Have you ever heard of “Poe’s Law?”

It’s when someone is doing satire or parodying a subject but, despite the fact that you set out to exaggerate something using comedy, people actually believe the thing you’re doing is real.

If you need an example, then I present to you the recent hoax of the woman shouting that we should start eating babies while at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s town hall. As my colleague, Nick Aramas highlighted, while discussing climate change, a seemingly disturbed woman stood up and began panicking about how we only have a few months left to live and that we need to start eating babies.

One of Ocasio-Cortez's constituents loses her mind over climate change during AOC's townhall, claims we only have a few months left: "We got to start eating babies! We don't have enough time! … We have to get rid of the babies! … We need to eat the babies!" pic.twitter.com/uVmOnboluI

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) October 3, 2019

If I’m being honest, I think AOC handled this moment well and didn’t give this seemingly disturbed woman a chance to lose it even further by doing anything that may incite a reaction. 

That said…

It turned out that this woman was part of a hoax brought on by an activist group, who openly admitted that they planted that woman there as a walking-talking satirical take on an AOC supporter.

It was us. Malthusianism isn't new, Jonathan Swift knew that. Sometimes, only satire works. https://t.co/vR8oXdx39i

— Lyndon LaRouche PAC (@larouchepac) October 4, 2019

I’ll leave the arguments about the merits of this move to everyone else, but I feel there’s a very important tidbit that we shouldn’t overlook.

The reason everyone believed this woman was real and that Poe’s Law came into effect here, is because Ocasio-Cortez is drenched in this brand of extremism and her solutions to the end-of-the-world scenario she’s painted for us are so off the map when it comes to realism that someone suggesting we start eating babies to stop the coming apocalypse doesn’t sound that far from her camp.

AOC may have seemed measured in her response to this woman, but rest assured there’s nothing measured about her “solutions,” and that’s why people bought it.

Remember, this is the woman who is promoting the idea that it’s all over in 12 years and that the only solution is to restructure the United States from the ground up with her Green New Deal. This includes high-speed rail spanning the length of America, an end to air travel and personal vehicles, knocking down everything that can’t be retrofitted with renewable energy tools, and lowering the cow population (one of our primary food sources) drastically.

If you look at the Green New Deal, restructuring the landscape aside, it also restructures our economy into a socialist one! Go figure!

Just a reminder that socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Yes, even in Scandanavian countries where the left likes to say it works.

Let’s also remember that very real activists have suggested some very weird things from very mainstream media outlets when it comes to how we deal with climate change. Recently, we had activists saying that we should start eating insects to fight climate change because insect farming produces far fewer emissions than farm animals. We’ve had the suggestion floated that we need to get rid of our pets because they’re bad for the environment.

We’ve definitely seen suggestions for population control to fight climate change, and that suggestion came from Al Gore himself. Bill Nye suggested putting people in jail who deny his take on climate change.

That someone would walk into an AOC town hall and suggest we start eating babies doesn’t sound that unbelievable. While it may be a hoax, the fact that it seemed plausible to everyone that it was real should probably say more about the subject of the satirical hit than the hoax itself.

Climate change activists are so crazy about it that they come off as religious zealots. They truly believe we’re all going to die sooner than later and are willing to go to great lengths to “fix” this “problem.” This fake didn’t seem fake because many people thought it was only a matter of time before someone went that insane.

If you don’t believe people would go to said extremes, I’ll remind you that rhetoric like Bernie Sanders’ about income inequality inspired a man to go and shoot up a baseball field full of elected Republican officials.

Sensationalists fueling this climate alarmism, like AOC, could definitely inspire that level of crazy.