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Satire of the Left Is Coming From Within: Satire, like reality (according to satirists at least), has a liberal bias. The rest of left media has its share of counterweights—Fox for MSNBC; Breitbart and InfoWars and the Gateway Pundit, etc., for every Palmer Report—but there is no conservative late-night host, or Onion of the right. (Some, like Jordan Klepper and the Colbert Report-era Stephen Colbert, present as conservative, but direct their humor at the right’s discourse and not its targets.) Given satire seeks to aim itself at institutions and the status quo, it is perhaps unsurprising that the search for the conservative Jon Stewart remains the aggrieved, and status-quo protecting, right’s great McGuffin.
That’s not to say that satire of the left, with its own institutions worthy of mockery, does not exist. Where the right has failed, the left has stepped in to skewer itself. This Wednesday, Clickhole, The Onion’s fake clickbait website, launched a new vertical, Resistancehole, which takes as its targets the keyboard-warriors and conspiracy-mongerers of anti-Trump Twitter. Indeed, they have a lot to mock: those who peddle critiques of President Donald Trump, or “Drumpf,” that substitute snark for substance; those who believe every world problem can be reduced to one of Russian election interference; those who attack Trump with their own regressive rhetoric. In aiming at the failure of part of the left’s discourse, and not the validity of the underlying critique, Resistancehole succeeds where conservative comedians cannot.
