a gentleman is hard. Men won’t do it if they don’t have  real women — real ladies — to do it for. And wherever ladies stop being ladies and men stop being men, it isn’t Equality World, believe me. It’s Harvey Weinstein all the way down.

Read the whole thing.

HEH: Morally Bankrupt Entertainment Industry Totally Baffled As To How Culture Became Morally Bankrupt.

Second look at the Hays Code?

ROGER SIMON: Why Did the Weinstein Scandal Happen Now?

QUESTION ASKED: If the Academy is Willing to Drop Harvey Weinstein, When Will it Drop Roman Polanski?

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Facebook takes down data and thousands of posts, obscuring reach of Russian disinformation.

Related: “Liberals deliberately designed Facebook to influence elections but it went off in Hillary’s inept hands.”

“Not upon us, oh, King! Not upon us!” (Bumped).

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU RAM THROUGH UNPOPULAR LEGISLATION ON A PARTY-LINE VOTE: Obamacare Was Built With the Flaws Trump Now Exploits: Executive orders allowed the past administration to keep the program alive. They allow this administration to destroy it.

Do I just hate the poor so much that I can’t stand to see them getting help paying for health care? Well, no. I have no particular objection to the payments as policy. Except for one small thing, which is that they seem to be sort of illegal.

But at this point, such arguments are moot. It might be more fruitful for Obamacare’s supporters to ask what role they themselves played in bringing us to this pass.

A few years ago, as we all stood gaping at the disastrously bungled launch of the Obamacare exchanges, I was invited by Intelligence Squared to participate in a debate: “Resolved: Obamacare Is Beyond Rescue.” Longtime readers know that my motto is “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.” I was thus reluctant to declare, without equivocation, that Obamacare was already dead, dead, dead. But I’m a huge fan of Intelligence Squared, so I accepted, and then I resorted to a time-honored debate-weasel: 2 I reframed the question.

Thus I chose not to argue that Obamacare was going to collapse and be repealed in its entirety, but rather, that Obamacare would not, and could not, be the program that had been promised or intended. It had already failed to deliver on key promises for coverage, affordability and of course, the infamous promise that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” It was also dangerously unstable, requiring steady executive intervention just to keep the program from collapsing. I argued that these executive interventions, enthusiastically supported by the law’s proponents, were setting a precedent that would eventually be used against it. Worried that health care was too hostage to the vicissitudes of the markets, Democrats had instead made it the prisoner of politics.

“Essentially they’ve made it so that Republicans can undo two-thirds of this law with a stroke of the presidential pen,” I said at the close of my opening statement. “Obamacare is now beyond rescue. The administration has destroyed their own law in order to save it.” Four years later, we are watching those dominos fall.

Indeed. But there’s a bright side: By Cutting Off Obamacare’s Insurer Subsidies, Trump Might Help More People Get Health Coverage: The president has finally brought the law into constitutional compliance.

THEN: THINK DIFFERENT. NOW? Apple VP Of Diversity Apologizes For Suggesting Diversity Of Thought Is Important.

As noted Korean War-era US Army diversity officer Frank Burns once said, “Individuality is fine as long as we all do it together.”

TRIGGER ME: The Five Most Triggering Halloween Costumes of 2017.

HERESY: UCLA law professor: Affirmative action hurts more minority students than it helps.

Sander said that while this seems like a topic that should receive more attention, academia tends to sweep the information under the rug or try to discredit it. He cited a situation stemming from his own campus as an example.

“Michael Schill (the former dean of the UCLA Law School) told me privately that he thought it was a breakthrough study,” Sander said. But after it was published, Sander said that Schill sent an email to the student body suggesting “there are those of us who seriously question the credibility of this research.”

Sander cited additional examples in which editors of peer-reviewed journals, including one at the University of Pennsylvania, told him privately they would publish his study, then later had to back out due to their financial backers’ dislike of the content of the study’s findings.

To survive, affirmative action requires a bodyguard of lies.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Digital Deals.

MARSHA BLACKBURN, ROSE MCGOWAN, THE POWER OF TWITTER AND THE MEDIA: “Who would possibly have thought Tennessee Republican and Trump-supporting Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn — a candidate to succeed out-going Senator Bob Corker — would have anything in common with Rose McGowan, the hardworking film, television actress and LGBT activist? Two worlds, and worlds apart. Until it came to Twitter… But in both cases there is more than a whiff of a reminder that Twitter — along with Facebook, Google and You Tube — have now acquired massive power to decide what the American and global public will be allowed or not allowed to see.”

Abandoning the Blogosphere and its diversified group of hosting sites for the ease of Twitter and Facebook was not a wise move.

Read the whole thing.

SO IF YOU’RE FEELING BAD ABOUT YOUR DAY, THIS SHOULD CHEER YOU UP: A “Terrified” Paul Krugman Wakes Each Morning in a “State of Existential Dread.” Given Krugman’s track record, it’s when he feels good about things that we should be worried.

A PITIFUL VICTORY: Lies, Damned Lies, and UNC.

MICHAEL BARONE ON TECH OLIGARCHS: Today’s Turn-of-the-Century Problems.

Is America in a new Gilded Age? That’s the contention of Republican political consultant Bruce Mehlman, and in a series of 35 slides he makes a strong case.

In many ways, problems facing America today resemble those facing what we still call “turn-of-the-century” America from the 1890s to the 1910s. Just as employment shifted from farms to factories a century ago, it has been moving from manufacturing to services recently.

Financial crashes are another point of resemblance, coming precisely one hundred years apart. The panic of 1907 was resolved when J. P. Morgan locked his fellow financiers in his library and required them to pony up funds to save failing banks. Something similar happened in 2007, this time with Ben Bernanke in the bowels of the Federal Reserve.

Technological advances providing new products, and threatening incumbent businesses, is a feature of both epochs: huge steel mills and automobile factories then, tiny smartphones and mouse clicks today. Monopoly power also reared its ugly head then and now. Railroads and steel and oil muscling potential regulators then, retail-dominating Amazon and political communication censors Google and Twitter now.

Income inequality was greater in the 1920s (and probably earlier, but the statistics are incommensurate) than today. Immigration as a percentage of pre-existing population was three times as high in peak year 1907 than in peak year 2007.

In all these respects, the problems—or perceived problems—of Americans today more closely resemble those facing the Americans of 100 years ago than the problems of the era that is generally taken as a benchmark, especially by commentators of a certain age (including me), the two postwar decades after World War II.

But Mehlman’s list is not exhaustive. And the items omitted are perhaps even more troubling than those already mentioned.

The Gilded Age yielded Teddy Roosevelt’s trustbusting. Will we see something similar from President Trump?