The Identity Politics mob will come after you for any number of offenses.
- Starting a restaurant serving food from a culture that isn’t technically yours
- Using the wrong pronoun on purpose or accidentally
- Saying an effort to erase white people on campus for a day is a bridge too far
Turns out pretending to be a different ethnicity for years, and years, and profiting handsomely from it isn’t enough to light the mob’s torches.
Hilaria Baldwin never attacked a photographer or hurled epithets at strangers like her Emmy-winning spouse, Alec Baldwin. She just ran a very long con on a very long list of people.
- Magazine editors
- TV producers
- Journalists
- Instagram users
Born Hillary Hayward-Thomas, Mrs. Baldwin spent years creating a fake persona that gave her real benefits. She pretended to have a strong, vibrant Spanish heritage, down to her accented banter. Turns out most of that is a bald-faced lie.
The cringiest piece of evidence is a clip from the “Today” show, in which Hilaria, speaking in a Spanish accent while cosplaying as some kind of culinary expert, says, “We have very few ingredients. We have tomatoes, we have, um, how you say in Eng — cucumbers….”
In December 2016, Hilaria published a book called, ironically, “The Living Clearly Method.” The chances of a basic, accomplishment-free chick from Massachusetts getting a book deal, let alone attendant publicity in Vanity Fair or on the “Today” show or representation with CAA — where her original online bio stated she was born in Mallorca, Spain — without marriage to a bona fide celebrity is laughable.
She got busted this week by The New York Post, and her damage control attempts proved laughable.
“Leave me alone. I’m not doing anything wrong by being me. And maybe that doesn’t look like somebody you’ve met before. But isn’t that the beauty of diversity?” she asks. “I’m not going to apologize for the amount of time that I’ve spent in two countries, and I’m not going to apologize for the fact that I speak two languages. And I’m not going to apologize for the fact that I have two versions of my name, which is the same name.”
Late night comics would have a field day mocking her fall, if they still had interest in being either truthful or funny.
So where’s the Cancel Culture mob? What about those who worship at the altar of Identity Politics? Why hasn’t she been officially canceled?
One more vital question — where’s the media outrage?
The liberal Vulture.com trotted out all the damning information and then softpedaled the results:
So, what is the truth? It seems as though Hilaria Baldwin genuinely believes that she is entitled to claim Spanish culture and identification because her American parents now live in Mallorca. “But isn’t that the beauty of diversity?”
August entertainment outlets like Variety covered the story but squeezed in an attempt to rationalize the con away.
But I also understand the impulse to feel that what one is, is not interesting enough, is not exotic enough. There was a time, when I was a freshman at Cornell, that my thick Boston accent became a source of crippling embarrassment. I felt dumb, incapable of being taken seriously. How to read De Sade aloud in Comp Lit 407 when I sounded like one of the concession clerks at Fenway Park? So I made a conscientious effort to change it. I worked at it, studied the students and professors on campus. I pronounced my R’s with intention. But it was all just so much effort….
I can’t speak for Hilaria Baldwin. Maybe it was all part of a marketing stunt. Maybe she just got bored. Maybe Spain appeals to Hilaria Baldwin in a way that the Boston Common never has. Who knows why people do what they do?
Less than zero outrage.
TheWrap.com covered it twice and did so in an appropriately brutal fashion.
The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline both spiked the Hilaria hilarity at first. The latter is still mum on the matter, but THR broke its silence this week with a comical op-ed saying it’s our fault that Hilaria Baldwin is a fraud.
Really.
Our culture worships the word “authentic.” But human psychology is situational. We’re different with our grandparents than with our sorority sisters; different in war than in peace; different when hungry than full; exactly the same when using regular water or aqueous ozone. I’ve never married a celebrity, worked at Extra or posted photos of myself in underwear doing exercises in my bathroom that I’m not entirely sure are exercises, but I am different on the page than in person. And I know that when people celebrate one part of me, I tend to play that up. I’m not saying Hilaria Baldwin contains multitudes, but she probably contains a half dozen of stuff.
The far-Left CNN similarly ran defense with its own piece, while NBC News did a lesser version but let Alec Baldwin have the final word. Why would reporters allow Hilaria Baldwin to skate from this comical, cultural appropriation con?
Two reasons leap to mind.
She’s the wife of a man who spent four years mocking President Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live.” If you think that doesn’t offer a modicum of cultural protection you’re flat-out wrong.
Here’s the other reason, and it might be more telling.
If the media savaged Hilaria Baldwin for cultural appropriation on steroids it would send a separate message to the masses. Being a person from another culture who speaks with a pronounced accent isn’t the curse we’re told it is in Trump’s Racist AmericaTM.
It’s a perk, a way to climb the corporate ladder and get plenty of TV face time.
That flies in the face of too many media narratives to tally. So instead of mocking Hilaria Baldwin deep into 2021 reporters are downplaying her cultural crimes, “explaining” what happened or, in the case of the far-Left THR, saying it’s our fault, dummies.
There’s more than one con going on here.
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