Actually, today’s Alec Baldwin news really is a little surprising.

And so our moral betters at the Federal Bureau of Intimidation now seem to have declared, officially, that the single-action revolver involved in the Rust on-set disaster…could not have fired without the trigger being actuated–meaning that Alec Baldwin must have fired said gun by pulling said trigger.

If I may briefly indulge the obvious: well, slow clap there, Dudley Do-Right. You managed to figure out, some ten months later and after what surely was some stack of taxpayer dollars, with an oh-fish-yul investigation, exactly what any Idaho Joe-Bob or Utah Cletus figured out within about thirty seconds of first hearing that a single-action revolver was involved in the case, and not hearing anyone claim that it was broken.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; even though the breathless reporting of the “shocking news”, by the legacy media, is indeed gag-worthy in the extreme, the “finding” still serves a purpose: now, anyone who actually still believes anything the FBI says may yet get the message along with the rest of us, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll be less likely that the victim-disarmament darling Baldwin will just skate entirely. (Still, I’ll believe it when I see it, and probably not even then.)

Still, I do find it somewhat surprising, and actually encouraging, that we got this from the FBI at this moment in time. Why? I mean, I don’t think for a minute that the Bureau didn’t have this figured out last October. They may be modern-day Brownshirts, but it would be foolish to underestimate them; they do have a basic understanding of how guns work, and they also have an understanding of how their dutiful fluffers in the legacy media work, too. No, this release feels like a “leak”; it had a purpose. And so, as usual, to understand the pesky why, we should remember to ask the full set of questions with the rest of the words:

• Why are they telling us this now?
• Why are they telling us this now?
• Why are they telling us this now?
• Why are they telling us this now?

And really, a pretty obvious conclusion surfaces from that simple exercise: we got this because they need cover, and throwing Alec Baldwin under the bus was deemed a worthy trade for what they believe will be new credibility with a cheap bone thrown to the gunnies…or, maybe at least a little less pushback from the uppity peasants…or, maybe (“would you believe…“) just a little old-fashioned misdirection for everyone, so people aren’t paying quite so much attention to all the Brownshirt-playbook activities they’ve been caught in lately. (You know: FBI assets involved in nearly all the major disasters and plots; repeated fairy tales about Russia!Russia!Russia!; abuse of power and abrogation of rights in politically sensitive cases like the ongoing J6 farce, and of course the recent pretext raid on the former President’s private residence…*)

Of course FBI as Brownshirts is nothing new, and some pretty damn nasty things have happened when they have decided they need attention or renewed credibility. But putting that aside (not an easy thing to do), deliberately “leaking” this ridiculous “finding”, now, means they know they are losing, and that they need cover for it.

That is good news, and should hearten us all to keep up the flashlight work. And who knows? Just maybe we’ll see ol’ Baldwin take even a bit of the fall he has so richly deserved for so long.

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* And I’ll say it again: one of the things I resent most, about the Hive Mind mob, is that they keep giving me reasons to appreciate that Previous Occupant. I’ve always regarded him as a hoplophobic toad unfit for office, and one could never with honesty call me a “supporter”, but he has had a most unexpected utility in making the “swamp” reveal its true self in Day-Glo colors and shrieking voices, and that credit, at least, must be given.

And now Thell Reed weighs in on the Rust circus.

I missed this when it first appeared, and I’ve got no particular desire to send any traffic at all to the clowns at Good Morning America, but since I was already wondering about how Thell Reed’s daughter could have strayed quite as far from the tree as it appeared originally, … well, apparently Thell ain’t buying the circus either:

Now, obviously he’s not an impartial party here, being Hannah’s father, but his reputation and history make pretty clear he’s no fool, either, and at least from my chair I’d consider this an important addition to the incident landscape. And while it’s fair to say that I do not trust Good Morning America for impartiality in pretty much anything at all, the coverage of Reed himself nonetheless struck me as actual reporting, and I’ll call out kudos to Kaylee Hartung for that segment.

For his part, Baldwin seems to be conducting an ongoing public masterclass in How To Be An Idiot By Assuming You’re The Smartest Person In The Room At All Times. Holy freakin’ balls, Batman; I mean, I figured there would be some flurry of CYA before everyone involved lawyered up and went to ground for the duration of the investigation, but dayum, even with the incredible kid-glove softball of a Stephanopoulos interview (see below for a Viva Frei take on that specifically), the sheer hubristic chutzpah of this arrogant, entitled elite stands out even amidst the background of the larger ongoing clown show we are faced with every freakin’ day now. (Roll around in your mind, for a moment, just what it would take to do that! And yet here we are.)

The gun, of course, did not fire itself*. Clearly (and presuming murder was not his intention), Baldwin did not check it. And Baldwin is not merely an actor in the production; he is involved at the producer level as well. This, alone, should be enough to earn him both a pretty massive civil lawsuit and, I would think, some sort of criminal prosecution for negligence, or something similar, for the production’s liability in the matter. Beyond that, of course, there is still chatter flying around about both corner-cutting at the expense of safety, and also about possible intentional malfeasance or sabotage (interesting to hear Thell Reed, here, saying that such might well be possible–even though his usefulness as an expert is limited because he’s Hannah’s father), but regardless of that, the above still stands.

Clearly, someone loaded that gun, either intentionally or unintentionally, and from there, one or more people in its chain of custody failed to check it, including but not limited to Alec Baldwin at the loud end of the chain. In any sane system of law, he himself should be well and truly ruined by this; as I see it, the best he could “hope for” would be that someone intentionally loaded that gun, but as any “gunnie” knows, even that does NOT absolve you from checking the damn thing yourself.

And Baldwin trying to play the victim in all this is just further evidence of how awful the entitlement of the elites has become. Here’s Viva Frei’s take on the Stephanopoulos puffball interview, very much worth the watch from the legal angle (and Viva’s just an infectiously good guy, too):

We’ll see, of course, how the CYA circus winds up, and then what lengths the Cool Kids Cult will go to, to absolve one of their own. In the meantime, it’s at least interesting to see Thell Reed himself appear and comment on Hannah, who it’s increasingly sounding like was not present for the incident at hand, possibly torn between two roles and not happy about that.

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*Consider this: if this had indeed been a gun prone to malfunction–e.g., if the half-cock notch on the hammer was broken or removed–that would be trivially easy to test, and were that the case we would have heard about it already, with the result dutifully leaked to an Establishment eager to exonerate one of its own at any opportunity. So, I’ll say it again: the gun did not fire itself.