Moral Amnesia

The strange afterlife of Mel Gibson has become a sort of planetary weather vane: wherever the wind blows hardest—populism, cancel culture, streaming wars, or the latest geopolitical flare-up—you’ll find the Australian-American actor-director hovering like a cigar-chomping ghost at the edge of the frame. From Cannes to Caracas, his name still triggers a Pavlovian response: half…