It’s official. The Harris-Biden administration is a joke. And none of us should be laughing.
On Monday, Facebook founder and Meta honcho Mark Zuckerberg revealed some unfunny truths in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” wrote Zuckerberg, who, as of late, seems to be exhibiting signs of early onset red-pilling.
Trying to suppress political satire is a dangerous knock at the First Amendment, and an insult to our American values. Kamala Harris owns this dystopian overreach.
This, however, isn’t the first we’ve learned of this current administration’s plot to make America glum again with digital censorship. Joy, we hardly knew ye.
In 2023, Jordan released information that the Biden White House’s Senior Advisor Andy Slavitt, who left his job in June 2021, demanded Facebook remove a hyper-viral, vaccine-critical meme.
It was a shot of Leonardo DiCaprio from “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood,” pointing at the television and, essentially, saying how in 10 years’ time, we’ll be seeing ambulance-chasing law firm commercials targeting vaccine recipients who may be entitled to compensation.
Slavitt was outraged and reportedly said the post “was directly comparing Covid vaccines to asbestos poisoning in a way that demonstrably inhibits confidence amongst those the Biden administration is trying to reach.”
We won two world wars and defeated communism, but a meme is too scary and potent.
This effort to disappear a topical joke displayed a low regard for Americans’ intelligence — and the administration’s own appetite for authoritarianism.
But to see it in black and white, in Zuckerberg’s own words, is particularly jarring: The White House wanted to kill not just something they viewed as covid disinformation (what a dumb word), but also humor that chipped away the left’s stranglehold on a narrative that subjugated us.
Or maybe just gave us a chuckle.
A narrative that sowed fear, justified prolonged school closures, destroyed businesses and, in some cases, required people to take a vaccine just to retain their job.
It’s criminally unfunny.
Humor and satire are necessary parts of a free and functioning society. They help us deal with our crappy lives and unspeakable tragedies. They unify and disarm. And, when deployed in a searing, effective way, they hold a mirror up to our society’s absurdities, poking holes in our overlords’ worst impulses.
It’s been most necessary this last decade or so, especially as our culture has become an epic pile-up of lunacy. We masked little kids and were mandated to stand 6 feet apart, a figure that Anthony Fauci now admits was pulled out of his hiney.
Tall strapping males like Lia Thomas called themselves girls and joined women’s college swim and cycling competitions. We were supposed to revere trans athletes for their bravery, and threatened with ruin should we point out the obvious farce.
And wealthy white women like Robin DiAngelo — now an accused plagiarist — made a boatload of cash lecturing corporations about racial equity. In another era, all of these would be fresh ingredients for the best episodes of “Saturday Night Live” or “In Living Color.”
But as the once funny left developed sacred cows, people have been canceled for daring to say the obvious. Or blasted for exercising the smallest bit of critical thinking skills — even if was cloaked in yuks.
Just ask Jon Stewart, who applied logic on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in 2021. In the now infamous appearance, Stewart — the 2022 recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (yes we have one of those) — hilariously said it was obvious the virus came from the Wuhan lab, adding: “The disease is the same name as the lab!”
Or Woody Harrelson’s gonzo “SNL” monologue in 2023, which took aim at the virus and vaccines. That led to a fierce tsk-tsk from the mainstream media, with many dismissing it as dangerous conspiracies.
And still, humor has been a lifeboat in a rising tide of woke-ism.
Efforts at suppression, mostly by our now scoldy cultural institutions, have forged a thriving and edgy comedy scene — Andrew Schulz, Shane Gillis, Tim Dillon— as well as a handful of hard-charging podcasts, like Tony Hinchliffe’s “Kill Tony” and Ryan Long’s sketches that reliably ridicule our obsession with identity and politics.
And look at what happened in 2022, when Twitter suspended the account of the sharp satire site the Babylon Bee for the high crime of misgendering HHS second-in-command, Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological man who transitioned in 2011.
As a rejoinder to USA Today naming Levine “Woman of the Year,” they awarded the doctor “Man of the Year.” It set off a firestorm and meaningful discussion about free speech. And truth.
And it also helped push Elon Musk to buy Twitter, though not without many tears from the ultra progressives who once ruled the platform with a castigating iron fist.
Eventually, the people will have the last laugh.