An article from a site called "Afru" is making the rounds on social media, which I'm not going to link to for reasons you'll understand soon.
Here at Not the Bee, our job is to separate reality from satire (an increasingly difficult task, to be sure).
So when it comes to this article, we have heard crazier stuff.
Need an example? Here's one (just off the top of my head) ... 20,000 Haitians were dumped on an Ohio town by the Biden-Harris administration, and they're hunting and eating federally protected waterfowl (and potentially pets, though that's not been verified and the city government says it isn't happening).
Beyond that, the American people have been called racist for everything from studying dinosaurs to saying "good morning."
It isn't hard to believe that some nutso lefty out there really does believe that it's racist to save wildlife and pets where illegals are involved. The Marxist math does add up!
But being on the side of objective truth and reason means we've got to do the work (to borrow a phrase from the Left) and dig a little deeper to see what's really happening.
So, let's take a look at this particular article.
The article starts out predictably calling conservatives "rAcisT":
But perfectly civilized folks (actually, almost all cultures) eat geese all the time. Right? So what's really going on?
The recipe makes for a predictable stew. Racist memes, smug culinary supremacism, and, of course, a torrent of fake moral outrage from people who couldn't care less about the actual lives of the undocumented.
It could be the opening of an Ivy League PhD dissertation in racial studies.
But then the article jumps ship on racism and moves into two other conservative flashpoints: The meat industry and capitalism.
The birds that the migrants ate were all free-range — literally — in the most perfect and ideal sense of the word. They've spent their lives flying around, foraging in parks, living their happy little bird existences without the stress of being trapped inside a small cage in a vast, stinking capitalist death Matrix.
And if that's not enough, the article then goes on to celebrate the fact that foreign-born workers are taking American jobs.
It's not a coincidence that the jobs report for August released last Friday showed that employment declined for native-born and rose for foreign-born workers.
Because it's not really the birds that these privileged white folks care about, regardless of what they claim. This entire Springfield bird cooking incident is just another opportunity for spooked white folks to look down on and otherize new Americans that they perceive as threatening to their unearned employment and even unearned status.First of all, the source is a bit suspect.
Sounds convincing, no?
Now let's look at a few other articles.
Afru is notorious for publishing articles that seem designed to propagate conservative rage. I mean just look at a few of these things:
It's like a treasure trove that was designed especially for our site to laugh at.
But there is such a thing as "deep satire," and in these wild times we should learn to identify it.
Horatian satire is whimsical or playful to point out stupidity or hypocrisy. The Babylon Bee often employs this.
Juvenalian satire mocks and cuts to show how truly vile something is. The Bee also uses this.
Often, satire blends together with parody, which is a mocking imitation of an enemy or his opposing viewpoint to show how he and his ideas are foolish and/or insane.
When The Bee uses this, it's obvious to most people.
But deep satire doesn't give you that little wink to let you know it's a joke. It doesn't pull its punches or include any clues that it's meant to be a joke.
Instead, its point may be to draw in an audience that actually believes the things it is making fun of, which then makes the audience the joke.
With all that in mind, now look at these headlines:
And:
Is it possible there really is a team of lefties running this site, who truly believe everything they're posting?
Sure.
But is it more likely that they're mid-tier trolls trying to get clicks and sell crummy T-shirts to lefties (while laughing at them for not perceiving the joke)?
Probably.
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