Alyssa Milano, Guess Who's Not the Boss?

Georgia recently ruffled liberal feathers by passing a “heartbeat bill,” which Republican Governor Brian Kemp has promised to sign. Imagine what a different world Georgians would be living in if liberals’ chosen one, Stacey Abrams, had won the governorship.

In response to the passage of the law, actress Alyssa Milano sent out a tweet arguing that Hollywood should boycott the state in response to the law: “There are over 20 productions shooting in GA & the state just voted to strip women of their bodily autonomy. Hollywood! We should stop feeding GA economy.”  Milano expanded on her dislike of the heartbeat bill in an op-ed for Deadline.

Milano’s op-ed in Deadline caught the attention of actress Ashley Bratcher, who stars as Abby Johnson in the newly released film “Unplanned.” Bratcher, a Georgia native, responded to Milano with a Deadline op-ed of her own. Bratcher informed the “Who’s the Boss?” actress that her life “was spared on an abortion table” and told her “you had the privilege of being born in 1972.”  Just one month after Milano’s birth, the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide. Bratcher educated Milano that as a result of the decision, “over 61 million lives have never reached their full potential.”   Bratcher also took aim at Milano’s threats to the Georgia film industry: “Georgia has its own identity and that it won’t be bowing down to Hollywood anytime soon…In Georgia, we care just as much about being pro-life as being pro-film.”

Milano appears to forget about Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  While filming for “Unplanned” took place in Oklahoma, surely more conservative, religious films would choose to film in Georgia if Hollywood decided to abandon the state.  Perhaps the “Virginia is for Film Lovers” crowd, which includes Bill O’Reilly’s series “Legends & Lies,” could flock to Georgia; especially if Virginia ever ends up passing the polar opposite of the heartbeat bill, as it flirted with doing earlier this year. Pure Flix, the company that produced “Unplanned,” may even decide to set up shop in the Peach State.  Pure Flix currently operates out of Arizona, another conservative-leaning state that the Democrats hope to re-colonize.

Milano has taken her activism directly to the Georgia State Capitol, where she did not exactly receive a warm reception.  She had an exchange with State Representative Dominic LaRiccia, who asked her “what district of Georgia do you vote in?”  Milano responded by telling him “I don’t vote in Georgia but…there’s 30 people outside that do vote in Georgia that I was going to escort in.”  LaRiccia asked her “but you don’t vote in Georgia?” Milano did not seerm to like his follow-up question, “excuse me, don’t interrupt me.”  Despite the fact that her teenage years came to a conclusion more than 25 years ago, Milano still has the characteristics of a bratty, entitled teenage girl.

Milano reiterated her attempt to blackmail the state of Georgia into not signing the “heartbeat bill” by pointing out to LaRiccia “the people that work on my crews, the 90,000 people that the entertainment industry actually employs do (vote in Georgia).”  Milano apparently believes that every single one of those 90,000 people support abortion on demand up until the moment of birth.

In her Deadline op-ed, Milano talked about how “in 2016, Georgia’s film industry was ready to pack up and leave the state because of divisive legislation passed by the state’s General Assembly.”  Milano described the “so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act” as “essentially a license to discriminate against the state’s LGBTQ+ community.” She then praised the then-Governor of Georgia over his decision to deal (pun intended) a fatal blow to the legislation by vetoing it.

This time, it looks like Milano and her comrades in Hollywood will have a much harder time getting the Governor to bow to their wishes.  Newly elected Governor Kemp has proven he has no problem offending liberals; he ran an ad jokingly pointing a gun at a boy interested in dating one of his daughters as he asked him to recite Kemp’s agenda. “I can’t govern because I’m worried about what someone in Hollywood thinks about me. I ran the last two years on these issues, and I got elected with the largest number of votes in the history of the state of Georgia, and I’m doing what I told people I would do.”  In other words, getting “charmed” by Milano (pun intended) will not cause Kemp to change his mind about signing the pro-life legislation.

Hollywood has tried to influence Georgia politics in the past; pouring millions of dollars into a special election for Georgia’s 6^th Congressional District in 2017.  Liberals saw this as a top pickup opportunity considering the fact that President Trump only won the district with a mere plurality after it had spent decades voting reliably Republican. The seat became open when Congressman Tom Price abandoned the seat in favor of an ultimately short-lived tenure as President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Liberals rallied around Jon Ossoff, who didn’t even live in the district.  In spite of Hollywood’s best efforts to buy the election, Ossoff ended up losing the special election to Republican Karen Handel.  However, Hollywood ended up getting its wish in 2018; as Democrat Lucy McBath defeated Handel in her attempt to win a full term.  The Democrats hope to build on their success in Georgia by flipping the 7^th Congressional District.  President Trump won the district with a bare majority in 2016 but incumbent Republican Rob Woodall barely held on in 2018; defeating his Democratic challenger by less than one percentage point.  Perhaps not wanting to go through another nasty election fight, Woodall has announced that he will not run for re-election; emboldening the Democrats seeking to flip the seat in 2020.

The passage of the “heartbeat bill” reinforces the fact that despite the left’s best attempts to re-colonize the state, Georgia remains a Republican state.  While the Atlanta area continues to get more Democratic thanks to demographic changes, Georgia contains a portion of Appalachia; one of the most culturally conservative regions in the country.  Two of Georgia’s Congressional districts rank among the top ten most Republican-leaning districts in the nation.  According to Gallup, Georgia ranks tenth in the nation in terms of weekly church attendance rates, tied with Texas.  

The battle over the “heartbeat bill” in Georgia illustrates the benefits of fiscal conservatism.  Liberals romanticize California, home of hundreds of miles of coastline as well as desert and mountains.  If liberals love California so much, it begs the question as to why they would want to leave the state to make their movies elsewhere. Actor Rob Schneider put his finger on the reason why: “overregulation…it isn’t helping businesses. We’re chasing business away.”  In an interview with The Blaze, Schneider said that he moved his vitamin business to the more business friendly state of Texas.  Not surprisingly, the “overregulation” instituted by the politicians that Hollywood helps to elect has caused them to start filming in other states, such as Georgia.

Now that Hollywood has established a foothold in Georgia, one of its self-appointed leaders has slammed state leaders for “going down a divisive road (by) refighting culture wars,” arguing that their decision may end up “jeopardizing one of the state’s biggest sources of revenue.”  Milano’s rhetoric illustrates the point that liberals love to lecture conservatives about divisiveness and “refighting culture wars,” acting as if liberal states would never, ever thinking about passing divisive legislation.  Maybe she forgot about the “Reproductive Healthcare Act,” the radical abortion law which erased a part of New York State’s penal code that declared it a felony to “engage in conduct which causes the death of a person or an unborn child with which a female has been pregnant for more than 24 weeks.”  It takes two to fight culture wars.  In addition to signing the Reproductive Healthcare Act into law, Governor Cuomo has served as an agent of division by deriding “extreme conservatives” who believe in the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and the Second Amendment and making it clear that they have “no place in the State of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”  As much as governors of conservative states might detest the fact that Hollywood liberals try to influence policy making in their states, Governor Kemp has yet to say that “extreme liberals” who identify as pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, anti-gun have no place in the state of Georgia.  With that in mind, liberals can spare the American people the lectures about “divisiveness.”

Milano has already proven herself a hypocrite on another issue central to the Democratic Party besides abortion: the #MeToo movement.  The actress sent out a tweet in response to all of the allegations of inappropriate behavior that have plagued former Vice President Joe Biden.  Milano’s tweet included a picture of her standing next to Biden, whom she called “a leader and a champion on fighting violence against women for many years.”  In the age of #MeToo, it comes across as quite refreshing when a member of the liberal mob stops to give any due process to a man accused of any kind of sexual misconduct. However, Milano did not extend that same courtesy to Brett Kavanaugh. A vocal opponent of Kavanaugh’s nomination, she sat in the room and looked on as Christine Blasey Ford hurled decades-old allegations at the then-Supreme Court nominee.  Therefore, in response to Milano’s tweet, the magnificent @whitneycovfefe congratulated Milano “on becoming the most annoyingly hypocritical leftist out there.”  I responded to her tweet by pointing out that “I don’t think she would be so forgiving if he wasn’t pro-abortion.”  After all, Milano probably would not send out a tweet defending a pro-life politician accused of sniffing women’s hair and touching their thighs.

Her hypocrisy when it comes to Biden aside, Milano has gathered the signatures of more than 100 Hollywood celebrites who promise to boycott Georgia should the “heartbeat bill” become law.  Milano has every right to protest the law the same way pro-lifers have every right to boycott the movies and TV shows featuring everyone on that list; which includes Lena Dunham, who once said she wished she had an abortion and Martha Plimpton, who warmly recalls her abortions the same way normal people look back fondly on their wedding day.  In reality, the judicial branch may emerge as Milano’s most vocal ally in her attempt to thwart the heartbeat bill since the courts have struck down every version of the heartbeat bill that has passed in individual states thus far.

Milano may think she and everyone else in Hollywood have enough influence to scare politicians into voting the way she wants them to.  It did not work with Kavanaugh and it will not work with the “heartbeat bill” either, at least when it comes to Georgia’s elected officials.  So “who’s the boss?”  Not Alyssa Milano.