Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a message for everyone on Twitter: don’t be fooled into laughing at me. Don’t you dare.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody), a fast-growing Twitter account whose satirical intent is clearly identified in parentheses, appears to have touched a sensitive nerve in the New York congresswoman.
Ocasio-Cortez has acknowledged the parody account on Twitter, warned her followers to be aware of it, and indicated that “I am assessing with my team how to move forward.”
FYI there’s a fake account on here impersonating me and going viral. The Twitter CEO has engaged it, boosting visibility.
It is releasing false policy statements and gaining spread.
I am assessing with my team how to move forward. In the meantime, be careful of what you see.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 30, 2023
Trending:
Assessing with my team how to move forward? Has a threat ever appeared more thinly veiled?
In the America many of us remember, there were only two possible ways to “move forward”: 1) laugh at yourself, and/or 2) stop doing things that make other people want to mock you.
The parody account makes fun of Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent deficiency in relevant knowledge due in part to what some might perceive as her excessive interest in being a woke celebrity. A pinned tweet, for instance, reads as follows: “Printing money is the only way out of inflation.”
Printing money is the only way out of inflation.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody) (@AOCpress) May 28, 2023
Is AOC overreacting to the news?
Yes: 98% (127 Votes)
No: 2% (2 Votes)
The threat against the First Amendment looms over every conservative on every media platform. Ocasio-Cortez, in fact, became the smiling face of the new censorship regime when she celebrated the “deplatforming” of Tucker Carlson.
AOC on Tucker “Deplatforming works and it is important.”
The Democrat Party is the Party of Censorship
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) April 25, 2023
In Ocasio-Cortez’s response to the parody account, we see an aversion to humor typical of tyrants and would-be tyrants alike. In fact, there is no indication that she even recognizes the account’s humorous tone. It is “impersonating me,” she said, and “releasing false policy statements.”
Had Twitter existed in say, 1964, and had a brave subject of the Mao Zedong regime in China somehow managed to create an account called “Chairman Mao Press Release (parody),” is there any doubt that Chairman Mao himself, once appraised of the situation, would have used similar words to describe it — that is, after marking the culprit for death?
When wrestling with memories of history’s most brutal regimes, humor has worked for some as a balm on the deepest wounds. Who can forget The Producers, brainchild of director Mel Brooks, son of Polish and Ukrainian Jews?
Legendary humorists also have mocked the technological backwardness caused by ridiculous Bolshevik pretensions, as in the case of SCTV’s “CCCP1: Today Is Moscow” skit, which here features a “new Soviet minicam”:
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Tyrannies invite such mockery. Only in free societies, however, do citizens preserve humor as an outlet for their frustrations with the endless follies of the powerful.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody) has incurred the wrath of its humorless namesake. Whether that wrath amounts to anything more than thinly-veiled threats should serve as a test of how free we truly are.
