is Seattle the new fort Sumter?

[Aegon]

Fox News falls for Monty Python joke in report criticizing Seattle protesters

Martha MacCallum, host of Fox News’ The Story, was covering Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) for her viewers, which included claims from the cable news channel that there were leadership problems within the organisation. To illustrate this point, Fox News shared a screenshot of a Reddit post entitled “I didn’t vote for Raz”. Raz Simone, a rapper, is the alleged unofficial leader of CHAZ. “I thought we had an anonymous collective,” Ms MacCallum said, reading the Reddit post. “An anarcho-syndicalist commune at the least, we should take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.”

What Fox News failed to realise was that this post was a joke that played off a popular scene from the 1975 comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In the scene, King Arthur approaches two peasants who are mud-farming out on the land and announces himself as their king. But Dennis, one of the peasants, informs the dumbfounded king that he and his cohorts have established their own form of government – which results in a debate about who actually is in charge.

“We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of purely external affairs,” Dennis says, a nearly verbatim quote used in the Reddit post.

Hilarious.