We’ve done it.
We’ve found the worst response to the growing and increasingly awful Harvey Weinstein sex scandal.
Behold: New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, who wrote this week, “The movie business is corrupt, depraved and iniquitous — and still morally superior to the Republican Party under Trump.”
Impressive. She identified a bad thing, and then identified a second bad thing so as to mitigate the sins of the first. We didn’t think we’d see someone from the Times downplay the Hollywood scandal this soon, yet here we are.
“Betraying the principle of gender equality is bad. Rejecting it is worse,” Goldberg added.
It’s downhill from there, trust us.
The chief argument of Goldberg’s piece is that supporters of President Trump have no right to attack the film industry over its decades of silence in the face of Weinstein’s well-known behavior because the president is actually worse.
If you support Trump, then you have no right to be angry about Weinstein’s 30-plus years of alleged sexual assault and harassment. You have no ground to shine a light on what appears to be a very serious and widespread problem. Sure, something terrible seems to have happened in Hollywood, she argues, but Trump is very bad.
Well, then.
First, if your reaction to the Weinstein scandal is to say “Yeah, but what about Trump,” we commend you for staying on your political message at the expense of your dignity and integrity. Yes, Goldberg’s column is aimed at shaming people who ran cover for Trump, but that seems like a cheap and self-gratifying response to the uncovering of a widespread conspiracy of sexual abuse that stretches across the entertainment and news industry and even the Manhattan D.A.’s office.
If your reaction to the Weinstein scandal is to stick it to those pro-Trump guys, then you may care more about politics than you do about the victims of sexual harassment and abuse. And to be honest, given the way some people use this issue, that’s more common than you might think.
Secondly — and this may be a difficult pill for some to swallow — being a hypocrite doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It means you’re probably a jerk, but not wrong. If someone voted for Trump or still supports the president despite what came out about his treatment of women, that doesn’t mean he or she is wrong in saying Hollywood is guilty of protecting Weinstein.
Being a Trump supporter doesn’t mean a person is wrong when they say the film industry is filled with gutless cowards who pretend to care about justice, but cave at the first sign of a threat to their checkbook. Weinstein was able to operate the way he did for so long thanks to the complicity of so many avowed women’s rights activists (we’re not talking about the victims here, but the enablers). Shame on them. They deserve every bit of criticism. They certainly don’t deserve a “But Trump” defense from a Times opinion writer.
Using the Times’ influential opinion pages to give it to those awful Republicans with some good, old fashioned whataboutery may feel good, but it does little in terms of advancing the cause of equality or shining a light on Hollywood’s deep-rooted, far-reaching darkness.
In fact, responding to this scandal with “Yes, but the GOP is worse” serves only to downplay the Weinstein scandal.
Surely, that wasn’t Goldberg’s intention.
