Why the GOP Loves Johnny Depp
After Amber Heard was ordered to pay ex-husband Johnny Depp fifteen million dollars as part of his defamation lawsuit something happened that would seem very, very strange if the world had not plunged into madness sometime around 2016.
The official Twitter account of the GOP House Judiciary posted a gif of Johnny Depp in character as Captain Jack Sparrow as he sails defiantly on the high seas.
I probably do not to remind you that the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial is full of horrifying details you’d love to be able to purge from your mind forever, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style, like Heard claiming that Depp sexually assaulted her with a liquor bottle.
Depp denies that claim and many others but freely admits that he sent his friend Paul Bettany texts saying that he would like to burn his onetime bride like a witch and then “f*** her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she is dead.”
He also called Heard an "ugly c***," a "worthless hooker" and a "filthy whore.” These are not in dispute. Depp concedes that these words and ideas are all his.
Considering that Republicans have long considered themselves the party of family values that might seem a little weird. Ugly divorces are one thing. Threatening violent posthumous rape, even in jest, is quite another.
Making the GOP’s display of support for Depp even more perplexing is that Depp is not one of the ten or twelve actors in Hollywood who are proud Conservatives. You know the ones. There’s James Woods and the original Buffy and a few others. Depp dislikes Donald Trump, the golden god of the GOP, so intensely that he took the unusual step of portraying him unflatteringly in a tongue-in-cheek Funny or Die “adaptation” of The Art of the Deal.
Depp even joked about killing the disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president in Glastonbury. When the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks criticized a sitting American president while abroad it destroyed one of the biggest careers in country music for a very long time.
But The Chicks are women, and consequently viewed with suspicion and contempt by the right, and, let’s be honest, much of the left as well and Johnny Depp is a (formerly) handsome rich straight white man who has made a lot of people a lot of money, including himself and Disney.
Within the context of #MeToo and the Heard/Depp trial, however, the actor’s politics became irrelevant to Republicans, Men’s Rights Activists and professional and semi-pro misogynists.
It no longer mattered that Depp was a Hollywood Trump hater and someone who openly admits to leading a wildly hedonistic existence full of expensive booze, hard drugs, sex and unconscionable waste.
The only thing that mattered to the right was that Depp had become an international symbol of the ferocious worldwide backlash to #MeToo.
The public’s vitriolic hatred of Heard, a contempt fueled and financed by Depp for personal, professional and legal reasons, gave them what little excuse they needed to not believe women. The
What mattered was that Depp was a man who continued to hold onto the public’s affection and sympathy despite the horrible things he has been accused of and the boozy, sordid mess he has made of his life and his career and could be held up as an example of how feminist and #MeToo destroyed the lives of innocent men in its zeal to very publicly punish the guilty.
A QAnon crowd that sees Hollywood as an evil pit of sin filled with decadent, drug-addled real-life vampires threw its weight behind a famously decadent, drug-addled libertine who is LITERALLY in a band called The Hollywood Vampires.
Donald Trump Jr. captured the awful essence of this way of thinking when he tweeted, “Maybe the most telling part of the Amber Turd trial is that not a single man seems to have come out in her defense saying she’s great” and “Believe all women... except Amber Heard. and “$15,000,000 in compensatory and punitive damages to Depp, and perhaps a case that could end the effective rabid feminist notion that all men are guilty before being proven innocent that we've seen as of late. She's just that terrible!”
Perhaps not surprisingly Trump Jr. previously tweeted MULTIPLE TIMES about how Depp’s abuse of Amber Heard rendered him a “stellar left wing spokesman.”
When Depp was just another Hollywood liberal who attacked his dad, Trump Jr saw him as a wife-beating hypocrite. But when Depp became the bloated face of the #meToo backlash he became a brave man standing up to extremist feminist tyranny.
The Republicans would love for the public to intuitively not believe women unless they’re accusing Democrats of crimes.
Now when a woman accuses a powerful man of physical, sexual or emotional abuse the accused can point to Johnny Depp as someone whose career suffered due to abuse allegations but who was ostensibly vindicated in a court of law for all the world to see.
That’s the Depp the GOP is embracing: a symbol, not a human being.
It’s disgusting but then what else would you expect?
The Republicans clearly believe that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. Since Conservatives despise women like Amber Heard with a white-hot passion that has perversely but unsurprisingly made a Trump-hating super-hedonist their accidental friend.
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