What Do Hate Groups Think of Anne Hathaway?

Have you ever met anyone who likes Anne Hathaway? No? Me either. 

Even if someone doesn’t know who she is, you can just show them a picture of her smarmy, drama school face or that clip of her saying “blerg” in an effort to appear human, and they’ll be an instant lifelong “Hathahater.”

Last week, I called around hate groups to see how they felt about Jennifer Lawrence, and it turned out they, like everyone else on earth, all liked her (kinda). So I decided to call up a few more hate groups and see what their feelings were on Anne.

COUNCIL OF CONSERVATIVE CITIZENS

Who are they?

A white supremacist group that, amongst other things, are against racial integration, the gays, and interracial marriage. 

What do they think of Anne Hathaway?

Could I just ask, really quickly, if your group has an opinion on Anne Hathaway? Do you hate her as much as the rest of the world?
Who’s Anne Hathaway?

Catwoman in the new Batman movie? She just won the Oscar for Les Mis? Princess Diaries?
I don’t know who that is.

You didn’t see The Devil Wears Prada?
No. Why are you asking me this?

Because I really hate her. And I was just hoping to find some kind of group I can join that feels the same way.
Well, why do you hate her?

I don’t know! It’s weird. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think it has something to do with her face. 
Is she white?

Yeah, she’s white. 
I don’t know. We don’t have an opinion on everything in the world. I don’t look at many movies. But I guess my daughters or my son or my wife might have seen her in something. 

Are they there? Maybe you could ask them what they think of Anne?
[to his daughter] Renee, do you know what the Princess Diaries are? [to me] Yeah, she’s heard of it.

Ask her what she thinks of Anne Hathaway.
She just went to the other room…

Well what kinda stuff is your group into? 
We’re the voice of a no-longer-silent majority. We’re paleoconservatives and populist conservatives. 

I don’t really know what anything you just said means.
We’re like Andrew Jackson. 

Was he Michael Jackson’s dad?
No, no. He was the president. 

What do you guys think of Michael Jackson? It must be a hard one for you guys, right? Because he used to be black but then he was white. 
Oh, I don’t know… I don’t really have an opinion on him.

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What Are Republicans For?

Not that long ago—it was last year, though it feels like a lifetime ago—I wrote a column that could have made my reputation, and almost began to, but instead it made me sick. It was called “What Are Women For?”, and though it might have seemed like something a pundit had spent a night at a desk assembling out of notes and bookmarks and tabs, I actually wrote it in about 30 minutes at a coffee shop. I was more or less unemployed, I was wondering how long I could last in that state, and I had a deadline I wanted to hit.

When the column was published, I received an avalanche of criticism from outraged, irritated women and liberals, and the conservative establishment didn’t offer a peep in my defense. Rather than embracing my role as the bro version of Ann Coulter and try for a maybe-lucrative career as a conservative pundit, as the angry little controversy gave me a chance to do, I wanted to go back in time and arrange that the whole thing never happened.

On the one hand, politics, like gossip, is the art of talking about strangers. You goad people you don’t know into having a reaction, and, as a rule, the intensity of that reaction translates into success. On the other hand, as I suddenly realized, there’s very little joy in spontaneously inspiring real people you’ve never met to despise you, as if a piece of writing you produced was not just something with your name on it, but was actually you.

And sure enough, as I came to realize more slowly, when you publish things online and live most of your professional life on social media, what you write really is the closest approximation of you that almost anyone on earth can access.

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In this episode of Foreign Correspondents, Hong Kong State Radio reporter Ben Leung heads to the Conservative Political Action Conference convention in Denver to see what’s what. China has a one-party system, so he’s always been bewildered by the pageantry of our elections. Watch as he attempts to wrap his head around one of America’s silliest, and most important, traditions.