Alyssa Milano, television star turned sneering left-wing Twitter activist, has taken on her most significant role to date: Internet panhandler.
Last week, the 51-year-old shamelessly shared a GoFundMe plea on X, asking followers to chip in $10,000 so her 12-year-old son’s baseball team can jaunt across the country to Cooperstown, New York.
The gall of a multimillionaire celebrity crowdfunding for a childhood luxury brought social media to a screeching halt — something Milano likely doesn’t encounter in her smooth-driving electric Porsche, which reportedly costs $200,000 (not to mention the custom green paint job. Price tag: $14,000).
And she’s just the latest example of someone looking for others to pay for their fun — the new American dream!
Yet the actress had no trouble paying for herself to travel to Washington, DC, and sit ringside for Justice Kavanaugh Brett’s contentious 2018 hearings. Or the fabulous tropical family vacation she posted on Instagram before Thanksgiving.
Milano’s show “Charmed,” which originally ran from 1998 to 2006, is airing in reruns for 29 hours on TNT this week (and that’s not unusual); surely that hauls in some nice residuals? Milano is reportedly worth $10 million and is now podcasting and producing. Her husband is an agent at CAA, representing A-listers such as Bradley Cooper, Vince Vaughn and Milano herself.
Me thinks they’ve got the scratch to send those kids to Cooperstown.
And yet suckers still tossed money into the hat, as did trolls paying $5 for the chance to leave a rude comment. Outkick founder Clay Travis, meanwhile, dropped $794 with the request that the kids wear MAGA hats.
Milano was excoriated, but she quickly mounted a full-throated defense — insisting that she’s paid for team uniforms, thrown birthday parties and sponsored kids who can’t afford dues.
In other words: I’ve done my part. Now you do your part for my kid and his friends.
The donations weren’t just for travel costs but also “novelty items to make our tournaments memorable experiences beyond the field.”
I’m surprised she stopped short of a Sally Struthers-style “Save the Children” video, where we could pledge 20 cents a day.
The chutzpah. The entitlement.
We’re all tapped out.
Look, youth sports has morphed into a pipeline to bankruptcy. “The Bad News Bears” would never play now; long gone are the days when a group of rag-tag kids could hop in a stolen van and make their way to compete in the Astrodome.
Fees for travel sports are outrageous and teams are also expected to travel far and wide, nearly every weekend. It’s not sustainable, but that’s a topic for another column.
But it used to be, if you really wanted something, you washed cars, mowed lawns and sold cupcakes in the shopping plaza. Maybe you lobbied a wealthy local business for a donation. You planned for years for such a big trip.
And if you couldn’t afford it, you couldn’t do it. Sorry, Charlie. It was a tough childhood lesson.
There is now a pervasive expectation in parts of America that, if you really want something, there will always be someone else to pick up the check — whether it’s the government paying off your student loan or friends and strangers contributing via GoFundMe.
Remember when The Rock and Oprah solicited $2.8 billion for the Maui wildfire victims while only giving $10 million between them? And The Post recently reported on how the production company of dog-cloning enthusiast Barbra Streisand paid the gardener at her $20 million estate through PPP government loans intended for small businesses.
People all over the world think nothing of crowdfunding their kids’ activities, their weddings, their vacations — and even for their dogs to be cloned. (Seriously, Google it. Because I won’t help these people out by linking.)
No shame.
It’s ordinary to see Cash App or Venmo links in social media profiles, not for any exchange of goods, but just because.
It’s why multitudes of Americans believe that they should be off the hook for their student loans. There’s a large political movement afoot to demand that clean slate, while doing absolutely nothing to fix the mechanisms that led to this unmitigated $1.6 trillion disaster.
Earlier this month, Biden promised another $5 billion in debt forgiveness after his plan was rightfully struck down by the Supreme Court. Now he’s swearing to deliver a financial break — this after months and months of free Covid money — in the form of stimulus checks.
We inhabit a world where the word No is rarely uttered or heeded, and it’s only leading to delusions of grandeur and serious debt.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
