The American Spectator

Even if Baldwin wishes to dispute Sgt. Karsnia’s interpretive expertise, why must Baldwin implicitly accuse the officer of lying by asserting that “no one can honestly say” what happened in that airport restroom?

With his all-encompassing “no one can honestly say,” Baldwin issues an open invitation to a destination far beyond the non-judgmental tolerance that has become such common intellectual terrain in 21st-century America. Baldwin invites the reader to join him on a journey to a place where there are no facts, no certainties, no concrete reality to disturb the liberal’s utopian dream. To assert otherwise — to say that there are knowable facts — is to be “intolerant.”

Baldwin’s fact-free utopia bears a certain (and perhaps non-coincidental) resemblance to the Hollywood dream factory where Baldwin obtained the fame that, at least in his own mind, makes him a valuable political commentator. In his fantasy world, Baldwin is free to ponder counterfactual scenarios — “maybe those cops…jumped the stall”! — and to imagine an alternative universe in which powerful politicians are helpless victims of vicious throat-cutting Republicans who have made homosexuality itself a crime.

The Land of No Facts exists, of course, only in the liberal’s imagination, so the journey there doesn’t require any actual travel — and thus no contact with the messy reality of airport restrooms. Like a stranger’s hand reaching beneath the stall divider, Alec Baldwin’s disorderly thoughts are an unsolicited intrusion into the lives of Americans who have no choice but to live in the real world.