November 1, 2021 at 12:08 p.m.
Hypocrisy central
Hypocrisy central
It's horrible for the loss of Halyna Hutchins's life; it's horrible for her family and friends; it's horrible for Baldwin and his family; and, let's face it, we all feel a gut punch when we hear about a young life so senselessly taken.
That said, there are serious questions to be asked - those that are certainly being asked by investigators now but also the larger political issues the incident raises.
We all may know more by the time this is read, but for now there are troubling reports from the movie set that raise the possibility of both civil and criminal liability. The local district attorney has not ruled out criminal charges, so we will wait and see, but reports about a crew walk-out over working conditions and safety protocols, about cutting corners on a low-budget film, and even unconfirmed reports of crew members using the guns for target practice with live ammunition in their off time are troubling.
Underneath the scuttlebutt, there's an undeniable fact: There was serious negligence that led to a shooting death that movie protocols and standard gun safety measures would have prevented if followed.
Movie protocol: No live ammunition anywhere on set. Gun safety: Always check a firearm when your hands touch it for the first time and never ever take someone's word that a gun is unloaded. If it's supposed to be a blank, confirm that it's a blank.
Clear the weapon personally, that's the rule.
In this instance, three people handled the gun - the armorer who placed the weapon on the cart, the assistant director who handed the firearm to Baldwin and declared "cold gun"; and Baldwin himself - and not one made sure the gun was safe.
Beyond the calamitous mess that was the movie set of "Rust," there are larger political questions to consider, the intertwining issues of gun rights and the hypocrisy of the American left. Consider that most of Hollywood, including Baldwin, have been anti-gun rights crusaders for years.
In fact, several years ago, Baldwin famously joined a celebrity anti-gun rights coalition called NoRifle Association (NoRA), a group founded to campaign for gun control laws and to counter the NRA. Since the NRA happens to be the largest gun safety training organization in the world, Alec Baldwin might want to rethink which group he should belong to.
Speaking of rethinking, it should also be noted that Baldwin has called for "rethinking" the Second Amendment. Just how does one "rethink" fundamental civil rights without taking them away?
It's not just Baldwin. It's virtually all of Hollywood, and that's the point. On and on they go about gun control and gun confiscation, all the while writing, filming, producing, and acting in films with depictions of gun violence that are more fatal and far more common than in real life America.
And after every actual gun tragedy, whether accidental or purposeful, these celebrities use the opportunity to call for gun bans and the dismantling of civil liberties, while they continue to blaze away blissfully on their Hollywood sets.
And so it behooves us to ask: Now that actual gun violence has occurred on one of those sets - again - will Hollywood call for a ban on the use of real guns in filming movies and TV? Will Alec Baldwin do so?
In California, in the wake of the Hutchins shooting, a petition has started to do just that. It had more than 28,000 signatures in a matter of days. Will the progressive Hollywood left get behind it?
Already, too, the producer of ABC's The Rookie has banned live guns on that set. How many productions will voluntarily follow suit?
To be sure, we don't believe such blanket bans are necessary. Many actors insist a real gun with blanks gives them a feeling of authenticity, while technicians acknowledge that even post-production technology cannot always reproduce on film the "reality" that a real firearm gives.
In the real world, strict protocols for safety - no live ammunition on set, always checking the safety of a gun about to be handled, not pointing in someone's direction, when possible - would keep crew and cast safe.
But Hollywood does not live in the real world, and when real tragedies strike, they do not look for common-sense responses but use them as an excuse to push ideological measures to ban and confiscate guns, not just from the criminal or careless, but from law-abiding people who use them to hunt and to defend their families and their property.
So now that a real world tragedy has struck home, will Hollywood take it as an opportunity to impose their rigid authoritarian prescriptions on themselves? Or will they defer to Hollywood profit motives and their own convenient preferences?
Will they at least be consistent for once in their wrong-headedness or will they continue to wallow in the hypocrisy that has become a defining feature of the American left?
We guess the latter, but we'll see.
Speaking of hypocrisy, there was even more of that on the "Rust" set. Just six hours before Baldwin shot Hutchins to death, the camera crew walked out in protest of various bad working conditions, among them safety complaints linked to the prop gun, as well as quartering the crew 50 miles away from a location where they were reportedly being made to work 14-hour days.
When they protested, management - to which Baldwin belongs as a producer - just dumped them along the wayside like garbage and hired replacements. According to a report in the LA Times, management even threatened to have the union workers forcibly removed after they had returned. The Hollywood prop union also confirmed that the prop master on duty at the time of the shooting was not one of its members.
Part of the labor protest concerned gun safety. The LA Times reviewed a text message it reported was from a crew member to a unit production manager: "We've now had 3 accidental discharges. This is super unsafe."
Yet the union workers were told to get lost. Some social justice from the social justice warrior management team.
Of course, brute management was not what everybody saw in the days and weeks leading up to the shooting. Baldwin stood in solidarity with union workers in a photo Hutchins herself posted to Instagram days before her death, and, according to Mother Jones, Baldwin had recorded a video prior to a union contract ratification vote advising union workers to stand up in solidarity and to strike if they felt they had to.
Strike, but be replaced. That last part he apparently forgot to say. And there's no photo on Instagram of Baldwin supporting Rust union workers tossed from his set in the hours leading up to Hutchins's death.
This brazen hypocrisy is not unique to Hollywood but saturates the American left these days. We constantly hear the left and the liberal corporate media complain about misinformation from the right when they are the biggest disseminators of disinformation of all. (See four-year Russia hoax as prime example.)
We hear Democrats and the corporate media scream about far-right fascism, as if such a thing existed, and conservative authoritarianism when it is they who are threatening Big Tech if they don't censor conservatives even more, when it is they who compel Americans to surrender their medical freedom if they want to work, when it is they who threaten to unleash the security state on parents who dare to criticize school boards.
In America today tyranny is on the march; its camouflage is hypocrisy. Not many times is it exposed, but last week Alec Baldwin did so in a particularly horrific and tragic way.
Halyna Hutchins's death shouldn't have happened, and it certainly wasn't worth it, but we should nonetheless not be afraid to look at the larger production it has revealed, and to look closely at the script of the left as it tries to distract us with the subterfuge of its hypocrisy on the political stage.
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