OCCULT HOST: Steve Harvey's 2015 Miss Universe ‘Mistake’
Plus (+?) Rumination on the Current 'King of Hollywood'
“There's diva unapproachability, and then there's Steve Harvey.” — Stephen Gossett
“You can be rich if you make the decision to be rich.” — Steve Harvey
$ $ $ $ $ $
Not to mention that once you make the decision to be rich, there’s no telling what other precarious choices you might make to get rich. “Bend over, Billies!”
With that in mind, let us quantum-leap backwards nearly a decade with Steve Harvey. It’s relevant, I promise. First the Now, then the Then:
Falling in line with his fellow nervous Hollywood puppets’ social media scorched earth deletions, comic/actor/game show host/professional liar Steve Harvey nuked any online mention he ever made about controversial and currently incarcerated unholy multiple personality/identities Sean Combs/Puff Daddy/Diddy. Predictable!
Predictable to me, anyway. Not predictable to many others, including a SoCal heroine I know. She posted her dismay — “I like Steve Harvey, so I hope he’s not part of this” — about the well-known (inside the comedy biz, at least) joke-thief, sitcom premise-stealer, and self-declared “King of Comedy.” Instead, I say: Send Mr. Harvey and all the so-called contemporary “kings,” regardless of race, creed or secret society membership, to the figurative guillotine. Revolution calls for Regicide, and this current sovereign system of sinister schemers stinks bad. Time for a royal flush!
So step with me back-back-back into the Time Tunnel (R.I.P., James Darren), my sweet summer children. All the way in reverse to 2015, Christmas season or something something season, a prescient article about the shady host of Family Feud (burying search results about his feuds with Bernie Mac [R.I.P.], Mark Curry and others) and the Miss Universe Pageant Steve Harvey.
I wrote it for MediaPost on December 23rd of that year, taking a cynical look at that moment-in-time’s Mediagasm that I guess nobody remembers now: The wrong winner of the international pageant was announced by its flummoxed host, requiring a rescinded re-announcement and huge humiliation (ritual?) for Steve Harvey, poor Miss Colombia and the beautiful women contest as a whole.
Since nobody remembers nuthin’ nowadays, of course that huge media moment for a moment is now down the memory hole. But I remember. I remember. I was different; America was different; corporate media was most certainly different. Only I have changed for the better since, as you can surely discern from this recycled rant. Sorry!
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Steve Harvey’s Miss Universe 'Mistake' Almost Certainly Wasn’t
At first glance, it feels like an exercise in futility to deconstruct the latest should-be non-story about a dumb incident at a meaningless event: The supposed “mistake” by professional game show host and card-reader Steve Harvey at the Miss Universe pageant.
But since the story’s been “trending” on my Zuckbook page for two days now, and there are (admittedly funny) emerging memes, an outdated and archaic patriarchal beauty pageant that no one paid attention to is suddenly “relevant” again.
This is not good for women, America or the world. So let’s lift the veil and expose it for the scam that is almost certainly is.
For one thing, it amazes me that anybody who works in media, advertising, marketing or PR could think Harvey’s “gaffe” was anything but a manufactured “error” to create buzz and social conversation. They know the underlying foundation of these television events points to hoax.
1. This live contest is tightly scripted to fit a time slot. It's got to be done by 11 p.m. ET. For beauty pageants, producers leave you hanging until after the last commercial break, with roughly two minutes remaining. This year, the winner was announced with about six minutes remaining. Good thing there was enough time to clear up their mistake!
2. Steve Harvey, like all TV hosts, is almost surely wearing a small ear monitor. If he made a mistake, it would've been blasted to him in a millisecond.
3. Instead there were nearly two minutes of parading around poor Miss Colombia as the "winner" before the "mistake" was acknowledged and Miss Philippines was instead awarded the crown.
4. Look at how perfectly those two minutes are choreographed. If you watch this unofficial video taken during the pageant’s announcement — all the real-time videos that used to be on YouTube have apparently been removed — the congratulatory music sequence ends naturally and organically as Harvey returns to the stage. As if it was timed.
5. Steve Harvey is a professional game show host. He literally reads cards for his job on the now prurient Family Feud (“Name a body part that looks like a carrot”; “Name something you suck on”). Did you see the card he was reading from? It couldn't have been more clear who won.
6. All day Monday, and now into Tuesday, the shallow, irrelevant Miss Universe pageant — a sexist relic that should be relegated to the dumpster of history — is all over the news and our public conversation. It drowns out the thousands of more important things we note, such as Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s jaw-dropping report that the Pentagon is openly defying President Obama while providing Syria’s Assad regime with intelligence and other means of support [EDIT: A harbinger of the ongoing Civil War in the military and intel agencies].
Steve Harvey, on the other hand? I think he knows exactly what he’s doing. Harvey’s going to walk away from this bigger than ever. Wait and watch.
The Miss Universe pageant has already announced Harvey will return for the 2016 pageant. Of course he will! The ratings next year will double. [EDIT: I was wrong. They continued to drop and now rattle around two million or so; the Miss Universe Pageant has become largely irrelevant].
Harvey will go on an apology tour, earning sympathy and pity. He’s a likable guy, at least on screen. A few weeks before the 2016 pageant, he’ll go out again, appealingly self-deprecating and reminding us good-naturedly of his “gaffe,” and promising that if we watch this year, he’ll get it right. And the saps and dipshits will then watch a live event that few will DVR, and the advertisers will be very happy for the real-time viewership.
But back to Steve Harvey. Steve Harvey just went from an American B- or C-lister to a global entertainer. The Miss Universe event is an internationally aired event. Before Sunday’s pageant, nobody knew who Steve Harvey was outside the United States….until this “mistake.” Now Harvey’s got worldwide recognition.
But isn’t the recognition for something bad? Doesn’t matter.
In a world of celebrity commodification, no one lasts long in disgrace nowadays. The media narrative demands a redemption story after humiliation. Steve Harvey’s turnaround will take nothing more than a few media mea culpas.
And by making this about Steve Harvey’s redemption, we take our eye off the ball: Beauty pageants are gross. Particularly contests like Miss Universe, which has no talent category to pretend it’s anything but a showcase of objectification.
Thus, let’s show Sunday’s manufactured “mistake” for the sham that it almost certainly is, and do our best to deter people from playing along. Even if I’m wrong, the Miss Universe pageant needs to end, like other unhealthy vestiges of the 20th century. True beauty isn’t found in an ersatz TV contest, even if you can’t fast-forward through it.
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As you can see, I was quite the feminist ally a decade back! Today I’d sardonically say that if beauty pageants are determined to stick around, there needs to be a “nude” category where judges can see how much cosmetic surgery each contestant has had, with a subsequent reduction in scores for each fleshy refashioning.
In hindsight, I’d also say without couching it behind veiled corporate media insinuations that Steve Harvey got put through a secret society humiliation ritual that was also a chaos magick spell to undermine the patriarchal West on the global stage (via an incompetent African? Is there a racist element to this bad joke too?).
To branch off on a relevant tangent, I’ll also mention that almost exactly 14 months later and on a much bigger and more significant stage — all the world’s one, y’know — aging Oscar-winners Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway read the wrong Best Picture film at the Academy Awards.
My personal opinion is that this too was a mass public ritual of sorts, pronouncing for those with eyes to see that the reign of Old Hollywood and dreamy transportive musical fairy tales with Movie Stars — La La Land, the announced winner but actually taking a fourth “L” —its time had passed. The Town had trans-itioned to gay black Hollywood’s time to rule, under the Moonlight (the serious moonlight!).
Recall: Not long after the triumph of low-budget, low-grossing, low-mass appeal gay-paean-to-melatonin-queers Moonlight over the heterosexual-friendly and romantic La La Land, the presumed King of Hollywood Harvey Weinstein took his legendary Humpty Dumpty fall, replaced by…surely somebody black and gay, and representing the Barrack Hussein Obama wing (ahem) of the ruthless, woman-hating, child-predating, incompetent-but-still-dangerous satanic occupying regime.
Evidence suggests that whoever this black and gay person is — I thought it was Orca Winfrey, but now I’m leaning Diddy — they are actually even worse than Harvey (Weinstein, not Steve). Weinstein was an evil sex criminal predator tied to Israel’s Mossad and who had people killed (IMHO!). But at least he made good movies, brought beautiful people to prominence (after they blew him a lot, but whatever Gwyneth, you whacky “The First Lady of Miramax,” you!) and worked hard to entertain the masses, usually successfully. Whoever’s running “The Show” in “The Town” today not only hates America and promotes ugly people (inside and out), s/he can’t create or oversee successful popular entertainment.
Imagine someone worse than Harvey Weinstein! That’s who’s the King of Hollywood now. Diddy? Orca Winfrey? That Very Close Friend of Larry Sinclair? Beats me! All I can tell you is that they’re almost surely black, gay and awful. No joke: The Town needs an enema! “Bend over, Billies!”
In any event, no matter who we’re blaming for Hollywood being the worst it’s ever been, it doesn’t surprise me at all to find Steve Harvey deleting a bunch of his Xweets. As we were all recently reminded, Elon Musk/Lone Skum said shortly after he acquired the Blue Bird of Perpetual Turmoil: “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.”
Keep that in mind. No telling who is really pulling the strings of all the increasingly obvious puppets on the world’s stage. But you can almost smell the Fear and Loathing among our repulsive and retarded Ruling Class now, amirite? I expect it’s going to get worse, but what do I know? “I Know Nothing.”
all the world's a stage indeed....
If you work on film crews, like I did, there are celebrities you hear about: the very wonderful, and the very rotten. Steve Harvey is known as one of the very rotten. Just horrible.
When I first started in the business, , for example, decades ago, I was shocked to hear what a horrible person Bill Cosby was. And Barbara Walters. At the time I was shocked.
But yeah, Steve Harvey. Everybody says the same thing about him and it’s all bad.