This may come as a shock to many, but the internet is full of trolling, sarcasm, parody, and fake news — some of it funny, like the Onion, some of it painful and belabored, like 90 percent of the Babylon Bee (about 10 percent of its content, about the foibles of church boards and doctrinal disputes, used to be really funny : "Calvinist Dog Corrects Owner: ‘No One Is A Good Boy’").
Being able to recognize parody and sarcasm requires a bit of mental effort, and even a fairly sophisticated reader will sometimes miss a joke, which is why we have Poe's Law in the first place. But sometimes, it's a wonder that people who should know better miss all the cues that someone's pulling their leg, and that can be hilarious all on its own. Hello, sophisticated culture snot Andrew Sullivan this week!
In a now-deleted tweet, Sullivan appeared to fall for a really dopey, tendentious rightwing "comedy" video making fun of all those crazy woke educators who force critical race theory on the kids. The creator of the video, Kali Fontanilla, is a former public school ESL teacher who claimed in a PragerU video last year that she had to leave public education because she just couldn't stand all the woke indoctrination and communism anymore, so she's started her own company, "Exodus Institute" (get it? It's for parents escaping the Government schools, just like Moses freed his people!) to provide instructional content to homeschooling parents. You can sign up for either a full K-12 curriculum, or for "enrichment" content to supplement your own homeschool lessons.
Fontanilla also posts fun parody TikTok videos in which she pretends to be "Miss Luna, activist teacher" (you know, like lunatic haha) the wokest woke teacher ever. She wears a mask that says "Black Educators Matter," which she said in her PragerU video had been an unwanted gift from her last school principal, and an emblem of the Left's obsession with race. Pfft, as if anyone wears masks anymore!
Here's the video Sullivan approvingly retweeted, in which Fontanilla claims to have started a "communist lunch program" in her fourth grade class, to impose "equity." She says that all her "white privilege kids" have better lunches than her "BIPOC kids," so to be fair, she has all the kids put their lunch items in a basket, and she redistributes the items to all the kids. (None of the imaginary children goes into anaphylactic shock from an imaginary classmate's peanut butter, thankfully.)
“I started a COMMUNIST style lunch distribution in my 4th GRADE CLASS! It’s going great! #Communism #capitalismsucks”
— Kali Fontanilla (@Kali Fontanilla) 1676475204
Get ready for the big punchline! "Miss Luna" says that "this one white privilege student" always complains that "he's getting the hummus and carrot sticks" while the "BIPOC kids are getting the six-pack of Oreos, and I tell him, 'You know, even though I am doing my best to make this equitable, we also have to make up for 300 years of oppression.'"
That's it. That's the joke.
Andrew Sullivan tweeted that he thought it was very, very telling! Although he later deleted his tweet, at least we have a screenshot:
Sullivan twote:
I'm afraid this isn't fake. But it's the most honest explanation of "equity" I've yet heard. Redistribution pudding followed by a topping of racial revenge.
Honestly, we aren't entirely sure Sullivan fell for it, because his phrasing is ambiguous: "I'm afraid this isn't fake. But ..." Perhaps he meant to say it wasn't real, but that the logic nonetheless is indisputable , because here is a fake thing that's exactly like what's happening with all this diversity and stuff.
Or maybe he thought he'd stumbled on to a very real confession by one of those radical socialist teachers who are out to punish all white students, a thing he knows to be true even if this video is fake. Sullivan deleted his retweet and hasn't said anything about it since. He's been very busy excoriating LGBTQ groups like the Human Rights Campaign, because they've criticized the New York Times's coverage of trans people . The HRC and other critics, Sullivan insists , are "betraying the gay rights movement's longtime support of a robust free press" and are actually "hostile to a free society," so please stop donating to them immediately if you love freedom.
So honestly, maybe he did think the parody was real. The less time we spend trying to figure out what's going on in Andrew Sullivan's head, the better, the end.
[ PragerU / Kali Fontanilla on Twitter]
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Honestly, it's getting so hard to tell the difference I somethimes mistake Andrew Sullivan for a real person.
If there was ever a real life carrying out of The Menu, Andrew Sullivan should definitely have a reservation.