Marliyn Manson Gets Nailed to the #MeToo Cross

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

The swift cancellation of Marilyn Manson proves that #MeToo is a more powerful cultural force than conservative Christianity ever was.

Only the rocker’s most ardent fans are keeping him in their demonic thoughts and Satanic prayers in the wake of serious abuse allegations.

Marilyn Manson, who rose to stardom as a self-proclaimed shock rock anti-Christ in the 1990’s, has long had a target on his back.

Ever since the minimally talented Manson hit it big with his cover of the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” off his EP Smells Like Children in 1995, fundamentalist Christians have tried to cancel him for his devoutly anti-Christian attitudes and occult antics.

In a brilliant piece of cultural jiu-jitsu, Manson masterfully used his position as a public foil to puritanical Christians to promote himself to great wealth and fame with his smash hit follow up albums Antichrist Superstar (1996) and Mechanical Animals (1998).

It seemed back then that the more outrageously anti-Christian Manson got the more MTV and Rolling Stone and the rest of the pop culture establishment embraced him, and it drove conservative Christians absolutely crazy.

For his rather derivative Satanic rock star pose, Manson inflamed a Christian hysteria that led to him being blamed for everything from teen suicide to the Columbine Massacre. But none of those charges ever actually harmed Manson’s career, only enhanced it.

Manson’s success in the 90’s and conservative Christian’s impotence in the face of it, was a clear indicator of the religion’s waning social power and a forewarning of its precipitous demise and near disappearance from American culture.

But where conservative Christians miserably failed to bring down Manson in the 90’s, the new dominant puritanical moral force in our culture, wokeness, with its powerful feminist denomination #MeToo, has succeeded spectacularly.

This week, numerous women, including Manson’s former fiancé, actress Evan Rachel Wood, have come forward with allegations of “sexual assault, psychological abuse and/or various forms of coercion, violence and intimidation.”

Wood, who was 18 when she met the then 36 year-old Manson, said of the relationship, “He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission.”

Another former fiancé of Manson’s, actress Rose McGowan, released a statement in support of Wood and the other accusers. “I stand with Evan Rachel Wood and the other brave women who have come forward…Let the truth be revealed. Let the healing begin.”

In response to the cavalcade of allegations, Loma Vista Recordings, which distribute Manson’s albums, said they would cease promoting his current album and refused to work with him again in the future, and the powerhouse Creative Artists Agency quickly dropped him as a client.

In response, Manson released a statement.

“Obviously, my art and my life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims about me are horrible distortions of reality. My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners. Regardless of how – and why – others are now choosing to misrepresent the past, that is the truth.”

Manson is right, his rather pedestrian art and performative life have been magnets for controversy, but that is because they were built upon being intentionally provocative, particularly against Christianity.

He repeatedly stuck his thumb in the eye of Christians in order to draw attention to himself, with “shocking” yet predictable actions like proclaiming himself to be a minister in the Church of Satan (inducted by none other than Anton LaVey), and quoting famed occultist Aleister Crowley’s dictum, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”.

It would seem according to his accusers that Manson actually lived that morally grotesque motto to the fullest, but the women on the unpleasant receiving end of it are now publicly exacting their revenge and ending his career.

It’s a testament to the enormous cultural power of wokeness, with its two dominant denominations, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, that its ability to cancel heretics and blasphemers far exceeds anything conservative Christians were able to accomplish over the last forty years.

That Manson thrived for so long in opposition to the old religion of Christianity, but has been utterly obliterated in no time at all by the new religion of wokeness, is revealing of the tectonic shift that has taken place in just the last four years in American culture.

Further proof of this is that the pop culture establishment, which so dutifully defended Manson when he was offending Christians back in the 90’s, will not even contemplate tolerating his alleged sins against women now.

It is also striking that puritanical Christianity has been so soundly defeated in the culture wars by the entertainment industry, but that the puritanical impulse is still alive and well and thriving…in Hollywood of all places, in the form of #MeToo feminism and Black Lives Matter.

Unfortunately for Manson, the only difference between the old irrational, hypocritical and sex-obsessed religion of Christianity that he so brazenly defined himself in opposition to, and the new irrational, hypocritical and sex-obsessed religion of #MeToo wokeness that is currently crucifying him, is that Christianity at least offers the opportunity for redemption.

The truth is that Marilyn Manson danced with the devil to great success, but, as always, the bill comes due. It’s the height of irony that it wasn’t the puritans of conservative Christianity that took him down, but rather the witches of wokeness who’ve succeeded in burning him at the pop culture stake.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Hollywood's Self-Serving and Misguided Immigration Protests

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

Hollywood celebrities are furious over Trump’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families, but their outrage is selective and often self-serving.

In recent weeks the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their families when they attempt to enter America illegally or to seek asylum has been the top story.

Media coverage has included horrific pictures and video of young immigrant children in anguish over being taken from their families. Pundits have repeatedly used the phrase “babies in cages” to describe the situation.

Hollywood celebrities like Oprah, John Legend, Ellen DeGeneres and Evan Rachel Wood are among the many stars moved by the plight of these children who have gone public with their disdain for President Trump and his immigration policy. 

While it strikes me as obvious that Trump’s family separation policy is cruel and horrifying, I also have to admit I find the pose of child advocacy on the part of some of these celebrities to be at best misguided and at worst a form of vacuous virtue signaling. 

For instance, Evan Rachel Wood, star of HBO’s Westworld, went to the Texas border to join in an organized 24-hour hunger strike to bring attention to the issue. She implored people to follow her on Instagram to stay current on her progress. When I read that story I found it so asinine that I had to double check to make sure I wasn’t reading the satirical news website The Onion. Sadly, I wasn’t, it was a real story that left me wondering if she was starving herself for a good cause or starving for attention?

While Ms. Wood’s heart may be in the right place, it’s her mind that I’m worried about. Here are a few things to consider in regards to Ms. Wood’s 24-hour hunger strike.

First of all, if you’re an actor living in Hollywood, if you’re not fasting at least one day a week, you’re simply not trying.

Secondly, starving yourself for 24 hours is not going to do a single thing for frightened toddlers and infants separated from their mothers and fathers at the border.

And third, if the argument is that Ms. Wood and the rest of her fellow 24-hour hunger strikers are, like other famous hunger strikers in the past such as Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Bobby Sands and the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison, starving themselves to bring attention to an issue, in this case the immigrant family separation policy, then they are a little late to the party.

The media has been relentlessly reporting on this topic for the last few weeks and have flocked to the Texas border to breathlessly cover the story. And that, it seems, is the point for some of these celebrities, namely that the media is already focused on this issue and therefore when seemingly well-intentioned stars use stunts like hunger striking or going to the border, they aren’t bringing attention to the issue…but rather to themselves.

Another problem with the spate of Tinseltown voices demanding action to stop Trump’s brutal family separation policy is that these stars didn’t get up in arms when President Obama had a similarly callous policy towards illegal immigrant families.

Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson recently went on Fox News and commented on startling images of young immigrant children separated from their parents and put in makeshift jail cells by the Obama team in 2014. Johnson said, “without a doubt the images, and the reality, from 2014, just like 2018, are not pretty.”

Johnson then said of Obama’s family detainment policy, which at times included child separation, “We expanded it, I freely admit it was controversial, we believed it was necessary at the time, I still believe it is necessary …”.

Johnson also proudly said that the Obama administration had deported and repatriated over a million people.

One wonders why Hollywood bigwigs like musician and actor John Legend only seem to care about draconian immigration enforcement policy when Trump is doing it. Legend, who recently donated $72,000 to the ACLU over Trump’s inhumane border control practices, must have been blissfully unaware that the ACLU lambasted Obama in 2015 for his family detention and fast track deportation policy for Central American illegal immigrants.

Again, Mr. Legend’s heart is in the right place but his failure to advocate for the immigrant children brutalized under Obama, seriously degrades his legitimacy when he chastises Trump for doing the same thing.

Another problem with the celebrity outrage machine regarding the Trump immigration issue is that none of the stars speaking out ever dig deep enough to get to the root of the problem.

For instance, ‘comedian’ Bill Maher postulated on his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher last week that he thinks the wave of illegal immigration from Central American countries, like El Salvador and Honduras, both of which are among the most violent places on earth, is due to the drug war.

Maher and his panel of establishment sycophants were incapable of seeing the forest for the trees and lay the blame for the immigration fiasco either on Trump, the drug war, or both and entirely failed to notice the neo-liberal elephant in the room…namely, America’s colonialist and imperial foreign policy.

For example, El Salvador didn’t become a violent hellhole all by itself. From 1980 to 1992 the U.S. fueled a dirty civil war in El Salvador by sending hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid, and military advisors who trained paramilitary death squads that kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of innocent Salvadorans. 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in that brutal, U.S. backed proxy war that so destabilized El Salvador that it still hasn’t recovered.

Honduras is also a hot mess of a country, in part, because in 2009, in opposition to the Organization of American States, the E.U. and United Nations, the U.S. backed and supported a coup that toppled a democratically elected government.

None of this is new, as children from all over the world have had to pay the price for America’s militarism for a long time now.

For example, America’s recent history of nefarious military meddling in the Middle East has had devastating consequences for children. Millions of children have become refugees, orphans or been killed or maimed by America’s recent military adventurism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen. 

According to the Pew Research Center, from 2005 to 2015 the number of displaced migrants in the Middle East is a staggering 23 million, the majority of which were the result of American backed wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. If Hollywood genuinely wants to protect children, a good place to start would be to stop collaborating with the Pentagon in making muscular propaganda for American militarism that leads to endless military actions across the globe.

And finally, if these celebrities were genuine in wanting to help children separated from their parents, they wouldn’t have to go to all the way to the border to find them.

Los Angeles County, home to Hollywood, has the largest foster care system in America with nearly 20,000 children in their care. Over 81% of these kids have been removed from their homes due to neglect. These children, just like those taken from their families at the border, have been traumatized and are in desperate need of a warm bed and a kind soul to care for them.

So celebrities, if you want to prove that you are genuine in your concern for displaced and vulnerable children you should start by doing two things: one, become foster parents and two, vociferously advocate against America’s relentless militarism. Because the truth is, preening at the border, posing as a hunger striker and tweeting your outrage doesn’t bring comfort or alleviate a child’s suffering, it only heightens your sense of self-satisfaction and feeds your ego.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.com.

©2018