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November 10, 2024

The pleasant surprise of the unexpected Justine Bateman

By Andrea Widburg

I was 21 when the TV show Family Ties debuted in 1982. As was true for many Americans, I focused on Michael J. Fox, whose impeccable comic timing humanized the cuckoo in the nest: An unexpected young Reagan Republican whom two hippies had inadvertently raised. It turns out, though, that I should have paid attention to Justine Bateman, who played the relatively overlooked character of Alex P. Keaton’s younger sister, Mallory. Bateman may have lacked Fox’s comic timing, but her recent tweets gently poking fun at overwrought leftists and expressing strong support for core constitutional values reveal an interesting, intelligent, and funny person.

Unlike Fox, Bateman did not have a stratospheric career in Hollywood. Instead, she appeared in a few TV shows over the years (none of which I’ve watched) and directed a feature film and a short film (neither of which I watched). However, she’s done something unusual in Hollywood, which is to remain married to the same man for 23 years. Their two children are fortunate.

Frankly, I haven’t thought about Bateman in close to 40 years.

However, since the election, Bateman has suddenly thrust herself into my consciousness as a witty cultural critique and a valiant defender of America’s core values. I suspect she’s a long-time Democrat who realized, as many others have, that her lifelong political party no longer exists and that wokism is destroying creativity and the world in which she’s raising her children. She sees, as we all do that, on the ground the modern Democrat party’s supporters are often insane, while at the upper echelons, the power brokers have Marxist, international values, not traditional American values.

Regarding those crazy supporters, Bateman launched the hashtag “#SocialMediaVideoCritique. In a series of dryly ironic tweets, Bateman offers straight-faced critiques of the acting and production values in the overwrought videos Kamala supporters posted immediately after Trump’s victory. (Interestingly, she found a lot on Libs of TikTok, whether because she realized it was a good source or because she’s a fan.) Here’s a sampling. There's this one:

And this:

And this:

The best one, of course, is her critique of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has long been the role model for all the crazy leftist women videos we see:

(You can find all of Bateman’s brilliant critiques here.)

This is brilliant comedy, for Bateman’s dry, objective tone only highlights the overwrought insanity playing out in the videos.

However, Bateman didn’t stop with gently highlighting the emotional collapse on the left. Instead, when angry leftists pushed her about her values, she bravely stated them. They have nothing to do with Trump or MAGA. They are, instead, about essential American principles that have been lost over the years, everything from American resilience to free speech.

Immediately after the election, she pushed back at the way universities infantilize the young people they should be preparing to face the real world:

 

 

When challenged, she explained that she hasn’t suddenly abandoned her values; she is, instead, responding to being left behind by the rapidly moving and censorious woke movement:

Eventually, Bateman attacked toxic Wokeness directly:

The last two sentences read: “The Woke Party can take its place in the American political graveyard with the Whigs and the Federalists. It’s over.”

Nor was Bateman in a mood to be cowed by well-known critics from the left. When Taylor Lorenz (or, as Libs of TikTok calls her, “Tay Tay”) tried to silence Bateman, Bateman was unimpressed:

Aside from showing that a rather mediocre teen actress (sorry, but it’s true) is a genuinely talented comedian, Bateman’s tweets show two other things: One, she’s courageous, and two, she’s right that Trump’s reelection signals the end of woke dominance in America. If you look at this amazing chart in the New York Times (which doesn’t even reflect Arizona and other Western states), you see that Americans have re-set. They’re done with the Democrat party madness.

In a way, Trump’s four years in the wilderness were necessary. Instead of a second lame-duck term that would have seen him subject to the same endless attacks we saw during Trump’s first term, Americans finally had a good look at the unmasked, unconstrained, wide-open-crazy Democrat party. Trump’s coming in loaded for bear, and the American people are behind him—including, it seems, Justine Bateman.

Image by Greg2600. CC BY-SA 2.0.

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