By Mike Huckabee
October 24, 2024
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Winning the election is just the start. If we get there in a couple of weeks --- it’s looking good, but take NOTHING for granted --- we then have to make it all the way to Inauguration Day. And the left will not go gentle into that good night. Who knows how far they’ll go to shake things up before then --- and after? It’s going to get mean.
We do know much of it will necessarily involve an army of aggressive lawyers and partisan judges. But another piece of it involves taking a cue from what the European Union is already doing with great diligence and enthusiasm. That is, they’ll work even harder to shut down all communication from those they consider “right-wing extremists.” And since they define President Trump as a right-wing extremist, it follows that all his supporters are, too, and, like him, require their own “gag order.”
They will try this even though by now it should garner little more than a yawn when they describe Trump as worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun, Chairman Mao, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Idi Amin and The Grinch, COMBINED. It’s really getting old: the Democrats have called every Republican presidential nominee “Hitler” since Thomas Dewey in 1944. (And that was when we were actually at war with Hitler.) This time, with Kamala as their candidate and her weaknesses on full display, that “dictator” stuff is all they’ve got.
The list of people they’ve likened to Hitler is long. For when you have time...
https://instapundit.com/
But, wait, you might say of our joke. Idi Amin was so evil, he was a cannibal! Would the left really go so far as to compare Trump to a cannibal? Sure they would! To the TDS-infected mind, he’s Jeffrey Dahmer. Besides, the cannibalism is true in a figurative sense, because he’s eating Kamala for lunch.
In truth, THE ATLANTIC didn’t go that far (yet); they held back and just said Trump was like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini combined. This sparked Margot Cleveland at THE FEDERALIST to quip, “When Hitler isn’t bad enough!”
Our riff on what THE ATLANTIC said is something called comic exaggeration, done to make a point.
But this kind of pointed ridicule is precisely what the left is most afraid of and obsessed with silencing. Gabe Kaminsky at THE FEDERALIST reports that the EU has released an 18-page report that warning that your use of humor and satire, even the sharing of funny memes, could be a sign you’re one of...THOSE. You know, right-wing conspiracy theorists. Nazi white supremacists. Domestic terrorists. Deploooooooorables.
We are not amused, they say. And, yes, that is the royal “we.” We know this because they behave like the ruling elite, assuming power through Divine Right.
Cracking down on humor and satire? Them’s fightin’ words in our book. This is being done by control freaks who think the ending of George Orwell’s novel “1984” is a happily-ever-after.
An EU-funded group called the Radicalization Awareness Network has partnered with them to combat “violent extremism” with “surveillance and security.” Yes, surveillance. Their report is titled “It’s not funny anymore. Far-right extremists’ use of humour.”
“This paper,” they say, “scrutinizes how humour functions as a potential factor in terms of influencing far-right extremist violence.”
“The most potent weapons known to mankind,” their report reads, “are satire and ridicule.” Yes, and that’s exactly why we all need them in our arsenal. Taking them away is like disarming the populace. Somebody needs to print up the bumper sticker: To take my sense of humor, they’ll have to pry it from my cold dead mind.
But then, the self-anointed ruling elite will prowl parking lots and scrape those bumper stickers off pickup trucks.
They themselves are generally humorless; they’ve designated most humor as unsafe. As Greg Gutfeld said Wednesday, the left has “cancer of the funny bone.” They know our humor loses its power when it can’t be shared, so that’s the kind of world they envision, with themselves in charge of what can be communicated. Accordingly, this group recommends de-platforming those who produce and/or share memes of which they disapprove. They’ll psychoanalyze each creator and pick apart each image to imbue them with motives and beliefs that likely aren’t even intended. One can see from examples in the EU report that this is what they have done.
Note: these people get the strangest ideas. For some reason, they have the bizarre notion that the “OK” hand sign, with the thumb and index finger touching, is code for white supremacy. But somebody just made that up. (It means “okay.”) Or the idea that Trump supporters are QAnon conspiracy theorists. As immersed in the news as my team and I are, when we first started seeing references to QAnon, we had to look it up, as we had no idea what it was. Yet they’d wipe me from the internet in a heartbeat.
At the same time, as Kaminsky writes, “There is no direct reference to left-wing extremism and whether individuals who promote radical ideas on all sides of the political aisle ought to face consequences.” Well, of course there isn’t. Antifa, knock yourselves out with the memes --- although, again, I don’t think we have to worry too much about YOUR sense of humor, because you don’t have one.
The report cites a number of “resources,” such as the Urban Dictionary, Tech Against Terrorism, Meme War Weekly, Know Your Meme, and the CARR Guide to Online Radical-Right Symbols, Slogans and Slurs. Does the right have a secret handshake, too? Good grief.
But here’s some good news on the censorship front: Though California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been trying hard to act as the humor police, state AG Rob Bonta has stipulated that California cannot legally enforce a law (AB2839) against “materially deceptive” political content, including memes and parodies of elected officials, from plaintiffs BABYLON BEE and law blogger Kelly Rickert.
Thanks to the Alliance Defending Freedom for successfully fighting this attempt by the State of California to flout the First Amendment. To quote BABYLON BEE CEO Seth Dillon: “Our job is hard enough when the jokes keep coming true, as if they were prophesies. Unfortunately for them, the First Amendment secures our right to tell jokes they don’t like.
RELATED: It’s too bad the Brits are cracking down on humor, because they’ve been such a great source of it over the years. John Cleese of the original Monty Python comedy team has had plenty to say about this, particularly with the rise of “content moderation” in the age of Trump and wokeness. Cleese famously said he doesn’t perform on college campuses any longer and has done many interviews and presentations on the subject of wokeness killing creativity; here’s one. In it, he makes the case that “all humor is critical” --- even if it’s a joke based on a weakness of all human beings --- and he passes along an insight from groundbreaking psychiatrist Robin Skinner about super-sensitive people: “If people can’t control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behavior.” That is a brilliantly simple explanation for the left’s focus on “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and the like.
If humor goes away, then the sense of proportion does, too. “If humor is gone,” Cleese says, “then as far as I’m concerned, you’re living in ‘1984.’”
https://bigthink.com/videos/
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