Originally published at: Watch right wing writer Benny Johnson's incredibly cringy grand entrance at Turning Point USA conservative student summit | Boing Boing
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Is this now the only authorized “dance move” for GQP males? 
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Ugh, down boy, bad dog, bad BAD dog!
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That’s almost as bad as Elon Musk dancing… 
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cough–cough–douchebag!–cough… sorry. allergies.
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WTF is wrong with those people; it looks like the stage for a WWE wrestling match.
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I have no idea who this person is but already I want to punch him.
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He’s provided the raw material for the left to demonstrate that, despite his t-shirt, they can indeed meme.
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IKR, and then after all that fanfare this pudgy white boy comes prancing out, it’s not good. Not good at all.
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I just threw up in my mouth a little.
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Part of the problem is the fan fare, if we’re being honest. Nothing wrong with that kind of thing in the right place (the WWE or whatever), but the more we treat our politics like pro-wrestling instead of a realm for trying to solve our collective problems together, the easier it is for these sorts of movements to crop up and dominate politics.
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Is that…is he supposed to be dancing?!?
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Agree x10. It’s a problem that I think that we’ve been dealing with for a while. It’s all entertainment now.
Politics has been reduced to an “our side vs. their side” thing. People are now just rooting for their team to win. Ideas don’t really matter anymore.
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i can’t help but think this is deliberately designed to bait the “left” into taking it at face value and “meme-ing” it widely, thus upping the profile of whoever this guy is. no publicity is bad publicity.
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It’s 100% culture war, 0% issues/policies/analysis.
It’s 100% own the other side, 0% good faith.
And as much as we want it to end, it will end before we’re prepared, and it will end badly.
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And that was purposeful, of course. Because then it’s easy to manipulate some people into things like supporting the dismantling of democratic practices.
It isn’t just everyone, though, but we can all be vulnerable to it. Plenty of us still try and discuss ideas and solutions to problems.
Maybe, what we really need is to recast our understanding of what politics is and can be. If we can shift our perceptions to understanding it as a means of solving large scale, collective problems (which are ever more evident in a globalized world) that might be helpful, but as long as people like Murdoch still exist, that’s a difficult project to undertake. Mass media is a powerful tool for shaping perceptions and many people are willing to use that to shove through their authoritarian agenda.
They have shown us over and over again, exactly who they are. Maybe instead of trying to dig up excuses for their shitty behavior, we start to believe them and push back against them?
All they have is hate and tax cuts.
If we let it. They tried to end it on January 6th 2021, and failed. If we LET them win and assume they already have, then they will.
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I was referring to this specific video clip, with the cheesy lights/fog/music/dancing. It’s unlikely that this guy’s schtick is completely un-self-aware. He knows he’s being cheesy, and is partially counting on “the left” to not get that, and widely mock him for it, thus providing free publicity in the same way trump leveraged doing/saying outrageous things to get endless free media coverage. i certainly would never have heard of this guy had it not been for this boing boing post. again, no publicity is bad publicity.
How do you know that? He’s speaking at a far right organization’s conference, so he’s very much interested in pushing their worldview, which is basically fascist. Whether he’s intentionally being goofy to “own the libs” doesn’t matter.
We ignore them at our peril. How we GOT here was by dismissing and ignoring them since at least the OKC bombing.
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Unless you work for him or have some kind of ‘inside knowledge,’ those are mere speculations.
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