Conspiracy
Man Who Posted the 9/11 Smile Clip Smiled At His Own Father's Funeral
By Tah Foil, . BSN Network. Satire.
A video posted to X on Sunday evening shows New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez briefly making eye contact, smiling, and exchanging what lip-reading specialists retained by three separate conservative media outlets have independently characterized as the word "hey."
The clip, which carries the caption "PURE EVIL NO REMORSE AT 9/11 MEMORIAL," has been viewed 4.2 million times. The original poster, a man in Scottsdale, Arizona who goes by the handle PatriotWatchdog1776 and whose profile photo is him grinning at a Dave Matthews Band concert, has since clarified that he stands by his outrage.
CNN footage from the same ceremony, taken from a wider angle, shows the 1.4-second greeting was followed by both Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez returning their attention to the ceremony, standing in silence, heads bowed, for the next forty-seven minutes. This portion of the event has received approximately no views.
This reporter has watched the original clip 31 times at various playback speeds, including 0.25x, which is the speed at which a smile becomes philosophically terrifying, and can confirm that what occurs is a smile. Whether it is the wrong kind of smile is a question that now employs seven people at three different media companies.
Ashley Grimford, a body language expert who has appeared on Newsmax and whose website sells a course called "Read The Room: Detecting Liberal Deception In Public Spaces," told her 340,000 followers that the smile was "the kind of smile that says I do not feel what I am supposed to feel right now." She did not specify how she was feeling when she filmed her rebuttal from a Marriott pool deck in Tempe.
The clip's spread follows a pattern this reporter has documented across forty-three similar incidents going back to 2018, in which a short video of a recognizable politician doing something that human beings do, such as blinking, adjusting a jacket, or in one case drinking water in a way that seemed confident, is reposted with a caption asserting that the behavior reveals a secret that the mainstream media refuses to name.
In all forty-three cases, the mainstream media named it within four hours.
Mamdani's campaign issued a statement reading: "Zohran attended the ceremony, participated fully, and said hello to a colleague he recognized. We do not believe this requires further comment." The statement then ran to three more paragraphs, which is what happens when you say something does not require further comment and then provide further comment.
Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram: "I said hi to someone I know. I will not be elaborating." She then elaborated in a follow-up story, a pinned post, and a seven-minute video filmed in her kitchen.
PatriotWatchdog1776 was asked by this reporter whether he had ever smiled at a solemn occasion. After a 48-hour delay, he replied: "that's different." He did not say how.
Photographs from his public Facebook, which is not private, show him smiling at a Fourth of July barbecue held the same summer his father passed away, at what appears to be approximately the same wattage as the smile he found disqualifying.
He has not posted since this detail was included in a reply to his original thread.
The ceremony itself, which honored 2,977 people killed on September 11, 2001, concluded at 12:47 p.m. It was the twenty-third such ceremony. The names were read aloud. Bells were rung. Nobody has made a video about that part.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mamdani-aoc-laughing-911-ceremony/