Undernews breaks through

This is just delicious. The right wing media sphere has got itself in a panty-soiling tizzy over a dance performance of the Nutcracker in the White House about which Jill Biden tweeted. You can watch the performance at that link.

Apparently none of the right wing media opinion makers ever saw a production of Hoffman's 1816 fable, such a corny staple of Christmas delight.

Ron DeSantis thinks he's onto something according to a fund appeal using a picture of the production:

Jill and Joe Biden are taking your tax dollars and throwing them at radical activist groups to parade through the halls that leaders like Ronald Reagan used to march through. There is truly no clearer picture of our country's decline than the dereliction of duty by our President. ...

Such confidence that his supporters must be narrow minded morons. Now we know Ron is one ... but all of them? 

Catherine Rampell [gift article-enjoy] has the story:

Hide your children, hide your wives. A radical force is sweeping the nation, threatening to destroy everything that God-fearing Americans hold dear.

That threat, according to Fox News? Tap-dancing, one of the most quintessentially American art forms there is.

Last week, first lady Jill Biden shared a festive holiday video of tap troupe Dorrance Dance performing their swingin’ spin on “The Nutcracker,” set to a jazz arrangement by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. ...

More seriously, David Frum [gift article] has described how MAGA acolytes become confirmed in believing so much nonsense in the concept he calls "undernews". 

During the Obama presidency, more extreme conservative media trafficked in rumors that Obama was secretly gay and having an affair with a male aide, or else that Michelle Obama was secretly transgender. This rubbish was too lurid, offensive, and stupid ever to be repeated on Fox News itself. But Fox hosts regularly made jokes and references that only made sense to viewers who had absorbed the undernews from other sources.

Undernews made itself felt during the first Trump impeachment too. The official defense of Trump, the one articulated by more high-toned hosts, was that the extortion of Ukraine did not rise to the level of impeachment. After all, Ukraine got its weapons in the end: no harm, no foul. In the undernews, however, this defense was backed by an elaborate fantasy that Trump had been right to act as he did.

In this fantasy, Ukraine became the center of a global criminal enterprise masterminded by the Biden family. Trump, the myth went, had heroically acted to reveal the plot—only to be thwarted by the Deep State’s machinations in Washington and Kyiv. Believers in the undernews reimagined Ukraine as a pro-Biden mafia state that had cruelly victimized Trump. They burned to inflict payback on Ukraine for the indignity of Trump’s first impeachment.

This delusory narrative was seldom articulated in venues where nonbelievers might hear it. But the delusion shaped the opinion of believers—and the behavior of those who sought votes from those believers: congressional Republicans. ...

That's the point. We don't hear it, but millions of our sibling citizens marinate in this stuff -- and end up scared of a tap dance performance.