A month ago, we talked about how deniers were clutching their pearls over an obviously satirical suggestion from a Swedish scientist that cannibalism is the next big climate solution.
Last week, right-wing media launched a deliberate campaign of disinformation when a supposed climate activist disrupted a town hall Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was holding by calling for people to eat children. AOC, to her credit, treated the (pretending to be) emotionally distraught woman with compassion and in good faith, talking her down and later tweeting about the need to be empathetic with people potentially struggling with a mental health crisis.
But of course, it wasn’t a real climate activist making a genuine call to embrace the Hansel and Gretal diet. The person was a member of LaRouchePAC, a “putting the cult in cult of personality” sort of fringe conspiracy-theory embracing group who has been pulling similar stunts elsewhere for decades now. (Its work feeds into the dangerous existing conspiracy theory on the right that Democrats eat children.)
No one should be surprised by this. Indeed, even many deniers and right-wingers immediately recognized that the outburst was, as CliScep’s Paul Matthews wrote, “a piss-take based on Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal.” The Daily Caller ran three different stories about it, but to their credit, two of them added an editor’s note that it was a set-up, and that was the subject of the third story.
But the damage was already done--and not everyone was forthcoming with the fact that this was a set-up. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a clip of the outnburst, which was quote-tweeted by the President of the United States who called AOC a “Wack Job.” (Better that than “a criminal who betrays our country,” AOC replied.)
A key player in spreading the clip was the Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra, whom absolutely no one should take seriously given his history of bouncing between conservative conspiracy-theory sites like Gateway Pundit to Brietbart to the Daily Caller--he’s apparently unable to keep a job due to his serial plagiarism and islamophobia. But being too garbage for even the worst of conservative media means one is perfectly suited for a job at the Daily Wire, where Saavedra managed to write three different stories on the saga by Friday. Despite the fact that other outlets managed to include the relevant detail that this was a far-right hoax, Saavedra’s multiple stories just couldn’t seem to find room for that.
The clip even made it to Tucker Carlson’s show. Of course, Carlson commented that “we don’t know” if the outburst was trolling or satire, and it could be someone who “believes the rhetoric.” Carlson’s larger issue, though, was with AOC for not saying “No, we shouldn’t eat babies.”
And that’s really the whole point of exercises like these. If AOC had said “don’t eat babies,” then of course the right would run clips of that all the time. Like a certain old tweet, it would be hysterical. Still, even without the big payoff, the right had a story to spin.
For people like Saavedra, LaRouchePAC and the Trumps, and of course for any cult, the truth is not the point. Destroying the truth is their aim. Truth, reality, facts--these are all just norms to be discarded in their very deliberate effort to pull their followers away from objective reality and into the parallel universe where AOC wants us to eat babies, Nazis are fine people, you can’t say “Merry Christmas,” and white Americans are threatened by an immigrant invasion.
And sure enough, by Friday afternoon Saavedra had moved on from spreading a conspiracy theory about AOC, to retweeting rightwing spin about Trump’s Ukraine conspiracy theory.
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