Did you laugh out loud when Lady Gaga, clad in a strapless black jumpsuit, leaped onto a sanitation truck parked outside NYC's Trump Tower on Nov. 9 to protest the tower's namesake's surprise win of the presidency? Or did you just chuckle to yourself?
Did you barely suppress a mile-wide smile when you read that another NYC Hillary supporter, Lena Dunham, fled Gotham immediately after the election to seek "guidance" from a rock formation in desert-y Sedona, Arizona? Hadn't Lena vowed to move to Canada if Trump won? Geography lesson: Sedona is in the opposite direction from the Great White North, Lena.
Well, wipe that grin off your face right now. The New York Times's Amanda Hess says you're bad, bad, bad if you dare to make fun of the Nigara-level waterfall of celebrity despair that has followed Donald Trump's election on Nov. 8:
Conservative news outlets — most notably Breitbart News Network, the right-wing populist enclave — are perfecting the art of sapping Democratic stars’ name recognition and repurposing their words and actions into pro-Trump material.
How dare they?
This new battle in the culture wars is being waged not by bombastic, big-name right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, but by nimble, often nameless online aggregators who quickly churn through popular culture and throw the most evocative stories to their readers, often without much commentary. All it takes is a pointed headline, an unflattering photo and a few well-chosen (and real) quotes.
And those crafty "right wing"-ers even go so far as to :"signal" to their readers that the grieving celebrities are actually hysteria-prone rich hypocrites:
Beneath the surface of these articles, though, is subtle signaling at work. A piece about a postelection Vice essay by Jennifer Lawrence, in which she railed against the barriers still facing women in the workplace, includes an underhanded accolade about her: She was “recently named the highest-paid actress in Hollywood for the second straight year.
This recent headline — “‘Depressed’ Robert De Niro: Trump Election Makes Me ‘Feel Like I Did After 9/11’” — packs a one-two punch, pairing the image of a pathetic, weepy liberal with a flip attitude toward terrorism. Breitbart’s article on the Hamilton dust-up, titled “Tolerance: ‘Hamilton’ Cast Lectures Mike Pence From Broadway Stage,” is threaded with buzzwords — tolerance, lectures, Broadway — that cast liberals as elite, pedantic hypocrites.
Well, if the shoe fits….
And course there's the apparently obligatory accusation of anti-Semitism
[A]an article [on the Breitbart site] calling attention to Ms. Dunham’s Jewish faith feels like a bone thrown to the site’s white nationalist readers.
Actually, the Breitbart article in question (which Hess pointedly does not link) merely quotes Dunham herself verbatim:
In a separate post on Wednesday, Dunham said she had spent days “grieving” over the “loss of our country and the woman who inspired us,” comparing her experience to that of the “shivah,” a Jewish mourning ritual.
It might surprise many Jews actually sitting shiva to hear Dunham comparing Hillary's election debacle to the death of their closest relatives (Judaism reserves shiva for the passing of parents, siblings, spouses, and sons and daughters). The Breitbart article continues:
On Monday, an audibly frustrated Dunham could be heard leaving Speaker of the House Paul Ryan a voicemail message expressing her disappointment about President-elect Donald Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist and senior counsel.
“I wanted to leave a message to let you know how disappointed so many of us are in the appointment of Steve Bannon,” Dunham said in the voicemail message. “I’m not sure you’re really going to listen to this, but I hope you do, because I want to let you know that as a woman, as a Jew, as a person who cares about other human beings, people of color, the idea of appointing an anti-Semitic white supremacist…” she said before the voicemail message recorder cut her off.
I'd say that it's Duhnam, not Breitbart, who keeps "calling attention" to her Jewish faith.
And then:
[T]he catalog of slighted celebrities starts to read like something of a star-studded enemies list.
Oh right, McCarthyism. So don't you dare laugh at the grieving stars! You will be in big trouble.