Ben Affleck: My Daughter Is a Marxist

The Left is accustomed to taking Ls. For every win (the Child Tax Credit), there is a loss (the Child Tax Credit ending) — usually several (student loans, blocked rail strike, Sean McElwee). But today is an unambiguous victory for DSA members nationwide: Ben Affleck’s daughter is a Marxist.

This promising news emerged at the New York Times Dealbook conference, the annual confab where business guys shell out $2,500 to hear 40-minute musings from figures like Volodymyr Zelensky, Benjamin Netanyahu, and, incredibly, Sam Bankman-Fried. Mr. Jennifer Lopez himself was there today to talk about his new production company, Artist’s Equity, with DealBook’s public face, Andrew Ross Sorkin. The conversation was a dry exchange of platitudes, advice Affleck would give his younger self, and a prolonged back-and-forth about how to cut down on bloated production budgets. But in the middle of a long answer about Affleck’s experience with becoming “very uncool, very fast,” the new CEO dropped this fascinating aside:

I was able to realize, “Oh, so all of these other relationships were very artificial.” They had nothing to do with me. These are people who want to advance through business. I can understand that. I’m not going to fix a lot of emotional importance to those relationships…At the same time, I thought, “I’m going to live a life of which my daughter can be proud” — which is ironic because she’s a Marxist and I’ve now disgraced her by becoming a capitalist.

Presumably, Affleck was talking about his eldest daughter, 16-year-old Violet Affleck, as the other one is still a pre-teen. (Apologies to 12-year-old Seraphina Affleck if we’re wrong here. We wish you only good will.) It’s good to hear the scion of the first Bennifer marriage has sided with labor, even if her father’s studio’s first movie is “about business” and sold to Amazon, whose CEO was also speaking at DealBook while his unionizing workers protested outside. Welcome comrade Affleck. As our big guy told Ludwig Kugelmann in 1868: “Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment.”