The Hilaria Baldwin story gets funnier and funnier. Scott wrote about it here. Briefly, “Hilaria” Baldwin, social media star and wife of the anti-Trump actor and activist Alec Baldwin, has been impersonating a Spanish immigrant for many years.
In fact, her name is Hillary Hayward-Thomas, and she is from Boston. Her father was a Boston lawyer and her mother was an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital and, I believe, on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Hillary grew up in Boston and attended prep school there. For sheer comedy, it will always be hard to top her Today show appearance, where, impersonating a Spaniard and talking about cooking, she uttered the immortal, heavily accented line: “We have very few ingredients. We have tomatoes, we have, um, how you say in English — cucumbers.”
How could the Daily Mail resist a story like this? The Mail has been digging into the past, and now reports on the Baldwins’ 2012 wedding:
EXCLUSIVE: The bride wore a mantilla! Inside Hilaria and Alec Baldwin’s NY wedding where they said ‘sí,’ waved flamenco fans and exchanged Cartier rings inscribed in Spanish – and later she said her family ‘couldn’t pronounce her new surname.’
This photo of the Baldwins at their wedding is hilarious, given what we know now. Still, one wonders: did Alec seriously believe that his wife was Spanish? Presumably not: her parents attended the wedding. (Hillary’s father’s family, by the way, has been in Massachusetts since before the Revolution.)
Woody Allen, his wife Soon-Yi, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. all attended the wedding.
More:
The couple married at Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan, with the nuptials including readings in both English and Spanish.
Hilaria donned a long white veil with lace embroidering the crown of her head, reminiscent of a mantilla, a traditional Spanish lace worn over the head and shoulders.
She later told People: ‘I liked that I brought in a bit of my culture.’
You can’t make this stuff up.
During their vows, Hilaria is also seen fanning herself with a flamenco hand fan.
The couple exchanged wedding bands that have the inscription ‘somos un buen equipo’ – meaning ‘we are a good team’ in English.
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Even the couple’s proposal was an ode to Spain.When Alec proposed just three months earlier in the Hamptons, Hilaria told Extra TV that he chose Montauk because it was ‘as close as he could get to Spain, to my family.’
Later that year, Hilaria spoke with Vanity Fair España, describing her marital bliss and dropped an anecdote about how her family couldn’t understand how to pronounce her new last name – Baldwin.
In my view, comedy aside, there are a couple of interesting aspects to this story. First, the fact that being non-white, or at least exotic, is considered by just about everyone to be an advantage. Who wants to be the daughter of an upper-class Massachusetts family when you can pretend to be an immigrant who struggles with English? Presumably it was the same impulse that drove Elizabeth Warren to pretend to be an Indian. See also Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug, and many others. Being non-white, or non-American, pays in America. Why that is so is a topic for another day.
The second point that I find interesting is that Hillary Baldwin is now being attacked by liberals, her erstwhile friends, mostly for the wrong reasons. Predictably, she is accused of “cultural appropriation.” True, in a sense, but so what? It is not as if she took the place of a real Spanish woman in Alec’s affections. And it is hard to see how anyone has suffered from her impersonation, other than liberals–the Baldwins rank near the top of the left-wing cultural hierarchy–who have been made to look foolish.
But it isn’t only that: some on the Left are also attacking Hillary for having five children. I, on the other hand, take my hat off to her for that accomplishment. It was Medea, in the play by Euripides by that name, who said, “I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.” I don’t know about the ratio, but I sincerely admire any woman who has borne five children, no matter what she does with them on social media thereafter.
Liberals don’t, however: their attacks on Mrs. Baldwin include the claim that having five children is contrary to leftist principles, because of the carbon dioxide they give off, or something. For my part, I am happy to overlook the fact that the Baldwins gave their children Spanish names, as part of Hillary’s impersonation: Carmen, Rafael, Leonardo Angel, Romeo Alejandro, and Eduardo Pau Lucas. I can’t begin to penetrate the weirdness at work here, but welcome to the world, Baldwin kids. It is getting stranger all the time. Maybe someday you can help us do something about it.
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