Because once it happens to them, the outrage machine goes into overdrive and suddenly their moral compass points due north.
If you’re not caught up on things, conservative humorist and commentator for CRTV Allie Stuckey made a spliced together video that satirized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s very real and very cringe-worthy ignorance on pretty much everything.
As of this writing, the video has over two million hits due to the fact that it’s actually funny and somewhat true.
So because the video hit square, naturally the left has gone into pearl-clutch mode and is condemning Stuckey and the video as being both misleading and in bad form.
This, coming from the left, who thinks peeing on President Donald Trump’s star on the walk of fame, and calling him Putin’s c*ck holster is the epitome of comedy.
Rest assured, there’s no way to take Stuckey’s video as anything but satirical. The left, however, is having a meltdown over claims that there is no possible way to tell that the video is fake aside from a winking emoji in the video’s description.
As Adi Robertson at The Verge wrote, people are too stupid to understand that the video is satire because CRTV is mostly serious commentary videos:
Some internet users will inevitably believe even the most obvious parody, especially when it plays to political sentiments. That’s how a Twitter jokester can accidentally convince high-profile Trump opponents that the president is obsessed with an imaginary “gorilla channel.” But the framing here is particularly clumsy, because Stuckey’s page (and CRTV in general) isn’t primarily satirical, though the channel has posted satirical videos before. A user who clicks through will see serious videos, including interviews, alongside the Ocasio-Cortez satire. And while the clips aren’t spliced all that realistically, it’s not clear that this is intentional. Without the disclaimer, it’s indistinguishable from an awkward attempt at smearing a political opponent.
Stuckey is known to engage in satire from time to time, and the fact that this video is one of her more humorous videos is blatantly obvious, and that the footage was ripped from the viral interview on PBS’s Firing Line, where Ocasio-Cortez antisemitically spit out her biggest gaffe when she called Israel “occupied Palestine” and then admitted she knows nothing about that subject. Even if no one had seen that interview, the video is clearly fake.
But it wasn’t just worried that people would take the video seriously. The left was demanding that Stuckey and CRTV acknowledge that they weren’t just trying to make a satirical video, they were trying to fool people into thinking that Ocasio-Cortez was actually that stupid.
As Robert Mackey wrote at The Intercept in an article title that made it seem like Stuckey was on the defensive called “Fake Interview With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Was Satire, Not Hoax, Conservative Pundit Says”:
While satire, from Jonathan Swift to Stephen Colbert, is always aimed at an audience that is in on the joke — and Stuckey insisted that her fans were so familiar with Ocasio-Cortez’s somewhat halting appearance on PBS that the gag would be obvious — there was ample evidence on social networks that many viewers less engrossed in political news had assumed the video was fact, not fiction.
The producers of the video made it easier for viewers to mistake it for a genuine news clip by digitally altering the original footage to replace the PBS “Firing Line” logo behind Ocasio-Cortez with the logo for Stuckey’s show, “Allie.”
Again, that the video was satire is overwhelmingly obvious, and that a hand full of people thought it was real does not mean that Stuckey and CRTV were trying to mislead people.
The real problem isn’t that Stuckey and co. made a video that looked real. It didn’t. The problem is that Stuckey and co. made a video that was funny and highlighted the already clear and present ineptitude by which Ocasio-Cortez is plagued. The figurative punch that Stuckey threw landed squarely on Ocasio-Cortez’s jaw to the point where even she felt it and made that obvious in a response tweet that just made things worse.
Republicans are so scared of me that they’re faking videos and presenting them as real on Facebook because they can’t deal with reality anymore.
Here’s one bonafide truth:
Election Day is November 6th. https://t.co/Z7MfisgiWl— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 24, 2018
And so the left has to go into outrage mode in an attempt to do some damage control. They have to paint CRTV as a network that lies, and Stuckey as a bad-natured peddler of snake-oil.
Meanwhile, the left has moved entire industries and brands into attack mode against the right using exactly that kind of humor. Comedy Central utilizes The Daily Show and other programs to mock Republicans without cease. HBO’s This Week Tonight with John Oliver is a bash-fest of venom against Republicans, and values they often espouse. Samantha Bee, Michelle Wolfe, Steven Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel are comedians who weaponize their comedy to mock, slander, and denigrate the right so it looks stupid, racist, and ridiculous.
Don’t even get me started on Saturday Night Live.
The left has an entire armada of brands and programs specifically dedicated to turning the right into a group to be laughed at, yet whenever the right gets off a good shot the left has to feign that it goes too far. They’ll denounce it as bad-natured, and even try to have it removed. Sometimes they succeed, as was the case with Steven Crowder’s SXSW intrusion into a “gender nonconformity meetup.” Google/YouTube suspended the video of Crowder and his gang crashing the meetup with one of his interns claiming to identify as a computer. Not only that, Twitter suspended his account, and anyone involved with him.
According to the left, only the left can engage in this kind of mockery. In fact, they are allowed to do exactly what Stuckey did.
The right, however, is not allowed to give the left a taste of their own medicine. Doing so is apparently morally wrong to do. It’s misleading, or sexist, or racist. It causes actual harm to those who are being mocked and purposely spreads hatred to innocents.
In other words, the left is once again engaging in their unofficial motto: “It’s okay when WE do it.”
In truth, C.S. Lewis said it best…
“Above all else, the devil cannot stand to be mocked.”
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