Poor Bobby De Niro. He just can’t catch a break. Not even when he’s been a good boy.
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There’s been a story going around the past couple days, concerning yet another De Niro faux pas to pile atop all the others of recent years — if not decades. As the story goes, De Niro was booed off the stage while giving an address to a class of film school graduates (or alternately, a political rally) in Meredith’s Bay, Georgia. De Niro was said to have, as has become his habit, gone off into a disjointed, politically charged rant, proclaiming that “America is a lost cause,” “we must all stand up to the MAGA morons,” and that “the meaning of the American flag has lost its value of freedom,” and now stands for nothing more than Donald Trump and MAGA.
At that point, some members of the crowd (usually numbering at “about twenty”) are supposed to have started shouting that De Niro was a disgrace, that he couldn’t talk about the flag that way, and that his movies are trash. De Niro began shouting back at them, generating a verbal melee that ended, somehow, with him inviting them all to a No Kings protest he was hosting in NYC. He was then escorted offstage by security, cursing out the audience all the while.
Now, I’m not here to ruin anybody’s fun, but here’s the thing: this never happened. The source for this story was a Facebook satirical page called “America’s Last Line of Defense.” It’s an oddity, featuring only a short clip of pictures of De Niro with a soundtrack that sounds like the bass-and-drums style of the 90s, and a sidebar with a few lines of text. Clearly, not a lot of work went into this.
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All the same, a certain number of the naïve and gullible (I almost said “nitwits,” but I’m not mean like that) went for it, spreading it around that new development in human evolution and seat of global consciousness, the internet, in less time than it takes to type this period.
It’s said that the test of great satire lies in how many people think it’s true. That being the case, all hail America’s Last Line of Defense. But it’s also the latest of many lessons on not believing the first thing you see on the screen. God forbid that anybody should actually check before passing it on. (I mean, the page actually has “satire” in it’s web address.
As for De Niro, don’t be too disappointed. One thing you can make book on is that he’ll be back.
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Image: Joella Marano