Political movements invariably include some people who do and say things that are embarrassing, ill-considered, brutish, and/or extreme. There are different schools of thought on how best to respond when people in your own tent act in this fashion, but if you have a modicum of honesty and common sense, you should at least grasp that you should not defend every last thing and pretend that it’s virtuous and wise.

Of course, that assumes that you care about the good opinion of the people with whom you share a country. A movement that believes that elite power will insulate it from public opinion can afford to be arrogant, and a national political press without shame will urinate on our legs and tell us it’s raining. Thus, we get this report from Tyler Kingkade of NBC News on video of marchers at a New York City Pride parade chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.” Kingkade insists on defending this:

Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, . . . said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.” “It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.” The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community. . . . According to multiple Drag March regulars, the “coming for your children” variation has been used before. Last year, Gothamist reported, people at the Drag March chanted, “Ten percent is not enough: Groom! Groom! Groom!”

If you don’t want people to think you believe something, maybe don’t chant it in the streets? No major media organization would print at face value a claim by, say, a white nationalist group that “we’re really just chanting ‘you will not replace us’ ironically.” In fact, white nationalists do a good deal of wink-wink stuff where they say racist and antisemitic things that cross lines, not always meaning all of it literally but as a deliberate strategy to use the ambiguity to inject more of their poison into the public conversation while maintaining some deniability when called out. This smacks of exactly the same rhetorical strategy. Shame on NBC News for giving it cover.

Remember the Rule of Goats, which can’t be properly rendered in a family publication but amounts to “if you fornicate with a goat ironically, you’re still a goat-fornicator.” At some point, you become who you pretend to be.