Just a few weeks into 2014, we’ve already got our first NRA-Fox News freakout, this time spawned by Hollywood, of all places.
It began with Harvey Weinstein, who announced plans to make an anti-NRA movie, which will be called The Senator’s Wife. “I don’t think we need guns in this country and I hate it, and I think that the NRA is a disaster area,” Weinstein told Howard Stern. “I’m gonna make a movie with Meryl Streep and we’re gonna take this issue head on.”
“They’re gonna wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them,” he added. Streep is, of course, in the midst of a Weinstein orchestrated campaign to win an Oscar for her turn in August: Osage County.
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It took no time for denizens of Fox News and conservatives as far flung as The Washington Times and rocker-madman Ted Nugent to attack the project — several of whom were quick to invoke the Holocaust in their criticisms of Weinstein.
First you have Emily Miller of The Washington Times, who pounced on Weinstein for also talking of plans for a project about Jews who defended themselves during the Holocaust. Weinstein “does not seem to know that the Nazis were able to confiscate the guns that the Jewish people owned based on Germany’s government registry,” Miller wrote.
Then there’s Ted Nugent, who compared Weinstein to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, among others. People “will see that Joseph Goebbels and Saul Alinsky is alive in the form a fat punk named Harvey Weinstein and as he tries to destroy the NRA it will backfire on him,” Nugent said on the NRA news show Cam & Company, as MediaMatters first pointed out.
Here’s the audio:
And Fox News host Martha McCallum used a segment on her show to voice her own outrage, first asking conservative radio host Mike Slater “What do you make of a guy who made Kill Bill carrying the torch for anti-NRA?”
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“Harvey and his friends have built their careers on making incredibly violent movies, and they have contributed to this desensitizing to violence in America,” Slater argued.
Weinstein did address this point in another interview, this time with CNN‘s Piers Morgan, saying that he plans to think more carefully about producing violent movies: “You have to look in the mirror, too. I have to choose movies that aren’t violent or as violent as they used to be. I know for me personally, you know, I can’t continue to do that. The change starts here. It has already. For me, I can’t do it. I can’t make one movie and say this is what I want for my kids and then just go out and be a hypocrite.”
In the same Fox News segment, MacCallum also echoed Emily Miller’s point, noting that Weinstein “thinks that guns are necessary for self defense but only in other countries during genocides.”
“He says that in Germany if only they had access to a gun, they could have stopped the Holocaust,” MacCallum continued. “Well, I guess he’s forgetting the fact that their guns were all confiscated under German law at the time. So, you know, some holes in this story to be sure.”
It has to be noted that Weinstein has a penchant for making all kinds of news during the Oscar campaign season. What’s remarkable–if this is a cynical bid for attention by the movie mogul–is how wholeheartedly his targets went for the bait.
“I saw a movie where only the government and police had guns, it was called Schindler’s List,” Slater offered. “We can relive that again one day.”
Watch, via Raw Story:
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