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By David Futrelle
Sebastian Gorka — former White House security adviser turned freelance Trump bootlicker — has a reputation on the right as some sort of brain genius. But he’s also, it turns out, as gullible as any Facebook MAGA grandpa.
Earlier today, Gorka riled up his fans with a tweet blasting Nintendo for celebrating #PrideMonth by posting an image of Mario and his brother Luigi kissing, accusing the Japanese video game giant of “promoting incest.”
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To be fair, this would have been a rather outrageous thing for Nintendo to post, if Nintendo had indeed posted it. But in fact, the account behind the tweet was an obvious fake — lacking the blue checkmark of the real Nintendo account, spelling the company’s name wrong in its account ID, and with a pinned tweet clearly identifying it as a parody account. (And, yes, this was the account’s pinned tweet long before Gorka found the incest tweet.)
Had Gorka spent a few moments going through the troll account’s past tweets, he would have seen other tweets that would have set off anyone’s trolldar.
Unsurprisingly, Gorka’s most fervent fans seem to be as gullible as the man himself.
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After literally dozens of non-fans informed him that the account he was mad about was fake, Gorka quietly deleted his tweet — with no explanation to his fans and no apology for falsely insinuating that Nintendo was promoting incest.
But Gorka and his fans weren’t the only one taken in by the tweet — not by a long shot. Many of the “outraged” seem almost as angry about tey gays as they are about the incest.
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There were of course plenty of jokes about incestuous rednecks as well.
Despite all the debunkings, the outrage tweets continue to flow — indeed, every time I refresh this page of Twitter search results there are dozens more.
And I have to say I find thatmore than a little discouraging. As delightful as it is to see someone like Gorka exposed again as the gullible dingus he is, the lasting effect of the parody account’s fake tweet will be that a small but not insignificant portion of MAGAheads will remain convinced that Nintendo and the LGBTQ community really do support incest. We live in a world awash in misinformation and disinformation — and the people who have benefited the most from all the fake news have been reactionaries of all stripes, in the US and around the world.
It isn’t just that good parody is hard to do in a world in which reality itself often seems beyond parody. The problem is that parody like this, whatever its intent, plays into the right-wing agenda. It’s not news at this point that MAGAs are some of the most gullible people on planet earth; we don’t need to concoct parodies to “prove” this again and again.
Still, that doesn’t make it wrong to imagine Nintendo characters who aren’t related to one another having a lovely gay time with one another. Here’s some fan art of Mario and Bowser looking like they’re about to get it on. Happy Pride!
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H/T — I borrowed the screenshot of the Gorka tweet from The Daily Beast’s @WillSommer
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