HOLLYWOOD’S JUSTINE BATEMAN IS Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.
I have found the last four years to be an almost intolerable period. A very un-American period in that any questioning, any opinions, any likes or dislikes were held up to a very limited list of “permitted positions” in order to assess acceptability.
I’ve never in my life known that to be an American environment.
It’s an environment I have encountered in smaller groupings (a church, a private club, a clique), but never before as a national blanket. It has been suffocating. Common sense was discarded, intellectual discussion was demonized. Only “permitted position” behavior and speech was “allowed.” Complete intolerance became almost a religion and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others.
Their destruction was displayed in the “town square” of social media for all to see. This was the #MeMeMeMeToo moment, where every effort was made to divert attention to oneself, instead of recognizing how one contributes to the whole.This was the era of trying to exercise control over those who did not want to follow the crowd and has their own ideas about what they needed to do. This dampened our culture and innovation, bringing people to even think that generative #AI, a regurgitation of the past, was actually our cultural future.
When you starve a society of those called to be independent thinkers and cultural and intellectual innovators, you rob that society of any forward movement. Those that tried to impose that control maintained a kind of “hall monitor” position by threatening others with damning labels like “Sexist,” “racist,” “homophobic,” etc, when the free-thinking and questioning was nothing of the sort. However, the mob mentality that followed caused these social convictions when there was often no evidence to support them.
(See Charles McKay’s 1841 book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”)
I am neither one extreme or the other, but am one of the millions of people who believe in common sense, and that everyone should be free to live their lives however they want, unless that freedom interferes with someone else’s freedom to live their own life.
That’s it.
She’s also spent a couple of days “critiquing,” as a director, some of the performative victimhood videos flooding TikTok after the election — and it’s some of the most dryly funny stuff I’ve ever read.
If you liked Bateman as Mallory on “Family Ties,” (or even if you didn’t), you might love her on X.
