France leads celebrity pushback against ‘#MeToo’
In the months since allegations of sexual abuse against US movie mogul Harvey Weinstein first emerged, Hollywood stars have been falling over themselves to condemn him, other ‘ladies men’ in the industry and express their support to those who claimed to be victims of sexual predators. The witch hunt has spread beyond Hollywood first to politics, then business and now the hysteria has reached such levels all men are being condemned. The unanimity of the response has been and astounding example of what the french call Le pensée unique, the single idea. At the Golden Globe awards last Sunday, an entire galaxy of stars came out wearing black in solidarity with victims and those who resisted the demands for conformity were subjected to the obligatory hate campaign.
This week veteran French actresses and 1960s / 70s sex symbol Catherine Deneuve, took a different view.
Deneuve was the most high-profile of 100 prominent French female celebrities who signed an open letter criticising the #MeToo social-media campaign, and related drives to expose sexual harassment in France and elsewhere.
The Hollywood and mainstream media campaigns, the Le Monde letter said, had gone beyond exposing individual perpetrators, and had unleashed a torrent of “hatred against men and sex”. Add to that the usual noise from London’s metropoilitan leftie screechers who, supported by the usual suspects, The Labour Party, Unite Against Fascism, The Anti – Nazi League, the Gay BLTs and the tesicularly deficient progressive wing of the Conservative Party responded with their own Pavolian hatefest. The people can be relied on to unfailingly respond to the trigger signals.
“Puritanism” was running rampant “like in the good old days of witchcraft”, the French feminists argued, stating that the freedom of men to pester was “essential to sexual freedom”.
Around the world – but mainly among the liberal elites of east and west coast USA, the shock of dropping jaws striking the ground registered two point five on the Richter scale and a tsunami of outrage swamped social media. In France itself there were some strong reactions – both for and against – but the response was not front-page news and most people simply gave a gallic shrug and said “Qu’importe”.
Those different reactions say a lot about the different ways feminist view the world in the Anglosphere and Southern Europe France and the US. “It’s hard to imagine a US movie star not being comprehensively pilloried” for signing such a letter, says Emily Yoffe, contributing editor for The Atlantic magazine. And that is a key point; the Politically Correct Thought Police who patrol the internet might get their knickers in a twist and start raging about diversity when someone complains about immigrant refusing to integrate but there are many aspects of diversity followers of the pensée unique are just not willing to tolerate.
The French women are not the first to break ranks from the politically correct consensus.
In an interview for Business Insider, Matt Damon, star of the highly successful Bourne franchise drew plenty of virulent ctiticism for expressing quite mild concerns about the conduct of the #MeToo movement. He said that the majority of men in Hollywood were not involved in sexual misconduct but this is not not gaining attention.
“We’re in this watershed moment, and it’s great, but I think one thing that’s not being talked about is… the preponderance of men I’ve worked with who don’t do this kind of thing,” he said during an interview while promoting his new film Downsizing.
Many social media users condemned the actor for suggesting not being a sexual predator was an accomplishment although that is a ridiculous distortion of what he meant.
It is not the first time Damon has commented on sexual abuse following rape allegations against Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. Last week in an interview with ABC News Damon said groping and rape were two different things and shouldn’t be treated the same.
“There’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?” Damon told ABC’S ‘Popcorn’ with Peter Travers “Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated, without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?”
Criticizing the politically correct zealotry of the #MeToo campaign may be taboo in the USA and Britain, so why can such views as are expressed in the letter to Le Monde accepted with so little fuss in France? One reason, according to Anastasia Colosimo, a political commentator who lectures in Sciences Politique in Paris, is author of “Les bûchers de la liberté,” (The butchers of Liberty) and is an enduring influence in France of 1960s-type feminists, steeped in the free-wheeling ethos of the time.
“A key aspect of the struggle of the 1960s was the need to remove any guilt attached to feminine sexuality,” she says. “Women openly said they had the same craving for sex as men.”
The signatories of the letter also include writer Catherine Millet, 69, best-known for a 2002 memoir detailing her sexual history in graphic detail. Among the others are Catherine Robbe-Grillet, the author of sadomasochistic stories, and Brigitte Lahaie, a 1970s porn star turned talk-show host.
These older feminists see the drive against harassment, which gathered steam in 1990s America, as a threat to the sexual revolution their generation has achieved. They accept the need to fight rape and workplace harassment. But in their view, says Ms Colosimo, activists who put such dangers at the heart of the modern feminist struggle promote a view of women “as victims and helpless objects of male desire rather than free agents”.
This contrasts with the Anglosphere where the feminist movement has been completely hijacked by ugly, hairy – arsed, man – hating lezzas who are prepared to condemn Harvey Weinstein although he has not yet been convicted of anything, but simultaneously defend Muslims who rape and sexually exploit white girls, “because Multiculturalism.”
The pushback is not just in France however, ridiculous claims from the gaggle of squawkers in Hollywood and other sectors of the celebrity circus have alienated more level headed commentators. Novelist Margaret Atwood has criticized #MeToo, from a different angle, her provocative article is published in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. The lifelong feminist is singing, if not quite from the same songsheet, certainy from the same songbook as she complains that a broken legal system which permits media witch hunts rather than ensuring due process is observed, thus negating the legal rights of those against whom allegations have been made but as yet no charges have been laid.
We saw a similar trend in Britain after the crimes of DJ and TV presenter Jimmy Savile were exposed in 2013 after a police investigation into evidence of his prolific sexual abuse of under age and vulnerable people had been in progress for some months. While rumours had circulated about Savile’s behaviour for years, as was the case with Harvey Weinstein, those who should have acted closed ranks to protect Savile because his carefully constructed public image made him a cash cow for their media companies and charities.
As soon as the Savile story gained traction , though he was safe from legal action having died in 2011, multitudes of attention seekers started to make #MeToo style allegations against male celebrities most of which were not supported by any evidence at all. And as in the latest outburst of politically correct madness names of the accused were made pubic before any legal process was initiated. The legal rights of those accused have been ignored by the very people who usually scream most loudly about “rights”.
American novelist Lionel Shriver, is also sceptical about the motivations of those jumping on the #meToo bandwagon. Unanimity in Hollywood, she suggests, is result of risking ostracism by going off-message: “Given the nature of social movements these days, if you have reservations you keep your mouth shut.”In the social media age, Shriver adds, “You have one position that’s acceptable and everyone piles on to it. If you express a dissenting opinion, you’re going to get slaughtered.”
This has not deterred Shriver, who fully supports the Deneuve line and regards #MeToo as a “witch-hunt”. “We’re losing the distinction between serious sexual assault and even rape and putting a hand on a knee,” she says. “It’s as if someone finding you attractive is an insult. I beg to differ: I’m complimented if someone is attracted to me. The only question is: am I allowed to say no?”
Last year another major French actress, Fanny Ardant – born in 1949 – went so far as to say that the campaign against sex pests was redolent of fascism. Fascism is an accusation that has been levelled at the forces of politically correct authoritarianism in other contexts too, and with good cause.
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Russian Involvement In Corrupt Deals With Obama and Clinton
The US election took place almost a year ago but Democratic Party Politicians, Hollywood luvvies (when they’re not busy accusing Harvey Weinstein of assaulting everybody in the world,) and the sycophants of mainstream media continue to obsess over a paltry $100,000 worth Facebook ads allegedly bought by Russian spies in 2016 seeking to swing the presidential election to Trump. Bizarrely (or maybe not if you are familiar with the track records of these phonies,) they appear determined to ignore a much larger Russian corruption scandal which was known (and reported by The Daily Stirrer and its associates among other alt_news outfits.)
The story of how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, when they were Secretary of State and President respectively, made a crooked deal to transfer US uranium assets to Russian organisations resurfaced today in the form of newly released FBI documents that confirm what was revealed by Wikileaks before the 2016 election, that the Obama administration was well aware of, and complicit in, illegal activity by the Russians to get a foothold in the U.S. atomic energy business when President Obama approved a deal that handed over 20% of America’s uranium reserves for a knockdown price…and resulted in a windfall of $$$millions in donations to the Clinton Foundation from Russian oligarchs.
As Zero Hedge pointed out last summer (also widely reported in alt_news) when Peter Schweizer first released his documentary Clinton Cash, the Uranium One deal, as approved by the Obama Administration, netted the Clintons and their crime syndicate charitable Foundation millions of dollars in ‘donations’ and ‘speaking fees’ from Uranium One shareholders and other Russian entities.
The purchase of US Uranium Assets in return for $145mm in contributions to the Clinton Foundation was facilitated by Bill and Hillary Clinton, who assisted a Canadian financier, Frank Giustra, and his company, Uranium One, in the acquisition of uranium mining concessions in Kazakhstan and the United States. Subsequently, the Russian government sought to purchase Uranium One but required approval from the Obama administration given the strategic importance of the uranium assets. In the run-up to the approval of the deal by the State Department, nine shareholders of Uranium One just happened to make $145mm in donations to the Clinton Foundation. Moreover, the New Yorker confirmed that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in speaking fees from a Russian investment bank, with ties to the Kremlin, around the same time. Needless to say, the State Department approved the deal giving Russia ownership of 20% of U.S. uranium assets
Newly released affidavits from a case that put one of the Russian conspirators, Vadim Mikerin, in jail, reveal that not only was the Obama Administration aware of Russians’ illegal activity in the U.S.A. but was probably also aware that “Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow.” The Hill reports:
Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.
Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show. They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.
When Schweizer’s book first brought the Uranium One deal to public attention in 2015, both Obama and the Clintons defended their actions and claimed there was no evidence of any Russians or donors engaging in illegal activity to secure the deal and no national security issue that warranted anyone opposing the deal. That said, we now know that the FBI was aware of wrongdoing going back to at least April 2009 even though the deal wasn’t approved until October 2010.
Links to the affidavits for the Mikerin case released today
Mikerin plea deal [ … ] Warrant affidavit [ … ] Indictment affidavit
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Macron Makes Honest Criticism Of Africa – Get’s Called A Nazi
Macron Makes Honest Criticism Of Africa – Get’s Called A Nazi
It is on record that none of the contributors to this blog have much time for recently elected French President Emmnuel Macron. We have dubbed the former Goldman Sachs executive a ‘grandmotherfucker’ and dismissed him as just another globalist appartchik who will do the bidding of the faceless people who run the financial cartels. However we should always give credit where it is due and, fair play to the lad, he is the first European leader to publicly utter the truth about why the problems of that dysfunctional continent, Africa, are insoluble.
Macron has been criticised for claiming Africa’s perpetual humanitarian crisis is due to ‘civilizational problems’ and women in tribal societies having “seven or eight children” hampering social and economic development in African nations.
Addressing a session of the the G20 summit, the French President was questioned by a reporter from former French colony Ivory Coast on the possibility of implementing a policy like America’s Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after the Second World War to kick start economic development in African nations.
“The problems Africa faces today are completely different {to those of Europe after World War Two] and are civilizational”, Mr Macron told the journalist. “What are the problems?” he went on. “Failed states, tribalism and extremely difficult demographic transitions.”
Only through by a more rigorous form of governance, a fight against corruption, a fight for rule of law, a successful demographic transition when countries today have seven or eight children per woman, can change be achieved,” Mr Macron added. “At the moment, spending billions of Euros outright would stablise nothing. So the transformation plan that we have to conduct together must be developed according to African interests by and with African leaders.”
In a far reaching reply, Mr Macron also identified issues such as Islamist terrorism, drugs and weapons trafficking and human trafficking.
He said that although France had controlled dozens of colonial territories across Africa and accepted responsibility to help with infrastructure, education and heath, a simple money transfer was not the answer. Again he is correct, billions of Dollars, Pounds, Euros, Francs, and Marks have been thrown at Africa’s problems since the end of colonialism and yet the crises only ever seem to get worse.
He is absolutely right of course, Africa’s population explosion is unsustainable. Nigeria is on course to be the world’s third most populated nation by 2050, passing Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and the USA. With a population estimated at 195million, Nigeria has seen a 200% growth in population since 1967. Ethiopia, where a famine that threatened the lives of millions of a population that stod at 40 million triggered the ‘Live Aid’ relief effort in 1985 is now over 100million. And yet there has been no agrarian or industrial revolution in Africa in that time, attempts to encourage the use of contraception have been resisted and many tribal communities simply refuse to adapt their traditional lifestyles to changing conditions.
At the time of writing, Ethiopia, with a population three times larger than last time, is facing a famine caused by prolonged drought again.
Not only is hunger an ever greater problem in some parts of Africa, with vast numbers of people dependent on aid agencies for food, there are also crises arising from shortages of drinking water in drier regions. With economic development not just stalled but propped up on bricks at the roadside because the wheels have been stolen, there is little to invest in infrastructure projects such as a water distribution grid.
To make matters worse global corporations, having no doubt bribed government officials, are privatising water supplies so in future only those who can afford to pay for water will be able to drink safely., (To do your bit about this, ask your readers to boycott Nestle products)
The excerpt of Macron’s speech published on Saturday went largely unnoticed during the G20 summit, where saw violent protests by ‘anti – capitalist’ protesters disrupted life in Hamburg and effectively distracted the media from important news. But an edited clip of his response being shared on social media has since provoked outrage, with the kind of left wing activists who set Hamburg alight accusing the French President of blaming women for poverty, being a Nazi and, inevitably, racism.
Media figures also criticised Mr Macron for referring only to “Africa”, rather than specific nations, ignoring huge differences across the world’s second largest continent. Writing for South Africa’s Daily Vox website, Mishka Wazar said: Africa is not a country. You cannot, as a world leader (or even an ordinary person on the streets with no political ambitions) conflate African nations with Africa.
Siddhartha Mitter, writing for Quartz Africa, commented: Macron’s remarks fall into a tradition of grandiloquent and condescending statements about Africa that point to every cause of the continent’s difficulties other than colonialism and its enduring trace, he wrote. £There is a long history of population panic and its use in racist ideology.”
Mr Macron called colonisation a during his election campaign called colonialism crime against humanity but has been quiet on France’s troubled legacy since his election victory.
He visited Mali, where thousands of French troops are bolstering local forces against an Islamist and separatist insurgency, during his first foreign tour in May and has restated France’s commitment to military intervention in the Sahel region.
Nihilism The Real Winner In French Election
While the mainstream media and those who relish the prospect of living in a society best represented by the image of “a military boot stamping down on a human face, forever” (George Orwell, 1984,) are celebrating the victory of the global elite’s office boy, Emmanuel Macron, in the French presidential election and proclaiming the death of nationalism, another, potentially more significant, story has emerged from the voting statistics.
Though the former Goldman Sachs executive Macron won easily in terms of the number of votes cast for each candidate, the largest number of votes, in a situation reminiscent of the movie Brewster’s Millions, a majority of French voters cast their vote for ‘none of the above,’ by declining to choose either centrist Emmanuel Macron or Front National leader Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s presidential election. They preferred to either abstaining by returning a blank voting paper or spoiling their ballots.
According to election officials the abstention rate stood at 24.52 percent — the highest since the presidential election in 1969. Additionally the interior ministry reported a record number of blank and invalid ballots, amounting to nine percent of all registered voters, compared to two percent in the first round.
“That would make a total of one French person out of three who decided not to choose between the two candidates. It’s really a lot for a presidential election,” Anne Jadot, political science professor at the University of Lorraine, told AFP.
Macron’s victory on Sunday was by a large margin, he took approximately 65 percent of the vote to Le Pen’s 35 percent, but don’t forget that is 65% of 66%. It was also the first time since the 1969 election that participation in the second round has been lower than in the first. And that does not take into account the people who simply did not register a vote at all.
“The presence of the far-right in the second round did not prompt a lot of mobilisation compared to the first round, in contrast to what happened in 2002,” Jadot said in reference to the election in which Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie saw voters of all parties unite to block him by backing his opponent Jacques Chirac.
This year, “there wasn’t the ‘shock’ effect, because (Marine Le Pen’s) presence was expected,” according to Jadot.
The large numbers of voters choosing not to participate shows that while France has rejected Le Pen as it’s president, the anti establishment pushback is far from over, add the supporters of Le Pen’s anti – EU, nationalist candidacy to the ‘none of the above’ vote and a huge majority have rejected the pro – EU, pro – immigration line of France’s political establishment.
Looks like M. Marcron is going to have a rough ride, assuming that he lasts the course.
This is a couple of days late, my previous article on the French election has been hanging around on the front page so I decided to hold off for a while
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If, as now looks certain, ‘the empty suit’ Emmanel Macron, the candidate with no party, no philosophy and no policies becomes President of France when the official announcement of the result is made, what will become of those French people who do not want Islamification to continue.
Apart from his being a globalist, pro European integration, mass immigration supporting apparatchik of the banking cartel, who knows what kind of France Marcon’s government will deliver? Macron doesn’t, that’s for sure. That’s if he is able to govern effectively at all.
French investor and political pundit Charles Gave, commented when asked what Macron’s agenda would look like, said:
“Well, first, nobody knows. Because during the whole campaign, all these talks were on one hand, on the other. I’m in favor of apple pie, and motherhood, you see. Basically he has, to my knowledge, very little program. So he’s running. That is what Hollande said. That he was going to make some fundamental changes without hurting people. And so Macron is a big, empty suit. That’s what he is. You did the right curriculum vitae, he went to the right schools. And you have the feeling that the guy never had an original idea in his life. He was always a good student.”
In other circles there is a strong feeling that Macron is a kind of golem created by Hollande, a globalist, federalist mini – me forged in the hope that at least a couple of socialist fingers would remain on the helm of the French state. They knew they were going to lose the election, and that a socialist candidate would suffer a heavy defeat so they created a sort of hologram candidate (we must not forget that before quitting to form his new centre left popular movement, Macron had a senior position in the socialist government under Hollande.
The idea, according to cynics – and there are a lot of cynics in France, was Macron would run for them and prevent the pro – EU, pro – Federalism party from losing power. It appears then that, the French political system has been taken over by the the Technocratic / Managerialist class. And this Technocratic class is presenting Macron as something new but in reality he represents business as usual except that the seat of power will be even more remote and detached from the working and middle classes. The pro – EU elite have been in power for 50 years, they have not survived that long without learning a thing or to about using propaganda to manipulate public opinion.
The biggest problem, barring terrorist outrages, that Macron will faceing in the French national assembly to enable him to get laws through. As stated above, he has no party, no base of support, and in the assembly elections, due in a few weeks, the socialist party where he might have expected to find most support, is likely to suffer heavy losses. The conservatives will not support him unless they dictate policy. In a sense Le Pen has really won the day because the worst case scenario for her, that she will have to tun again in the 2022 elections, is still achievable. As for the parliamentary elections, Le Pen could reasonably expect to have anywhere between 40 to 100 MP’s if the results bear out polls as accurately as in the presidential vote, and thus could effectively ally with the conservatives to block most of Macron’s likely measures…. which would be a total disaster for the ruling class.”
In other words, assuming Macron triumphs and is president elect tomorrow, the National Front isn’t going anywhere. And its rising star Le Pen’s niece Marion, has a distinct advantage over her astringent aunt:
Marion, is very young, 28; probably too young to be a candidate in 2022. She is already an MP in the French Parliament. She’s extremely pretty, which will win the votes of French males, and she represents the family oriented values of the French Catholic Right, which is where most Republican and Socialist votes come from. 2022 is going to be interesting.
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Freedom Of Thought And Information: Quotes.
If the ruling elites want to establish global control they need to be able to control all information the general population have access to. The idea of controlling information in order to limit the ability to think and develop ideas served Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and many other dictators well but was completely exposed by George Orwell in the novel ‘1984’.
In recent decades the technique for controlling thoughts and ideas has been more subtle, but that has not prevented many commentators higlighting what is going on.
“If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.” — Howard Zinn, historian and author
‘
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity” – much less dissent. Gore Vidal
“Understand that all battles are waged on an unconscious level before they are begun on the conscious one, and this battle is no different. The power structure wishes us to believe that the only options available are those which they present to us, we know this is simply not true.” – Teresa Stover
“People in the West need to understand that if the news they receive bears on the interests of the US military/security complex, the news is scripted by the CIA. The CIA serves its interests, not the interests of the American people or the interests of peace.” – Paul Craig Roberts
In the years the USA could claim with some credibility to be the only global superpower, the elites managed to gain control of print and broadcast media throughout the developed world. Unfortunately the technology developed as a tool to to enhance the ability of the elite to control information while maintaining the illusion of freedom, The Internet, backfired on them. The General public forever despised by intellectuals and derided by the elite and the media proved to be a lot more intelligent and adaptable than ‘the controllers’ suspected.
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