【2020 Archives】

If Fox News' latest report020 Archivesto be believed, Seattle's peaceful Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is roiling with infighting among the activists who have made it a police-free zone.

Of course, as with so many things Fox News, it is not to be believed. In what appears to be a clip from Friday night's broadcast, a reporter with the channel shows a screenshot of a now-deleted Reddit post that purportedly demonstrates the absurdist level of disagreement in the ranks of those protesting police violence in Seattle. There's just one problem: It's actually a joke, lifted almost verbatim from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

"There's infighting among some of the occupiers, and some signs of rebellion against Raz Simone — who we introduced you to here on the story last night," intoned the Fox News anchor. "One posting on social media that has now been deleted, read this: 'I didn't vote for Raz. I thought we were an autonomous collective? An anarcho-syndicalist commune at the least.'"

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The post includes language used in a famous scene in the 1975 cult favorite. Specifically, it's when King Arthur engages with a mud-farming peasant about various forms of government.

The character, Dennis, explains to the dumbfounded king that he and his cohorts have established their own form of governance, thank you very much.

"We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of purely external affairs," explains Dennis.

A screenshot of the Reddit post, broadcast on Fox News and included in the above embedded clip, shows sentences that are almost word-for-word identical to those spoken by Dennis.

Understandably, Twitter users got the joke — even if Fox News didn't.

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But by now we should be used to Fox News not getting the joke — or much of anything else, really.

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