It was in bad taste.
The “meme” — an altered video — depicted extreme, murderous violence. But it was not “weaponized” as incitement to real violence; it was, instead, “memeticized” contempt against the meme’s “victims,” the full panoply of media outlets along with a few iconic politicians.
The video was very popular over the weekend on social media. It took the church massacre scene from the first Kingsman movie, but with President Trump’s head placed over Colin Firth’s visage, crudely in “meme” fashion, and a few other heads put over other actors’, and the logos of major news outlets superimposed over most of the movie’s victims’ heads.
Cartoonish, yes, but done with élan.
Brooke Baldwin, however, is a paid agent of billionaire president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, and she has her marching orders, as revealed this week by a Project Veritas scoop. So she lit into the president in high moral dudgeon: “Mr. President, why is it taking you so long to condemn this video? You tweet all the time. I don’t want to hear from your press secretary … who says you strongly condemn the video … I want to hear from YOU.”
What Ms. Baldwin and her boss don’t get is that a growing swath of the American populace does not want to hear from a news reporter scolding demands that the president “condemn” things he had nothing to do with.
Trump didn’t make the meme, after all, nor had it made for him.
Brooke Baldwin’s effrontery shows why someone might make a meme like the one in question.
Not because you deserve to be killed, Ms. Baldwin, but because you deserve derision.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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