On Wednesday, the New York Times ran an op-ed from Republican Sen. Tom Cotton so dangerous (and dishonest) that several of the paper’s own writers and editors unified in decrying it. Cotton’s piece, “Send In The Troops,” not only calls for military incursion into American cities but also “an overwhelming show of force” to help “restore order.” That the piece was published on the eve on the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre hammered home its cruelty that much more.
In response, Times opinion and newsroom writers tweeted out the article’s headline with a caption: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”
As journalists and critics debated the ethics of a major newspaper running a piece calling for violence against U.S. citizens, others sought. to dunk on the paper’s increasingly fruitless both-sidesism by mocking up some op-eds of their own—beginning with one from “The Tank” in the famous Tiananmen Square Tank Man photo.
Others followed, adopting the evil perspectives of evil people both real and imagined:
Perhaps the best, though, is the below repurposing of the infamous Navy Seal copypasta, which doubles as a pitch-perfect distillation of the op-ed’s I’m-a-big-boy bluster.
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