Mallory Keaton joins Alex

It will surprise few that I loved and grew up on Family Ties which starred Michael J Fox (I even started calling myself David P Farrar to emulate him) as Alex P Keaton – the conservative son to liberal parents.

His sister, Mallory, was played by Justine Bateman. It seems Mallory (Justine) has joined Alex. The FP reports:

Three days after the election, Justine Bateman, the former Family Ties star, catapulted herself into the political muck with a tweetstorm to her 140,000 followers that began: “Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.” 

She continued: “Common sense was discarded, intellectual discussion was demonized. . . Complete intolerance became almost a religion and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others. Their destruction was displayed in the ‘town square’ of social media for all to see.”

In other words, she said out loud the thing everyone has been thinking.

The tweetstorm went viral, and her followers more than doubled. People responded on X with tweets like: “A long war just ended and I’m finally home” and “It’s okay to be normal.”

The intolerant left is the best recruiting mechanism for the right.

Then came 2020: the pandemic, George Floyd, the riots, the groupthink—“these people necessitating that I think like them, and policing what people say, and what they tweet, and what they like on a social media post.”

She hated the rise of the progressive mob. It was antithetical to everything she believed in. “The only way you get that kind of momentum behind destroying peoples’ lives is when you have a mob mentality,” Bateman said. “I felt like the fact that Trump won cut the momentum of that mob mentality.”

It was, and still is, a mob.

But as recently as a few weeks ago and definitely a year or two ago, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to produce a show like Family Ties, Bateman told me. The progressive scolds would have called Alex a white supremacist, and they would have loathed the ex-hippie parents for accommodating their kids’ shallow, capitalist, racist, sexist, xenophobic values rather than banishing them from their home. 

Sadly, this is probably correct.

Think how many of our favourite shows could never be made today – Family Ties, Friends, Faulty Towers etc