A lot of men look at the #MeToo Movement as a movement that started out well but went too far. During my Planet Hawkins interview with Matt Walsh, he disagreed and said it was bad from start to finish. Enjoy a slightly edited version of our conversation,
John Hawkins: Matt, you said the #Metoo Movement wasn’t just ultimately useless, it was ultimately bad. Why do you feel that way?
Matt Walsh: I think we all agree, obviously, that sexual assault is a horrible evil and anyone who does it should go to prison forever for all I care. So we all agree with that. But when you try to address this very serious and real problem through a mob mentality, when you make kind of a movement out of it and you put a hashtag label on it, then that becomes a problem because actual cases of sexual assault or sexual harassment — these are individual cases. Sometimes they can be complicated to adjudicate. So you have to be able to approach them on a case by case basis and look at the situation, try to figure out what happened and try to bring some justice into the situation. But when you whip up hysteria and make it this mob thing where you take all of these cases at once, you lump it all into the same pot and you say we’re going to treat all of this the same and which also includes, by the way, assuming the guilt of all the accused. You can’t deal with any problem that way; it’s not going to work. And I think that’s what happened with the #Metoo Movement.
I don’t think we’re in any better spot today after the #Metoo Movement than we were before it. Yeah, there are certain scumbag men who have got their comeuppance and that’s great, but we could have handled Harvey Weinstein without having a whole hashtag movement around it. We didn’t need the #Metoo Movement for that. Also after the #Metoo Movement, I think there are a lot of innocent men who have had their reputations tarnished or their careers ruined unfairly. It wasn’t necessary to do that. In order to deal with Harvey Weinstein, we didn’t need to throw Aziz Ansari.