Look Who Will Dress in Black at the Globes — and Why

Time’s Up — a movement initiated by Hollywood creatives — announced its intention on New Year’s Day to take aim at sexual harassment within the entertainment industry. As part of that, an array of A-listers have already pledged to wear black at the Golden Globes this coming Sunday night in “solidarity” with those who have been harassed.

Not so fast. On “The Ingraham Angle” Tuesday night, host Laura Ingraham pulled back the curtain on this new “movement” and explained the ulterior motives driving it.

“Liberals are now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, using sexual harassment for political ends,” Ingraham said at the top of the Fox News program. “Beneath the ‘girl power’ platitudes … is something that feels like almost another leftist political hack group.”

London Center for Policy Research Senior Fellow Monica Crowley, a guest on the show, explained that the notion “looks like the latest mobilization of Saul Alinsky’s phrase ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.'”

The effort is a means to “take a genuine crisis [sexual harassment against women in the workplace] and hijack it in two directions,” said Crowley. The first, she said, involves women supplanting men in positions of authority. This presents a risk of establishing an unfair quota system in which qualified candidates can be passed over based solely on gender. The second direction in which Time’s Up’s outward goals will be hijacked, said Crowley, is to reanimate sexual harassment allegations against President Donald Trump.

Julie Alvin, Time Inc.’s senior digital director of lifestyle topics, disagreed with that. She said she found the contention that the Time’s Up movement has liberal political goals “bizarre.” She defended the group’s stated goals of defending sexually harassed women as noble and worthwhile.

Several A-list actresses intend to leverage their star power on the Golden Globe’s red carpet. In what promises to be a well-publicized demonstration of support for the movement, the women intend to wear all black.

But Ingraham pointed out that the legal organization at the core of the effort — the National Women’s Law Center’s (NWLC) Legal Network for Gender Equity (LNGE) — was created just a few months ago with an openly acknowledged anti-Trump mission. Such shenanigans strongly suggest political taint — but Alvin avoided Ingraham’s question. Instead, Alvin reiterated the (already obvious) point that Hollywood has a serious issue with its objectification of women.

Several A-list actresses intend to leverage their star power on the Golden Globe’s red carpet this coming Sunday. In what promises to be a well-publicized demonstration of support for the movement, the women intend to wear all black — and some actors are jumping on this bandwagon as well. Historically, of course, the wardrobes of actors and actresses in attendance at the awards shows are considered almost an event in and of themselves — one in which objectification of women plays a starring role.

Related: The Golden Globes Are Nearly Here (Already)

“Perhaps a ‘Little House on the Prairie’ collection will be making its premiere at the Golden Globes,” Ingraham joked.

“If they really cared about their industry, they would stop hyper-sexualizing women and young people,” she added. “This is not just some beneficent effort to protect women, although the trappings of it are there. This is an obvious and craven attempt by Hollywood leftists to collect email addresses and other information to organize for 2018 and 2020.”

Donors to the movement include such liberal Hollywood actors as Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, and Steven Spielberg. And one of the keepers of the $13 million defense fund’s war chest is attorney Tina Tchen, who served as chief of staff for Michelle Obama.

Donations to the group will be administered by the National Women’s Law Center through its Legal Network for Gender Equity. A markedly left-leaning group, the NWLC offers donors and readers its opinions in articles such as “5 Ways NWLC Resisted the Trump Administration in 2017,” and “Stacking the Bench: Trump’s Dangerous Judicial Nominees.”

Related: Woody Allen Accuser Calls Out Hypocritical Hollywood

“These same people — producers, writers, directors, agents and actors — who have objectified women, and in some cases themselves, they’re suddenly the moral conscience of the entire country, not just the entertainment industry, and are going to safeguard women?” said Ingraham.

The Time’s Up initiative is “leaderless,” per The New York Times. Instead, it comprises several working groups. One of those groups, interestingly, resulted in the formation of a commission led by Anita Hill. She, of course, is the individual who in 1991 accused her former colleague Clarence Thomas — then a nominee to the Supreme Court — of sexual harassment in the workplace. Thomas was confirmed to the high court despite those disputed allegations and is today one of the longest-serving justices on the court.

Crowley summed up the concerns about the Time’s Up, #MeToo, and related movements: “We are seeing a weaponization of sexual harassment, which I think is a genuine tragedy,” she said, “because there are real cases, and the real women who have been victimized by this kind of bad behavior … are now going to have their credibility fall into greater question.”

Michele Blood is a freelance writer based in Flemington, New Jersey.

(photo credit, homepage image: Streep at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival, CC BY 2.0, by Glyn Lowe / Jessica Chastain, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Mark Indelicato & America Ferrera, CC 0, by samhsa; photo credit, article image: Emma Stone…, cut out, CC BY-SA 2.0, by MarinSD / Meryl Streep from “Florence Foster Jenkins”…, cut out, CC BY 2.0, by Dick Thomas Johnson / Eva Longoria, cut out, CC BY 2.0, by Richard Sandoval)