Ted Cruz Mad At Imaginary Atlantic Article

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Imagine there's a cave. And in the cave, there are five or so people who have been there since childhood, all chained up facing a wall, collars around their necks so they can only face forward. Also imagine that these people don't ever have to eat or go to the bathroom for some reason because if you do you'll get stuck on that part for a whole five minutes and then be completely lost when you check back in to what your philosophy professor is on about.

Anyway! There are people and they're in a cave staring a wall and behind them is a fire. There are people outside the cave who do silent puppet shows for them and I forget what else because honestly I was thinking about the whole bathroom situation. As far as the people chained in the cave know, this is what reality is. The shadows on the wall are all that there is to the world. They can only draw conclusions on the world based on the shadows they see on the wall.

 Now imagine all of these people chained up in the cave are Ted Cruz. 

This morning, The Daily Beast reports, Cruz shared an image meant to look like a screenshot of an article from The Atlantic, an obvious fake created by a self-described "shitposter," based off of a Tweet from perennially ridiculous person Ian Miles Cheong.

The fake article was titled "The Evolution of White Supremacy," with a subheading reading "In Dearborn, Michigan, Muslim parents who oppose teaching kids pornography to children become the new face of the far right." Cruz shared the image, tweeting "The Left is beyond parody."

Perhaps this is true. After all, in order to be parody something has to have some amount of truth in it. It can't just be a lie based on a lie based on a lie based on a lie based on some shadows a person chained up in a cave saw on a wall and thought was reality.

Cruelly, this pretend article — which neither Cruz nor the many other right-wing geniuses who shared it even bothered to Google— was actually attributed to Abby Ohlheiser, a real journalist who had indeed previously written for The Atlantic . Ohlheiser was then targeted for harassment by legions of awful people calling them a groomer.

“are you fucking serious ted cruz”

— Abby Ohlheiser (@Abby Ohlheiser) 1665752151 

Cruz quietly deleted the tweet after finding out it was fake, but not before it was shared more than 300 times by credulous cave prisoners.

One of these geniuses was King's College history professor David C. Innes, who — like so many conservatives before him who have been mad at imaginary things — tweeted "It seems this is fake. But its utter plausibility is the story. Liberals are DEVOTED to sexual perversion & shaping kids with it."

First of all, people of all kinds and all political persuasions are devoted to sexual perversion.

Second, "liberals want to show kids hardcore pornography in schools" is a thing made up by the Right and at this point I honestly can't tell if they know that or not. Are they just aggressively disingenuous or are they like the prisoners in Plato's Cave, unable to see what is happening in the real world and only able to draw conclusions based on the small bits of information they do get?

Here, from what I can tell, is how this bullshit goes down.

Republicans need something to get people worked up about because they are losing in some way—>
"Ok, trans people exist, how do you like them apples?" —>
People shrug —>
"Ok ... trans children exist! And they want to use the same bathrooms and locker rooms as your children!" —>
They start listening —>
"OH, and the teachers want your kids to be trans, too! In fact, all of the liberals want to brainwash kids into thinking they are a different gender, because that's a thing it is possible to do!"—>
Pitchforks start coming out —>
"OH, and they're doing this for sexual reasons, because they want to molest your confused children!"—>
Torches start burning —>
"And because they're so desperate to molest your children, they're showing kids hardcore pornography in school to groom them, and liberals think this is great and want more of it! And they think you're bad and a white supremacist if you don't want your kids to watch gangbangs all day at school and get blowjob lessons from the school nurse!"—> ARRRRRRGHHHHHHBFFFFFFLRRRRRRGGGGGGLLLLLLEEEE!

None of this is real. If they were able to turn their heads for a goddamned minute and look at the real world around them, they would know it wasn't real. They would notice that they were for some reason never able to find any documentation at all of any liberal teachers talking about how great it was to introduce their third grade class to the magic of Deep Throat or Debbie Does Dallas . They would notice that for some reason, no one was ever able to actually show them any proof of any of this happening. But they can't, because their heads are stuck and the shadows on the walls just look exactly like an school librarian holding a giant, double-ended dildo. Or because they're just very, very gullible and very, very cruel.

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