Episode Details

PROFANITY WARNING — cursing all through some of the videos.

When Johnny Depp won his defamation case against Amber Heard it marked the first time a #metoo casualty had fought back and won. Unless you watched the trial, all of the trial, you would not know just how badly Amber Heard fared on the stand, how weak her case was, the many contradictions in her story and that here we have a true defamation case that could be proven with evidence.

What was telling, however, was the reaction by the media elite. From the New York Times to Slate to the New Yorker to Rolling Stone, to The Guardian it was one condemnation after another by people whose primary news source is their own feedback loop. They have proved beyond any doubt just how much the #metoo movement was driven not by activists, not even by victims, but by them.

There was only one social media platform that showed the groundswell of public support for Johnny Depp and that was TikTok. Anyone who uses the app saw the surge of support for Depp as he became a meme then a trend and at some point a full blown movement around a single hashtag - #justiceforjohnnydepp.

80% of Depp’s most ardent supporters were women, united across political, economic, cultural and racial lines in support of Depp’s innocence. Many of them were victims of Domestic Violence themselves who could easily recognize a woman who was grossly exaggerating, lying and portraying herself as someone that contradicts her own recordings of her relationship with Depp.

Meanwhile, the high-minded columnists flopped around like fish, with no clue as to why so many in the general public supported Depp. Now women will never come forward, they collectively squawked. Now, no woman will ever be believed again, they howled. The #metoo movement is over, they bemoaned. It isn’t so much that women will never be believed again as it is about the activist media on the left losing all credibility with the general public, if they had any left to begin with.

The #metoo movement, like almost everything else, was a media narrative created by and driven by the same columnists who are now clinging to that power. It first began in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape that caught Trump talking about everything he could do to women as a famous person. Even before Trump won, the New York Times collected a series of women’s stories. Mine was among them.

Because the Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise, it wasn’t exactly shocking that the New York Times would have put out this piece in October. The two areas that would bloom into full-blown mass hysteria events in this country during the Trump presidency circled around sexual assault/harassment/abuse, and racism. These were the two main fears about Trump. Even if they started out as much-needed reckonings, they evolved over time into witch hunts, fear, and paranoia that continues to this day.

But the pendulum is beginning to swing because it always does. Mass hysteria is inevitably punctured when a case comes along that is so preposterous it brings the whole thing down. In Salem it was the Governor’s wife being accused of witchcraft. During the McCarthy era, it was the “Have you no decency” moment. In Salem, they tried to cover up their embarrassing year where 20 people lost their lives amid a mass hysteria event that mig