Just when you think it’s hopeless and there’s no one left with the courage to speak up, someone comes along and surprises you. I’ve always liked Justine Bateman. She showed her strength of character years ago when she first set aside standard Hollywood expectations and threw herself into high fashion knitwear. People laughed but, she blew everyone away. Her knitwear business (Justine Bateman Designs, Inc.) inspired the world’s top designers and directly contributed to the return of raw knit couture. Her influence is still felt on the runway and it’s not even the most interesting thing about her.
She’s an actor of course, an accomplished writer, graphic artist, coder, producer, director, filmmaker and advocate of free speech. Like me, she’s also a student of “embedded” literary masters like Hunter S. Thompson. Her first book “Fame: The Highjacking of Reality” established her writer’s voice in the mainstream but most younger people now know her for “Face: One Square Foot of Skin”. Justine’s aging face, and her defense of it, greatly appealed to Boomers. After the book’s release they clamoured to book her for every daytime talk show. They wanted her to show her aging face so they could lavish her with praise for the “courage” it took to love it. It’s a type of condescending double-edged praise she, thankfully, flatly refused while benefitting from its publicity.
Now, I could go on to talk about Justine Bateman’s free speech advocacy and the many forms it takes from advocating net neutrality to freedom of the press but, I’m not here to write her biography. You have fingers, do the research and learn about her yourself. Do that before you’re tempted to dismiss her as just another Trump MAGA monster the legacy media now loves to pillory. The dumbass kids on Reddit may be gathering the kindling to burn Justine Bateman at the stake this week but, you don’t have to agree with them. You could instead add up the whole factual reality of Justine Bateman’s career and choose instead to respect and defend her.
You might ask -“Why would they declare her a Trump MAGA monster?” Well, this week Justine Bateman took to X to review and critique dramatic tearful videos posted by despondent Kamala Harris supporters. Though I am not on X, her reviews have delighted so many people I know that my in-box has not let me miss a single scrumptious morsel of it. If I were to guess I would say Bateman has come to Trump by way of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and her support of former Democrat Nicole Shanahan (Breitbart further confirms it). Her reviews under the #SocialMediaCritique hashtag on X are eloquent and professional, quite simply genius, do check them out.
However she found her way to supporting Trump (I have yet to see her confirm that vote), one thing is clear. Intelligent and outspoken advocates of free speech have greatly suffered these past years. In a short thread on X Justine Bateman articulated that anxiety this week. Her thread is spooled here but I’m re-posting it for posterity. Why? It meant a lot to me. Despite sharing these feelings with like-minded friends, we’ve all suffered with a persistent feeling of loss and isolation in this era of insanity. We’ve all lost former online communities and watched our former political identity flicker like a porch light. We understand her feelings and her relief after Trump’s win.
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. 2/
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 3/
… 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 4/
… 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 5/
… 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. /6
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 7/
…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, 8/
“Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” 9/
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. 10/fin
Justine Bateman, November 8th – 2024. Posted to X.
