Is This the Most Subversive Sketch of 2023?

Patriot Front is the visual manifestation of White Nationalism on the rise in America.

Or it’s a body composed of masked federal agents propping up the Biden administration’s narrative on the subject.

The former is embraced by virtually all media outlets, the same ones that told us the Hunter Biden laptop wasn’t real and Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election.

The latter holds true for some conservatives who seethe when Tucker Carlson reveals FBI undercover agents were at the Jan. 6 riot and remember how the FBI ignored videos of an “insurrectionist” cheering on violence.

The truth, as it too often does in 2023, lingers somewhere in between. That leaves enough wriggle room for satire.

Free the People couldn’t agree more.

The organization formed in 2016 to “turn on the next generation to the values of personal liberty and peaceful cooperation” in ways both engaging and fun. The group recently began a comedy video series that dive directly into culture war battles.

The group’s first video follows cops interrogating an unconventional murder suspect.

The short plays into pronoun confusion, Identity Politics and more, and it does so without being mean spirited, just playful.

Its latest comic blast under the “Comedy Is Murder” banner cuts much deeper. You’d never see it on “Saturday Night Live,” of course, nor would any mainstream performer go near it.

Free the People charged full speed ahead with its latest satirical video, co-starring sketch veteran Lou Perez.

YouTube Video

We watch auditions for the next Patriot Front “psyops” gathering, spoofing both the media’s narrative on the subject as well as Theater 101. It’s a daring clip, no doubt, and one that starts with the heated accusation that the neo-Nazi group is more stagecraft than threat.

The clip’s biggest laugh? A genuine racist tries out for the production but ends up getting cut. The actors proved superior at shouting racist, hateful language, apparently.

Satire thrives with a kernel of truth behind it. And that’s where the subject here gets even thornier.

Last year, 31 members of the group got arrested at a Pride event on charges of “conspiracy to riot.” A Fox affiliate tried to interview one of the members, without luck. 

The group still attracts naysayers. Some simply no longer trust the media while others feel similarly toward groups like the FBI.

Joe Rogan and guest Matt Taibbi mocked Patriot Front earlier this year, recalling the kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that involved more FBI agents than actual kidnappers.

In June, a federal judge ordered the two remaining defendants to stand again for a retrial, but the collapse of the prosecution of the Whitmer defendants is one of the biggest public embarrassments for the FBI’s counterterrorism and informant programs since 9/11. The Whitmer case is more than just a high-profile embarrassment. It’s a window into the FBI’s decadeslong strategy, born of powers granted to fight the war on terror, of pursuing criminal investigations against hypothetical criminal acts that may never be committed based on evidence that amounts to little more than fringe political or ideological speech.

Some, like contrarian Scott Adams, say we’re not given enough information to trust the institutions at play when it comes to Patriot Front.

In Adams’ defense, it wouldn’t be the first fake hate group ordered up for political purposes.

The Lincoln Project has confirmed it was behind a political stunt in which five members posed as white supremacists carrying tiki torches at a campaign stop for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, in Charlottesville ahead of election day next week.

The post Is This the Most Subversive Sketch of 2023? first appeared on Hollywood in Toto.

The post Is This the Most Subversive Sketch of 2023? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.