Now that at least a few people realize that the Onion is satire, brilliant evangelical-posing site Christwire.org has stepped up to get the Internet all worked up. (The site’s tagline, “Conservative values for an unsaved world,” is particularly excellent.) Its latest goof, “Does Your Child "Sissy Bounce"? The Dangerous Anal Dance Trend Sweeping America's Colleges”, has the perfect mix of a headline that’s Huffingtonian in its glaring SEO-baiting as well as the type of straightforward (if horribly racist) statement-making that’s become de rigueur in the faux-authoritative writing of hyper-conservative jerkasses. Witness the absurdity:In black culture, the buttocks are a common element of arousal (oddly enough, they call it "the booty"). They find the filthy track of the colon a more convenient alleyway of intercourse due to their abnormally large penises. This also works when the woman is already pregnant, which is a very frequent situation in the African American urban environment. For this reason, the "Sissy Dance" sometimes involves a man pretending to be a female by presenting his anus for inspection by the group. He will shake it and wave it, grind it and bounce it. All his efforts are meant to convince either the homosexual or heterosexual black men to attempt sodomy on the man's tight anus. Often this happens immediately after in the disco's bathroom or in the parking lot.As absurd as that is, what’s more absurd is that person after person (after person, after person, ad infinitum) thinks it’s real. (Sissy bounce itself is a real thing, by the way, although it’s not exactly how Christwire describes it.) Hell, maybe Christwire is serious, in one of the most elaborate bait-and-switches ever, but I doubt it. Yet the very fact that people are questioning whether something so outlandish is real or not says a whole lot about the state of editorial content on the web.Christwire’s timing is particularly fitting after the debacle(s) at conservative outlet National Review in recent weeks. First, NR axed longtime columnist John Derbyshire for writing a guide on what white parents should teach their kids about the dangers of black people. It’s the type of bullshit racist lecture that terrible old white dudes in tweed like to deliver with partial statistics and a self-assured, scholarly air, and I don’t need to link to it. But as if that wasn’t enough, NR also dumped Robert Weissberg, another contributor (and terrible old white man) who felt it was okay to drop racist crap all over the web.Now, I suppose it’s good that NR dropped those gasbags from its roster — although how much of that is the NR bowing to pressure or actually disagreeing with their views is another matter altogether. But with that type of hogwash spewing about on supposedly-legitimate websites, what’s someone to think when they come across Christwire? Or how about the irreparable damage done to Trayvon Martin when Business Insider sourced salacious photos (that were decidedly not Martin) from infamous Nazi forum Stormfront?The thing is, once something is on the Internet, and spread through the collective consciousness of the social web, it never goes away, and that’s doubly true when something is controversial and offensive. The fact that so many are buying into Christwire’s (admittedly clever) brand of satire means that racist rhetoric has fundamentally altered what we expect of the range of discourse online, and it’s clear that racism online — if not in public — has clearly ditched the darker corners of the web for the mainstream.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead.
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Honestly, the fact that people can’t tell this is fake isn’t surprising.
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