Hold out your candy-bags, kids -- here's another freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. And in a rare double-up, like the last freebie this one features Rod Dreher. But he's just one of a bunch of rightwingers who've gone ballistic over a charming Twix Halloween ad, in which a boy who likes to wear dresses gets a nanny with heavy goth-witch vibes who confronts his bullies and proceeds to blow them off (in one case, literally).
The rampage against this ad is not limited to Dreher (who brings his unique "woke capitalism" brainworms to it) but extends to conservative outlets such as the Media Research Center ("Twix Halloween Ad Features Zero Candy and Plenty of Trans Propaganda for Kids"), Gateway Pundit ("Twix Releases Halloween Ad About a Boy Wearing Dresses With His Witch Nanny — Forgets to Mention Candy," hey thanks for the tip, Rosser Reeves), Russia Today ("The Witch & the Wardrobe change: Twix blasted for ‘woke’ Halloween ad with boy wearing princess dress, but no holiday… or candy"), et alia.
One particularly dumb idea in their coverage is that, when the witch-nanny sends off one bully with a gust of wind, the commercial actually, in the words of Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, "Suggests Violence Against Those Who Disagree Acceptable." Quite apart from the characterization of bullies as "those who disagree" -- there's a whole academic paper on rightwing victim-status-claiming in that -- I wonder if, when these guys saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Augustus Gloop drowned in the Chocolate River and Violet Beauregarde turned into a blueberry, they stormed the box office claiming it was a pedophiliac snuff film.
But my essay's not so much about that as why people like these hate fantasies in which the marginalized and bullied vanquish their tormentors, but love fantasies about overthrowing the government and raping and lynching their real-life opponents.
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