Mike Huckabee and the Worst Joke in the World
The day before Easter Sunday Mike Huckabee took to social media to tweet, “I’ve decided to “identify” as Chinese. Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my “values” and I’ll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to @MLB games. Ain’t America great?”
It was an astonishing tone-deaf, insensitive, racist thing to tweet less than a month after six Asian women were murdered in a shooting spree in Atlanta that ultimately claimed eight lives.
Despite what Huckabee’s joke suggests, being Chinese-American in the United States in 2021 dramatically increases your chances of being the victim of a hate crime, in no small part because our previous president went out of his way to refer to the pandemic as “The China Virus” or “Chinese Virus” rather than the more neutral and less racist COVID 19 or the Corona Virus.
In the space of just 280 characters, Huckabee’s “joke” somehow managed to be simultaneously offensive, racist, brutally unfunny, hack and transphobic.
That’s because Huckabee’s tweet is a variation on what I have determined is the single worst, most toxic joke in existence: the notion of cynical opportunists “identifying” as something they clearly are not for the sake of getting an unfair advantage.
This awful, dispiritingly ubiquitous gag is EVERYWHERE, particularly at the Babylon Bee, which I vaguely recall being a moderately amusing, affectionate satire of evangelical Christianity from a Christian perspective at one point but is now unreadable MAGA garbage. Here are TEN Babylon Bee stories dry-humping this dead gag:
1. Motorcyclist Who Identifies As Bicyclist Sets Cycling World Record
2. Trump Quickly Identifies As Woman So Kamala Harris Can't Claim To Be The First Female President
3. Brave Man Chooses to Self-Identify as Man
4. Grizzly Bear Shatters All Pro Wrestling Records After Identifying As Human
5. Grown Man Identifies As 10-Year-Old To Enjoy New Pokemon Game Without Guilt
6. Man Identifies As Woman Just Long Enough To Voice Valid Opinion On Abortion
7. Gina Carano Rehired By Disney After She Identifies As An Abusive Male Director
8. Progressive Parents Sit Their Kid Down For Talk About The Birds And The Bees And The Birds Who Want To Become Bees And The Bees Who Identify As Birds And Buckle Up, This Might Take A While
9. Man Identifying As 6-Year-Old Crushes Game of Tee Ball
10. Man Identifies As Woman, Immediately Receives 23% Pay Cut
In an infinitely more dispiriting development, the increasingly unbearable Terry Gilliam responded hilariously to someone observing that Monty Python is made up of white dudes by quipping, “I no longer want to be a white male, I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world: I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian… My name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition.”
Not to be outdone, the similarly appalling John Cleese gave his own version of this terrible joke when he defended J.K. Rowlings by tweeting, “Deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman. Is that allowed, or am I being unrealistic ?
This awful, distressingly deathless strain of faux-comedy suggests that authentic trans people don’t really exist and that people who identify as trans are merely cheating in order to receive the incredible benefits that come with being anything other than white, straight, Christian and Cishet.
It’s as if these folks saw the scene in Private School for Girls where Matthew Modine’s character dressed up like a girl in order to visit his girlfriend in the girl’s dorm and misinterpreted it as a documentary about trans life and not a particularly idiotic sequence in a dumb teen sex comedy.
We’ve certainly made strides but being trans in American society in 2021 is still incredibly difficult, expensive, complicated and hard, in part due to transphobic jokes about identifying as an attack helicopter.
Trans people transition despite the enormous cost, financial and otherwise, because they want to live their most authentic lives and be their truest selves, not because they want to cheat at sports or finagle their way into women’s locker rooms in order to look at boobs.
Yet folks like Mike Huckabee genuinely seem to think that demographics who have unfathomably hard lives, like illegal immigrants of color or trans women of color, have it easy because the thought police behind “woke” “politically correct” culture insists they can’t be mocked (ironically, often in memes and tweets mocking the trans community and trans people) while demographics with obscene amounts of power, like the scions of rich white straight Christian political dynasties like the Huckabees and the Trumps ostensibly have it the hardest because people sometimes hold them accountable for the horrible things they say and do and tweet, like mocking the trans and Chinese communities at a time when they are particularly vulnerable.
I personally identify as someone who is extremely sick of this awful, destructive, unfunny joke and the even more hateful mindset behind it.
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