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I remember all the “conservatives pounce” headlines from the Gray Lady and her friends making this argument, but I’ve never bought it. Consider a world where, say, the chair of the Texas RNC or whatever puts out a pro-Trump campaign video where they say “When we win the election, we’ll go stage a little putsch, / Suspend your sad democracy and voting rights and such”. You know, to make fun of liberals’ overblown fears of a Trumpian self-coup. Do you really think that progressives like the San Franciscan choir and their defenders would accept this as just a wee bit of humor poking fun at their neuroses, rather than a serious Threat to Our Democracy?
EDIT: I realize that I forgot to clearly make my point: if you’re in a position to do things that other people think are bad, and you state “hey, we’re gonna do those things that you think are bad”, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously. And those people would be right to wonder whether you’re just joking or going “haha, only serious”.
You'd have a point if the chair of the texas DNC put out this video. But it's a choir. It's a bunch of random people singing. The Texas Lutheran Choir singing a song about how kids should go to christian schools isn't a threat to democracy either.
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Isn't this just a classic Poe's Law case? To me, for example, the original choir line reads as clearly self-aware, but things like Trump's comment about suspending the constitution does not... but it's also quite possible that Trump's comment was self-aware, but the choir line was not. It's an internet communication problem endemic to the medium. Unfortunately, there's not a good solution, because "humor" can encompass many things, and sometimes people find the same statement humorous in different ways, and sometimes it's not even humor to start with!
Issues like this have led to my dad forgoing sarcasm altogether, though he loved it; and also, in theory, this forum doing the same, though sadly we can't help it too much if Twitter leaks in as "evidence".
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