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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Not gonna lie. Just the fact that someone drew Mario tonguing his brother did gross me out. But also Jesus Christ these people are dumb.
*tire screech sound*
Wait, wait, wait. I thought that the meanie pants SJWs were trying to take the sexy stuff out of gaming. I thought I supposed to be on a crusade to prevent hetero men from seeing boobs?
No one ever told me the strategy had shifted and we are trying to force sex on everyone now. Guess I missed the memo!
Right-wing GamerGomers: Waaaaaa, evil feminists are trying to take away my sex-drenched video games!!!!
Also right-wing GamerGomers: Waaaaa, evil gays are trying to drench my video games in sex!!!!
These guys really hate anal sex for some reason don’t they? Reminds me of the guy who hated that porn had anal sex because it lower birth rate or something.
@Lainy:
I think that reason boils down to ‘Anal sex == gay’, and ‘gay == less of a REAL MAN’, at least in their heads. Add in a dose of insecurity about masculinity, and the defensiveness snaps up immediately.
@Jenora
Yeah I think so too, but it’s very strange. Many straight couples or bi couples with men & women have anal sex all the time. People can just not like anal sex of course, it’s not for everyone and we’re all different. For them though they sound like a bunch of puritans upset someone else is having fun.
I’m sad that twitter already got in touch with the parody Nintendo account and forced him to change it. This comes a few days after someone missed that a twitter account for a Diamondbacks broadcaster was a parody and asked if he could visit him. The parody account said yes, and security let the guy in after seeing the tweet. Even though the account was an absolute parody and said parody all over it, it’s still been suspended by twitter too.
And yet twitter can’t do anything about the nazis on their service.
David must have been in a rush today. He usually does some manipulation on the header image.
And yeah, when 90% of the headlines now look like they’ve been pulled straight from the Onion on a low effort day, parody becomes rather difficult to pull off successfully.
@Shadowplay
It’s so true! I was reminded this very night of a 2016 headline from the Onion that read something like “Trump and Pence Advised to Double Down on Attacking All Women” and it took me a moment to realise it was from the Onion, because his advisors would totally advise that!
My favourite part of this is wondering if Gorka thinks he actually looks like his avatar. For someone so unbelievably mediocre-at-best, he sure has a great opinion of himself.
I think Jenora nailed the dynamic going on. Performative masculinity tends to involve dominance displays and anal sex, particularly receiving, is considered by them a submissive or a “debased” act.
I am going to take the opportunity to laugh my ass off at Gorka’s precipitous decline. I mean, by sheer gumption, an authoritative-sounding James Bond villain voice and a fake degree, he managed to get into the orbit of the baffling President of the United States… then immediately faceplanted when it was obvious he was a Nazi who faked his way to where he was.
Now he’s on like fifth-tier radio droning about Arthur and tweeting about Mario Rule34. It’s both hilarious and incredibly sad.
They can, but of course they won’t. “Engagement” matters more to them than constructive use of the thing. Meanwhile, their financial dependence on clicks, eyeballs and user engagement is proof that capitalism and fascism (as opposed to Mario and Luigi) have their tongues in each other’s mouths.
Witness, for instance, the continued presence of Wile E. Gorka, Nazi medal wearer, diploma-mill “doctor”, and suuuuuuuper-genius. Any self-respecting bartender would call the bouncer on him, but there he is, trash-talking and picking stupid fights…
OT, but I was wondering if it was something David wanted to sound off on, but the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) Commission Report dropped yesterday to a lot of chatter about the situation being described by the Chief Commissioner as “genocide.” Following on from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report, I’d use that word to describe what’s happened.
But man, if Dave ever was hard up for material (and he probably isn’t), just go to any story about aboriginal people that has an open comment section. Racism and sexism as far as the eye can see. I’ve dipped a toe into those sections and they’ve already lined up their talking points that it was “aboriginal men” that killed and injured this women and girls, so there’s no point in blaming white people or the Canadian government for disregarding the issue and constructing a system that made it all possible. None at all.
Willy Pickton wasn’t aboriginal, guys.
Some days I have to wonder if these parodists take the time to think about the possible blowback of their work. I know it’s supposed to be a spoof and all, but with Twitter being what it is even the most blatantly obvious of parodies will inevitably be taken seriously by someone and the last thing we need is shit like this happening more than once.
Also, gay jokes on Pride Month? That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in this guy’s own views, or their sense of humor at that matter. Gorka is still an ass though, that’s for sure.
@Bina:
This is so true. I just read the other day an article about yet another instance of YouTube enabling pedophiles where their attitude has basically been “we can’t fix it, it’ll break engagement”. Social networks? Sociopathic networks, more like.
@Cat Mara
Oh, they don’t care about engagement or constructive use. They never did. It’s all about the money.
The cash of an alt-right fanatic or pedophile is as green and spendable as anyone else’s, and banning them outright would mean too much of that sweet, sweet ad revenue would be lost- especially since the bulk of their customers don’t care about the presence of said fanatics and pedophiles enough to take their business elsewhere. Why they would even need that much money is beyond me- do their executives need another private island or something?
Twitter can’t ban white nationalists and neo-Nazis from the platform because too many Republican politicians would be kicked off the site in the process. Sad but true.
@Thebard:
There’s a reason why Twitter is reluctant to ban Nazis: Because it would mean banning far-right politicians from the US and some European countries. They’re afraid that being seen as “too political” would be suicide.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too
@Simon
@Snowberry
Laziness, greed, and cowardice on their part, no doubt. There’s no reason for a few people to be exempt from the rules because they were elected grand poo-bah of Asscrackylvania, and I suspect the only way to demonstrate that would be a mass protest against the site itself via breaking all their rules- the logic being that if they can’t keep enforcement consistent they may as well not have rules at all.
Silencing Muslim voices in an effort to “fight ISIS” is ok and “not political,” but banning an open white nationalist like Steve King from the platform would be “collateral damage.”
ok.
The fact that they easily believe that LGBT people also want to promote incest, paedophilia and bestiality reminds me of something I read a while back…
Conservatives tend to view sex in terms of “normal” and “deviant” and basically anything that isn’t cishet monogamous sex is in the “deviant” category and is wrong purely because it’s not normal.
Left wing people are more focused on consent. So two gay adults can consent to sex and there’s nothing wrong with it whereas a child or an animal can’t consent which is what makes it wrong.
No wonder feminists discussing affirmative consent makes alt righters rage.
@Katamount
Did you see Neil Macdonald’s column on the matter? Macdonald’s honestly been impressing me for a few years now as a fairly average, not “woke” person who’s still able to live by a creed of “Don’t be an asshole” that’s left him able to see how completely he’s fucked up in the past.
(A year or two ago, he had a pretty good column after discovering the existence of TERFs. He openly admitted to not knowing much about trans issues, but was still blinking in bafflement at TERFs and their evident inability to live up to the DBAA code.)
@Katamount
re people saying:
ugh. of course they’re saying that.
I guess it was also aboriginal men who made the editorial decisions not to run stories on missing or murdered First Nations’ women when there was still a chance for them (or at least their attacker) to be found;
and who refused to investigate their murders or disappearances;
and who set the policies and priorities of Crown prosecutors;
and who provided generations of students with a national history that, first intentionally and then less so, taught that members of First Nations were less than fully human;
and who, through criminally negligent deprivation of basic services, allowed communities to fester in a toxic mix of, lack of education, lack of employment, and lack of medical care.
and who erected an exploitative capitalist system which forced people from small rural communities with substantive informal support networks to urban centres whose anonymity and isolation enable thousands of young women to ended up dead or disappeared.
ugh, of course they are.
edit: removed redundant word
@Katamount:
As I’ve noted before, there’s a reason the CBC started actively disabling comments on news articles regarding First Nations peoples years ago. Not the best solution, obviously, but at least a realization that creating places that you know are going to become toxic cesspits is a bad idea if you don’t have the will or personnel to monitor them properly.
@Rabid Rabbit:
I hadn’t seen that article yet, thanks. As you say, Macdonald mostly just takes ‘don’t be an asshole’ to its logical conclusion; even without a fundamental understanding of the underlying issues, ‘don’t make other people’s lives worse’ is such a simple thing. (And understanding that just being quiet can make people’s lives worse is the obvious next step.)
And yet it’s a thing that so many people just don’t seem to grasp, probably mostly due to the whole ‘zero-sum’ attitude.
@NicolaLuna
It’s kinda worse if you ask me. It’s not “cishet monogamous” that they see as “normal”. It’s powerful, cishet, white men having sex that is “normal”. And all else is deviant.
I mean, just look how many good, WASP-y conservative men end up cheating, having underage mistresses or male affairs and how easily sexual assault is excused when done by them or their heirs.
To conservatives sex isn’t meaningful bonding or an expression of love. It’s another privilege that you have to be born into, If you’re not, you’re violating the hierarchy of life and that is the biggest deviancy.