A new anti-Trump website that features a roster of never-Trump notables such as Charlie Sykes, Jonathan V. Last, Jim Swift, and Bill Kristol from the recently shuttered Weekly Standard is off to an inauspicious start.
In one of The Bulwark’s debut articles, writer Rachael Larimore dunks on conservatives for “sputtering with misplaced anger” about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dance video.
"Republicans can continue to focus on the silly stuff with AOC—and keep making themselves look like clueless nitwits themselves. Or they can focus on finding more candidates who have her charm and appeal, but without the terrible ideas." https://t.co/mk2N5qFm25
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) January 7, 2019
Larimore writes:
Late last week, a Twitter account named AnonymousQ1776 sent out a video it had “discovered” that featured AOC dancing on a rooftop. She and her friends at Boston University did a rather spot-on homage to the dancing-in-the-library scene from The Breakfast Club. (You can see the original, which had been hiding on, um, YouTube, for the past eight years, here.)
Clearly AnonymousQ1776 thought he or she (hard to know, the account has been deleted) had discovered gold. As reported by various outlets, the now-disappeared tweet read:
“Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is. … High School video of ‘Sandy’ Ocasio-Cortez.”
Sick burn!
Except that it’s . . . not. Leave aside for the moment that the video is from college, not high school—the only person who looks like a clueless nitwit here is the anonymous mouth-breather who doesn’t recognize a cleverly made homage to a classic ’80s movie.
And this wasn’t the first time that conservatives have been left sputtering with misplaced anger over AOC.
Ridiculous.
As numerous conservatives on Twitter have already demonstrated, virtually no conservatives have “sputtered with anger” over the video. Not a single conservative has been identified as being scandalized or upset by it. And not through lack of trying. Genuinely bewildered conservatives have been begging for examples.
The only “conservative” identified by media outlets in their stories about this has been AnonymousQ1776, the anonymous Twitter account that posted the video before quickly deleting its entire account. And nobody knows if AnonymousQ1776 was an actual conservative, a random lefty impersonator, or even someone from AOC’s own team promoting a false flag to make her look good and conservatives look bad.
Charlie Sykes defensively linked to a Gateway Pundit post in response to one of Benny Johnson’s tweets about the AOC video, but that post has nothing to do with her dancing. It’s just a pointless write-up about how she went by a different name when she was in high school and college.
Fake news? pic.twitter.com/JD51O0P0cE
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) January 7, 2019
Others point to conservative actor Adam Baldwin, who shared the video while making a crack about her “privileged” background:
https://twitter.com/AdamBaldwin/status/1081605105055457280
Perhaps not Baldwin’s finest moment, but the idea that he was sputtering with misplaced anger about her dancing is obviously nonsense.
There simply was no tsunami of cranky, intolerant, right-wing fuddy-duddies who couldn’t stand the sight of a teenage AOC dancing up a storm on a rooftop. The vast majority of conservatives, in fact, had positive reactions to the video.
While the MSM was peddling this phony narrative, it all but ignored the despicable attacks by AOC’s followers on Rep. Steve Scalise.
Hi @AOC. Happy to continue this debate on the Floor of the People’s House, but it’s clearly not productive to engage here with some of your radical followers. #StayClassy pic.twitter.com/lZCO3oiLUZ
— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) January 6, 2019
And the even scummier attacks by Twitter trolls on recently deceased Federalist writer Bre Payton, who succumbed to the swine flu at age 26.
It’s almost impossible to fathom how anyone in their right mind could laugh at the tragic and untimely death of a young conservative writer, but Twitter is infested with such individuals. Check out the number of likes and retweets on these heinous tweets and weep for your fellow countrymen.
if you devote your life to gleefully stepping on the necks of marginalized people and then die in a somewhat comical fashion, some people are gonna chuckle at it. sorry that's just the way it goes unfortunately
— Rob (@robrousseau) December 29, 2018
😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/OpNxEHL6sf
— Jim Taggart (@tagjim) December 29, 2018
It was the will of the market
— Daniel Dresden (@tinytacotown) December 29, 2018
Even though there is a genuine story there about left-wing depravity and degradation on social media, don’t hold your breath waiting for someone at The Bulwark (or anywhere else in the anti-Trump MSM) to write about those examples of “misplaced anger.”
The post cites two other examples of righties “freaking out” over AOC.
One involves a conservative congressional reporter who tweeted last November: “Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now. I’ll tell you something: that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles.”
After getting ratioed by AOC’s fervent Twitter following, that tweet was also deleted. The dig about her clothes was petty, but the tweet’s real sin was that it drew attention to AOC’s phony hardscrabble life story — and that is not to be tolerated.
Larimore’s other example of a conservative “self-own” is pure, gaslighting balderdash:
In July, CRTV published a video in which a CRTV host appeared to be asking AOC questions, but the answers were spliced in from an interview she had actually done with PBS. The result was to make her look like she was spouting nonsense. This was, literally, fake news.
No, it was *obvious* satire. Nobody with working brain cells thought those were AOC’s real answers. It was the media’s outrage over what they called a “doctored” video that was literally “fake news.”
The Bulwark purports to be “a forum for rational, principled, fact-based conservative commentary” as the deplorable pro-Trump right “descends into sophism and trollery.”
But in one of its very first posts, the “rational, principled, fact-based conservative” forum descended into “sophism and trollery” by spreading the false media narrative that conservatives are “self-owning” in “spectacular fashion” in regards to AOC.
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