DON SURBER: Mock them till they cry.
The congresswoman who thinks she’s Evita eventually tweeted, “FYI there’s a fake account on here impersonating me and going viral. The Twitter CEO has engaged it, boosting visibility.
“It is releasing false policy statements and gaining spread.
“I am assessing with my team how to move forward. In the meantime, be careful of what you see.”
Um, it is clearly marked parody, but since she checks two boxes (female and Hispanic) she shall not be mocked.
Unless she were a conservative. Then it is open season.
Snopes swooped in to tell the world that a parody account’s tweets are a parody.
It said, “No, AOC Didn’t Say ‘Printing Money Is the Only Way Out of Inflation.’”
Snopes is fact-checking jokes. I await its declaration that the chicken did not cross the road and that Who really isn’t playing first base.
Politico — which never fact-checked RussiaGate — announced, “No, that isn’t the real AOC you may have seen on Twitter.
“An account impersonating the New York congresswoman cropped up over the weekend, going viral and catching the attention of Twitter’s owner and the lawmaker herself.”
Reuters routinely Fact Checks conservative jokes, hoaxes and mistakes — but never lefty ones such as the J6 insurrection (it was a protest).
Its fact check on the parody account said, “A tweet stemming from a parody account impersonating U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being taken seriously by users online.”
Oh no. More damaging is lies about Trump spread by the media are taken seriously by millions of people.
The media was never alarmed about Trump parody accounts.
So why are the media wagons circling to protect AOC from jokes? Because the jokes are funny and they sting. Let’s look at the Rules for Radicals written by Saul Alinsky, a Chicago communist, 52 years ago.
Rule 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
It took conservatives a while but the Internet gives us the opportunity to point at liberals and laugh. They do not like it.
They sure don’t, as this 2019 Reason TV reminds us: The Babylon Bee Satirizes the Absurdities of American Politics. Snopes Doesn’t Seem to Get the Joke.