Did you guys know that Justine Bateman was and is awful? I had no idea. Justine is Jason Bateman’s older sister, and Justine was once the more famous Bateman sibling, back in the 1980s and 1990s. She worked pretty consistently in TV through 2000-2013, then it’s like she dropped off a cliff professionally. Zero credits for eight years, up until 2021, when she premiered a film called Violet, which she wrote, directed and produced. Violet was supposed to come out one year earlier, but everything was on pause because of the pandemic. I bring this up because the pandemic seemingly broke her brain and turned her into one of the biggest Karens I’ve ever seen. Justine threw a hissy fit on Twitter after the election, I’m not embedding it, but here’s the text:

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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds).

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.

[From Justine Bateman’s Twitter]

Sure, I have some time to get into this. This is all part of a larger movement among MAGA cultists and Trump supporters to position themselves as the only true advocates for “free speech” and “independent thought.” Those are coded terms for “I want to be racist/bigoted/hateful/nasty in public but people will call me out!” They think they’re being “censored” when people respond to the awful sh-t they say or write online. They think it’s a First Amendment issue and an issue of “intolerance” that their words and actions have consequences. You know how I said that the pandemic seemingly broke her brain? Check out the receipt, below. Ten bucks says that Justine Bateman is an anti-vaxxer who thought the pandemic was a “hoax.”

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.