Hollywood Boycotts: Are Guns and Hydrocarbons Next?

While social issues lie outside the Foundation’s focus, it has been more than amusing to watch the entertainment industry’s call to boycott states that enact “religious liberty” legislation. Rob Reiner, for example, has thundered that unless the Tar Heel State’s “hateful law is repealed and LGBT North Carolinians are treated with the equal dignity they deserve, I will not film another production in North Carolina.”

There’s not much of a chance that such laws will ever be adopted here, but don’t think there aren’t other reasons why Hollywood’s groupthinkers might target New Mexico for inadequate fealty to political correctness.

Possibility one: guns. As the Albuquerque Journal reported earlier this year, almost “50 percent of New Mexicans have a gun in the home,” the state “is just one of three states that permits people to openly carry weapons into sessions of the … Legislature,” New Mexico “had the eighth highest rate of firearms deaths in the United States” in 2014, and in “the past five years, the number of visits to New Mexico emergency rooms for firearm injuries increased 65 percent.”

Possibility two: “fossil fuels.” No cause means more to L.A. moonbats than “climate change,” and among the states, New Mexico is seventh in natural-gas production and sixth in petroleum production.

New Mexico’s disastrous subsidization of film-and-television productions has gouged taxpayers and failed to produce a viable, sustained entertainment industry. We don’t need another reason to scrap the program. But the possibility of future boycotts, based on the Land of Enchantment’s culture and/or economy — #NoGunsInMyState, #NoFossilFuelsInMyState? — can’t be ruled out.