As if the country’s media weren’t already sufficiently co-opted by anti-gun advocates, this week, Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety announced an effort to pervert an additional facet of American entertainment. The billionaire bank-rolled interest group has developed the Everytown Authors Council. According to Bloomberg’s astroturf campaign, “The Council is designed to harness the power of the literary community to amplify the gun safety movement.”
Such efforts to influence an already biased entertainment sector are nothing new for Everytown. An April 2016 Variety article detailed how the gun control group worked hand-in-hand with writers for Netflix’s “House of Cards” to push their anti-gun agenda.
That same month, NRA-ILA’s Grassroots Alert informed readers of the extent of Everytown’s involvement in trying to distort television programming. It explained that an Everytown employee has the position of “Director of Cultural Engagement,” who, “oversees Everytown's storytelling efforts, partnerships with the creative community and develops cultural assets that mobilize Americans to support common sense reforms...”
Much like with their efforts to pervert television, Everytown’s Authors Council will reportedly “use its collective reach and cultural influence to support common-sense solutions…” In providing comment for an Everytown press release, author Jodi Picoult seemed to express a willingness to create agitprop for the anti-gun group, stating, “It is because of this that authors are singularly suited to speak out on the need for common-sense gun laws, and to tell the stories of those who have been devastated by gun violence in this country.”
One would hope that shameless shilling on behalf of a statist billionaire would be derided in any artistic community. Unfortunately, many in America’s “creative” class appear all too willing use their “art” in service of Bloomberg’s vanity project. As such, the gun-owning public should do their best to apprise the general public of the gun control movement’s propaganda techniques, and consider their own consumption of media accordingly.
