Next year I’m hosting an Anti-Communist Film Festival. I’m inviting Alec Baldwin as a special guest.
Hear me out. Yes, Baldwin is a leftist – and a crazy one at that. Sample quote: “Trump is someone who you’d have to be clinically insane to think that he was a qualified leader in this country.” Baldwin satirizes President Trump on Saturday Night Live, and once sent out tweets calling Republicans “lying thieves.” He supports gay marriage and gun control. He has attended fundraisers with Jane Fonda, and he adored President Obama.
Yet I think there is a conservative inside Alec Baldwin trying to get out. Like Whittaker Chambers, Baldwin, if exposed to the truth, could be an apostate of communism. (I also have a bit of a personal history with the guy, but that’s a different story.)
There is also the conservative ethic of engaging in debate with those who disagree with us. We don’t shut speakers down. It would also be a kick to have Baldwin and James Woods at the same screening. They were both in Ghosts of Mississippi, after all.
“By the time I was ten,” Alec Baldwin writes in his 2017 memoir Nevertheless, “my political consciousness was nearly concretized. I’m no different from people who are raised in a home that is for or anti any of the issues of the day: the NRA, immigration, gay marriage, abortion, or Obamacare. Politicization starts at home. My politics are my dad’s politics, based on the simple idea that, as the richest nation on Earth, America has a greater obligation to reach out and help those who have not realized even a modicum of what we take for granted here.”
Baldwin writes that his father Alexander loved John F. Kennedy and even attended the funeral in Washington when Kennedy was killed in 1963. Young Alec was five when Kennedy died, and Kennedy’s death was the future actors’ first political memory.
And yet reading Nevertheless, I felt like I was listening to a conservative. A kid from a poor Catholic family in Massapequa, Long Island, Baldwin went into acting not to make the world a better place, but for the money. To those of us on the right, that’s a valid reason to do something. The most touching parts of Nevertheless are the descriptions of the early years of Baldwin’s life, when he had to grapple with the anxiety of living in a house with an exhausted father and a mother who relied on pills to get through the day.
Baldwin’s father Alexander was a high school teacher and football coach who struggled financially. The family was always bouncing checks, and their house was perpetually falling apart. This, along with what he describes as a high level of emotional intelligence and empathy, may have cemented in Baldwin’s mind the idea that the left, which promises everybody everything, is always on the side of the little guy. “Six kids and no help,” Baldwin used to repeat to himself in reference to his mother. “Acting was a way to ease, though never eliminate, the financial anxieties of a boy from South Shore Long Island who remains inside me today,” Baldwin observes. “I’m writing [Nevertheless] because I was paid to do it.” Greg Gutfeld could not have said it better.
Baldwin also writes about God as a guiding force in his life – especially after he got sober in the early 1990s. Baldwin hates the press and played Jack Ryan, the hero of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. How can he not be a closet Republican?
In fact, The Hunt for Red October would be a fine film to screen at the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
While it’s true that most people first form their political opinions at the feet of their parents, those with a mind as agile as Baldwin’s usually reassess their political beliefs when they get older. Like Baldwin, they stop partying, have children, and appreciate that social policies that contribute to human flourishing come from the right side of the aisle as often, or perhaps more often, as the left. For example, in one section of Nevertheless, Baldwin calls the New York of the 1970s, where he lived as a struggling young actor, “filthy and unlovable.” The city was turned around by the policies of Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani, who gets nothing but scorn from Baldwin.
The modern Democratic Party championed by Baldwin changed radically after Kennedy’s death. JFK’s tax cuts, pro-Americanism, and Catholicism became the party of abortion, identity politics, and high taxes. It is now a party of socialists. Baldwin’s father died in 1983, but he was exactly the kind of non-nonsense, working-class man who was raised on Kennedy but might have voted for Trump in 2016.
Through sheer hard work, Alec Baldwin has lived the American dream. He’s rich, accomplished, happily married, and loved. Yes, there was the Rust shooting. On October 21, 2021, at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in New Mexico, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot, and director Joel Souza was wounded on the set of the film Rust. The accident was the result of a prop revolver discharging a live round while being used by Baldwin.
In an interview on ABC with DNC gnome George Stephanopoulos, Baldwin broke down in tears while saying that he felt no guilt about what had happened. “Someone is responsible for what happened, and I can’t say who that is,” Baldwin told Stephanopoulos in the interview, which was recorded in advance. “But I know it’s not me.”
As many have pointed out, had one NRA advisor been on the set of Rust, Halyna Hutchins may be alive right now. Still, we don’t have to get into that at the festival. We can welcome Alec as a long-lost brother.
Your VIP tickets will be at the box office, Alec.
Note: You can contribute support for the festival by donating at the GoFundMe page for the project.
