Mercy for Kevin Spacey – Exonerated by the Courts, Convicted by the Public

When they came for Kevin Spacey it was the height of the Me Too movement. It was a time in history when just being accused of something meant instant guilt. The collective hysteria driven by more people being online than ever before at a time when there were more people alive than ever before has led to one mass hysteria event after another.

Kevin Spacey was accused of assault of an underage male many decades ago. He denied it and has now been exonerated of all of the charges. That would matter if we still lived in a society that valued due process but we don’t. Spacey was convicted not for anything he did, but for something the mob decided he had become.

Now, he was regarded as a “pedophile” and a “rapist.” He wasn’t just “canceled.” That’s a nice way of saying what happened to him. He was exiled. He was purged. He was unpersoned. He’s not the only one obviously. Somehow we’ve arrived in 2024 when the richest and most powerful people can be controlled and condemned by a cabal of zealots. Some of the accused find redemption with the help of vocal advocates, but few people are willing to put their reputations on the line for any actor, even one as great as Kevin Spacey. So he hovers in the in-between.

Spacey is now fighting back as much as anyone in his position is able to fight back. I believe there’s a way back for him to at least be able to work. He’s in a tough slot, though. It isn’t so much that people don’t want to work with him because he’s committed thought-crimes, like so many of us have, it’s that so many still believe him to be a serial predator. That is too big of a risk for anyone to take right now whether inside the bubble of the “elites” or outside in the growing counterculture.

When people try to say “cancel culture is over,” they think that’s because people online aren’t throwing the same kinds of fits they used to. You can partly thank Elon Musk for that. He vanquished the blue-check aristocracy on Twitter, which is really what once amplified so much of “cancel culture.” With that power no longer around, we’re seeing a evaporating of the outcry, and more people are coming out to bravely speak out against what has happened to our society of late.

But it is also due to the kinds of people that now run Hollywood. They have cast themselves as our moral betters and they believe they are in the position to judge what and who aren’t “good.” That is the single most damaging thing that has happened to Hollywood. We were all much better off when the Left, or the creative community, didn’t feel the need to be seen as “good Puritans,” which is what they crave and demand now.

That isn’t say they don’t have decadence and an ongoing bacchanalia. They do, but with stipulations. No heterosexual white men can be involved (they’re all predators), and though Kevin Spacey doesn’t exactly fit that model, he has been slotted into the Harvey Weinstein lane somehow.

Spacey has tried over the last several years to help puncture the hysteria around his cancelation. He’s made wry, funny videos. He’s been vigorously defended by his friend, the brilliant Douglas Murray.

Sharon Stone, Liam Neeson, Stephen Fry and others have stood up for him and said it’s time to allow him back into Hollywood to work.

Paul Schrader has said he’d love to cast Spacey as Frank Sinatra but, “Cancel culture won’t let him go.”

Spacey has given honest, raw, transparent explanations of who he is now in an attempt to find some way back to having a normal life where he can work as the fine actor that he is.

Here he is with Dan Wootton:

Just as he was finding his way back, Channel Four put out a sloppy, one-sided “documentary” that showcases several men who had encounters with Spacey back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

I watched it and was kind of stunned at how badly done it was. It isn’t that you don’t feel for the men in the film who claim (at most) they were inappropriately touched by Spacey in various scenarios. It’s always hard to listen to people in pain like that. It’s just that they all sound the same. They all sound like they are auditioning for the exact same role.

And many of them seem to have consciously put themselves in situations to have encounters with Spacey to get something out of it, like a job or something. And yet, the maker of the documentary never explores that part of it. They also don’t give Spacey any opportunity for a response in his own defense, which is typical for the era we’re living through now. It is once accused, forever guilty.

I could spend a lot of time explaining how we got here and why. Instead, I rather just say the reason it persists is a lack of courage among the “prestige press” and other leaders of show biz who are really just trying to hold onto their jobs. No one in the Penske empire is ever going to talk about anything that questions any of the preordained doctrine of this era.

Everything exciting that is happening right now is happening outside the bubble Hollywood has become. All of the great stories that will never be told are unfolding in real time, Kevin Spacey’s story is just one of them.

We have a few major voices coming out of the bubble to talk about why they left The Left. Here is one of my favorites. Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times reporter, talking about how she slowly pulled herself out of the mass hysteria that has infected so many of our prestige institutions:

Her book is a must-read. It outlines everything that happened to our culture after the Great Awokening of 2020. These two women are dissident bad-asses who are revolutionizing new media. Together they operate the Free Press on Substack.

Bowles’ book more or less deals with the affliction of wokeness among mostly white women looking for their place in our culture now that feminism has all but collapsed. But it’s not that different from what happened with Me Too. Both of these are different tentacles of the same beast, a mass panic that hit the utopian bubble of the Left when Trump won in 2016. What’s weird is that these guys predicted it way back in 2011, just based on the patterns of history.

I will admit, I did not think it would get quite this bad, though this is what they had to say in the book about 2023:

Cancel Culture Taketh Away

Eliminating Kevin Spacey and replacing him with lesser actors just means a shittier film.

I sat my daughter down last night and showed her the absolutely great Glengarry Glen Ross. Before we watched it, I explained to her that some of the language might be offensive to her generation but that it was the truth because David Mamet is a great writer and he isn’t going to protect the delicate sensibilities of audiences. No, he’s going to give it to us straight. This is who these guys are.

Kevin Spacey is so good in this film as Williamson, the uptight asshole who uses the tiny bit of power he has as the office manager to enact tiny punishments. I think about what we have lost since both David Mamet and Kevin Spacey have been exiled and I just feel hopelessness and rage. I can’t stand being part of a puritanical cult like the Left has become. It isn’t worth it because it leaves us with NOTHING.

When the film was over, my daughter said, “Man, that was so good.” And I said, “they don’t make them like they used to.” Truer words were never said. Jack Lemmon is so good, Al Pacino, Ed Harris and Alec Baldwin. I mean…come on.

The reason Kevin Spacey can’t get work can measured by the cowardice of the executives, the managers, the studios who aren’t willing to take the risk of hiring him lest there be a shitstorm of epic proportions by the zealots on Twitter. It’s an industry full of Williamsons, in other words.

Mercy is a tough thing for the righteous. But it is an essential thing for humanity. I hope that someone somewhere can grow a pair of giant hanging brass balls and hire Kevin Spacey again.