'Triggered by jazz hands': MAGA mocked for latest holiday meltdown
MAGA’s latest holiday meltdown has a Washington Post columnist bemused — and pouring scorn on the right-wingers who “practically lost their minds."
At the center of the outrage: a holiday video shared by First Lady Jill Biden that featured tap dancing troupe Dorrance Dance performing “The Nutcracker.”
"The piece is wholesome and exuberant,” wrote Post columnist Catherine Rampell. “As a longtime admirer of Dorrance Dance, I watched the two-minute clip over and over when it was released and gushed over it with my dance-nerd friends.”
But others weren’t so impressed. In fact, they were outraged.
“The G-rated performance, which happened to feature some dancers of color, was 'woke nonsense' and part of the 'Biden freak-o-rama,' declared Fox News host Laura Ingraham. She said it was designed to 'offend' the public and appeal to 'flag burners and the America haters,'" Rampell wrote.
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“‘Anything connected to the American tradition has to be reimagined and then remade through a far-left lens,' Ingraham said of the troupe’s take on the Russian Christmas classic, adding that, ‘It is kind of a big middle finger to Christians in this country, I think, and frankly to all Americans, not just Christians.’”
The criticism was shared among other right-wing networks, and repeated by their viewers.
“Replete with tasteless perversions,” said Newsmax host Eric Bolling, while Former Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller was shocked by its “freakishness.”
The response was shocking, wrote Rampell.
“Who knew anyone could get so triggered by jazz hands?” she asked. "Anyone who thinks this 'Nutcracker' rendition is 'freakish' must have never seen the original. However weirded out these grinches were by a syncopated jaunt through the White House, trust me: Tchaikovsky’s classical ballet is way weirder.”
And she went on to pull apart what she saw as the real reason viewers were appalled.
“Some were pretty explicit that what set them off about the tap-dance troupe was that it has — gasp! — Black people in it,” she wrote.
She went on, “Maybe this sounds 'radical' to Fox News hosts or others accustomed to thinking of dance as bland, apolitical amusement. But tap is a uniquely American art precisely because it is infused with the country’s racial history, including the ugly parts.”