By David Futrelle
Sebastian Gorka — former White House security adviser turned freelance Trump bootlicker — has a reputation on the right as some sort of brain genius. But he’s also, it turns out, as gullible as any Facebook MAGA grandpa.
Earlier today, Gorka riled up his fans with a tweet blasting Nintendo for celebrating #PrideMonth by posting an image of Mario and his brother Luigi kissing, accusing the Japanese video game giant of “promoting incest.”
To be fair, this would have been a rather outrageous thing for Nintendo to post, if Nintendo had indeed posted it. But in fact, the account behind the tweet was an obvious fake — lacking the blue checkmark of the real Nintendo account, spelling the company’s name wrong in its account ID, and with a pinned tweet clearly identifying it as a parody account. (And, yes, this was the account’s pinned tweet long before Gorka found the incest tweet.)
Had Gorka spent a few moments going through the troll account’s past tweets, he would have seen other tweets that would have set off anyone’s trolldar.
Unsurprisingly, Gorka’s most fervent fans seem to be as gullible as the man himself.
After literally dozens of non-fans informed him that the account he was mad about was fake, Gorka quietly deleted his tweet — with no explanation to his fans and no apology for falsely insinuating that Nintendo was promoting incest.
But Gorka and his fans weren’t the only one taken in by the tweet — not by a long shot. Many of the “outraged” seem almost as angry about tey gays as they are about the incest.
There were of course plenty of jokes about incestuous rednecks as well.
Despite all the debunkings, the outrage tweets continue to flow — indeed, every time I refresh this page of Twitter search results there are dozens more.
And I have to say I find thatmore than a little discouraging. As delightful as it is to see someone like Gorka exposed again as the gullible dingus he is, the lasting effect of the parody account’s fake tweet will be that a small but not insignificant portion of MAGAheads will remain convinced that Nintendo and the LGBTQ community really do support incest. We live in a world awash in misinformation and disinformation — and the people who have benefited the most from all the fake news have been reactionaries of all stripes, in the US and around the world.
It isn’t just that good parody is hard to do in a world in which reality itself often seems beyond parody. The problem is that parody like this, whatever its intent, plays into the right-wing agenda. It’s not news at this point that MAGAs are some of the most gullible people on planet earth; we don’t need to concoct parodies to “prove” this again and again.
Still, that doesn’t make it wrong to imagine Nintendo characters who aren’t related to one another having a lovely gay time with one another. Here’s some fan art of Mario and Bowser looking like they’re about to get it on. Happy Pride!
H/T — I borrowed the screenshot of the Gorka tweet from The Daily Beast’s @WillSommer
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I think it’s more that publicly monogamous is the only thing seen as acceptable. Men, and only men are allowed to have affairs. As long as they’re private.
@Anonymous:
The thing about positional goods is, they’re zero-sum. Once everyone in your rich circle has a private island you need to have two, or the biggest one, or something to stay ahead. And once all of them have two, you need three. Or a private asteroid and its mineral rights, or something …
And this not only makes them insatiably super-greedy and causes environmental destruction, it’s also the ultimate driver of inflating real-estate prices and housing costs, making having a decent home increasingly unaffordable to people below the top decile of incomes or so.
This is one reason for instituting a wealth tax, or perhaps even a wealth cap. There are other red queen’s races in the economy that lead to Pareto-nonoptimal equilibria if not regulated away as well. Advertising is one of them: the endless efforts by everyone with money to outshout everyone else with money has not only made ads actually acoustically loud and annoying, it’s crowded out actual programming — the percentage of time with an ad on-screen on network TV, for instance, has ballooned from a few percent to over 25% in the past few decades, and we’re all familiar with how the web is pretty much unusable these days without an adblocker extension in one’s browser.
Anything with an “arms race” quality to it is subject to the same logic: it should be capped by regulation. But that would be “socialist”, so it isn’t done …
@NicolaLuna
The late great Derek Jarman commented that “heterosexuality isn’t normal. It’s just common.” Here endeth the lesson.
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
It’s shit like this that makes me feel feel that we somehow were teleported to hell en masse. The worst part is that the chances of anything ever being done about it are near zero.
@ TheKND:
NOOOOO… Tell me it isn’t SOOOOOOOOO!!! (/s)
Apropos “non-standard” sexuality, here’s another example of YouTube failing the queers:
Fuck that unfunny so-called comedian, fuck his 3 million humor-challenged subscribers, and fuck YouTube above all for being so cowardly and avaricious. Too bad they have the most used video platform on the net, or they’d be quaking at the prospect of a boycott by anyone using the service in good faith.
Funny thing is Fire Emblem Fates actually does have a gay incest option – have a female Corrin hook up with Rhajat as mothered by Azura.
Its been stated over & over by indigenous women & anyone properly reporting on the matter, based on the evidence, that indigenous women are the one group (or perhaps one of few?) that is more likely to be assaulted by (racial) outsiders- non-Native men. There are many reasons for this, mainly that the govt will protect those men, indigenous jurisdictions are pretty much helpless. & White men know it.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249822.pdf