As we mature, our tastes become more nuanced. When you’re a kid, you find humor in the banal. Things like flatulence and making goofy faces seem hilarious. When you grow up, while those things may still illicit a chuckle, you know deep down that they aren’t particularly clever. If someone told you that a comic who made fart noises for twenty minutes was brilliant, you would rightly question their maturity.
A similar reaction occurred to the Republican National Conventional on Wednesday night. At the conclusion of her speech, radio talk show host Laura Ingraham waved to the crowd, turning first to her left and rotating the gesture to include the entire assembly. The camera angle, when frozen on a particular frame, makes it appear as though she gave the Nazi salute. Twitter took it from there, and now we’re supposed to be appalled by the apparent emergence of Nazis in Cleveland.
#RNCinCLE in one GIF: pic.twitter.com/OlrqbnKUVd
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) July 21, 2016
This is beyond childish. It is precisely as banal as freeze-framing a speech in the middle of syllable to make the speaker look goofy or unattractive. Disingenuous doesn’t even begin to describe it. But hey, what else do you expect from the the likes of Slate?
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