40 years ago, a radical leftist wrote:
It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him, to react is to laugh at him. This causes an irrational anger.
It's a tactic the left has used for years, and when we complain about that, maybe they've gone too far—for instance, taking pictures with a life-like prop made to look like our President's severed head—they call us humorless and uptight. Yet, as we've seen they can handle absolutely zero percent of the same. They seem utterly incapable of laughing at themselves.
Sacha Baron Cohen can rib conservatives constantly and leftists rejoice. But they are completely blind and silent about Cohen's wacky NPR character, who perfectly encapsulates the hysteria of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and whose Twitter bio reads "Proud Democrat. Lecturer on Gender Studies at Reed College. Co-Principal at Wildfields Poly-Ed. Stay at home Male Mom." The character's intro is: "Namaste, I'm Dr. Nira Cain-N'Degeocello, and I'm a cis-gender white, heterosexual, male, for which I apologize…."
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Another great example is CRTV's satirical video of socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which Allie Beth Stuckey mocks Cortez's incompetence and proclivity to mislead people.
The video shows CRTV's Allie using selectively edited comments from Ocasio-Cortez's disastrous PBS interview where she made anti-Semitic remarks and framing them in such a manner where she appears to be answering questions from Stuckey.
The segment inter-spliced questions from Stuckey cleverly into selectively-edited clips from Cortez's recent interview with PBS, and the Leftist's immediate response, if you can believe it, was outrage. Shapiro had this to say:
This is intensely stupid. Allie makes satire videos. I've starred in them with her. Someone clearly needs to undertake a forced redistribution of senses of humor so that you end up with one.
(As Stuckey herself noted on Twitter: "If you have to do research to figure out that a video that blatantly absurd is satirical you shouldn't be on the Internet.")
Here's a clip:
Cortez responded to the video on Twitter:
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 (@Ocasio2018) July 24, 2018
Sounds like she doesn't get the joke. Or any joke, for that matter.
Sounds like she doesn't get the joke. Or any joke, for that matter.
Which brings us back to one major point: Why is it somehow fine for leftists to constantly make conservatives the butt of the joke then instantly cry foul the moment the humor is reversed? Obviously, it's important for people to listen to criticism and to have their beliefs challenged occasionally, but is it healthy for people to feel as though their worldview is inherently malevolent? If one side feels constantly under attack, they'll just stop listening, they'll stop engaging with the other side, and, as a result, the divisions between left and right grow more unshakeable.
It's a dangerous situation. Because, ultimately, we need one another. Democracy can't work without the balance of liberalism and conservatism, and if the two sides are unable to sit down together and have a laugh, let alone compromise and empathize and commit themselves to improvement we've got bigger problems than bias in comedy, and there's nothing funny about that.
Well, maybe there is, but only if it's done well.
