Poor, poor Mark Halperin. Nobody loves him.
(If you’ve forgotten who he is, he’s a former political director of ABC News, former MSNBC senior political analyst, and book author on US politics.)
He appeared at an event on "the injustices of cancel culture and the indignity of being shamed, shunned, and ignored."
The event was run by a public relations firm, and no one showed up except the PR firm employees and a few journalists.
He shared his sob story (or is that SOB story?):
“I haven’t had a job interview in two years,” Halperin said, adding that he has applied to work at restaurants and Target, trying to get health insurance for his three-year-old son. He’s not sure if his struggle to find work is because of his reputation or because he’s a man in his mid-fifties....
During the panel, Halperin repeatedly spoke of the need for “justice in our system,” a process by which “people who are hurt can be made as whole as possible by people who hurt them, but at the same time there’s some sense of going forward.” He called out businesspeople, religious leaders, and university presidents for not supporting the canceled. And he argued how unfair it was that some people must face consequences for their actions while others, like Donald Trump, do not. Society, he said, doesn’t want to “admit the randomness, or the lack of compassion, or the lack of justice, even for someone who’s done something wrong like I did.”
That was the only mention of wrongdoing in a 70-minute conversation....
When I asked Halperin to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate ways that he had been held accountable for his behavior, he didn’t give a direct answer. Instead he said victims deserve “top priority” but complained again that there isn’t a mechanism for reintegrating canceled people. “Murderers in our society who get out of prison are afforded an opportunity to go on with some aspect of their life,” he said. “The challenge to a lot of people who are canceled is there’s no mechanism for that, regardless of what they’ve done, regardless of whether they’ve tried to make amends.” The MeToo movement rewrote the rules of the game Halperin had been playing all his life. Now he wants the new rules to be rewritten to let him back in....
Nearby, Halperin stood with his back to a wall, talking to some PR people. “I can write press releases, I can write speeches, I can write just about anything,” he told them, eyebrows raised. “And I can do it fast.”
The moderator laughed awkwardly. “We’ll have to see,” she said.
Personally, I think he should be thanking his lucky stars that he didn't end up like Weinstein, being convicted and dragged off to prison for sexual assault. Perhaps his sins were less egregious: "slamming a woman into a wall, masturbating in front of another, and pressing an erection through his clothes onto three others."
He blames his situation on the "injustice" of "cancel culture," which hasn't let him redeem himself.
But maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe he's simply lost his privilege as a member of the media elite, and now finds himself just another member of the precariate, grubbing for health insurance and freelance work like the rest of the plebes. Maybe it hasn't yet sunk in for him that that's just what life is like if you aren't one of the blessed.
I hope he gets health insurance, at least for the sake of his three-year-old son.
He can write just about anything. Maybe he should consider himself privileged to have learned something about the hard reality of the 99 percent. Maybe he should write about that.