“Let us be clear: there’s only one reason the city commissioners ruled they were going to stop our production on the street: politics, pure and simple, and they pretty much admitted it,” Variety reports of Shapiro’s response. “One commissioner named Cindy Daniels said, quote, ‘I’m not willing to sacrifice the resources of the safety, the security of the mental health of our community. Absolutely not. This wasn’t a Hallmark film. This wasn’t, you know, Christmastime in Livingston, and it wasn’t a romantic story.’ Well, I mean, I wasn’t aware that we had to fulfill your idea of what the story required.” Shapiro continued, “In fact, I’m fairly certain the First Amendment says precisely the opposite of that. So they’re saying a Hallmark romance would have been totally fine. But a Daily Wire film about enforcement of immigration law loses that. That is content discrimination openly performed and a violation of the First Amendment.”
This is, of course, a misrepresentation of what happened. (That said, residents of a community exercising their First Amendment rights and objecting to something that they don’t feel reflects the value of said community is hardly a scandal.) Production on Pawn Shop was shut down, at least in part, because the production included dangerous stunts purportedly weren’t performed with proper warning to the community. There is good reason to be wary of this; the last Daily Wire production, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, halted production after unsafe stunts sent Jonathan Majors hurdling through a window. The crew members who wanted to ensure something like that didn’t happen again were then called “communists” by producer Dallas Sonnier, who definitely meant it in a pejorative way. But the safety of community members is obviously a secondary concern for a movie about how it’s fine if ICE creates unsafe conditions in a community.
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