A bumbling group of patriot movement and anti-federal-government torch bearers takes over a remote and empty public building with a gift shop, vowing to defend the space with their lives. Some post rambling, earnest goodbye videos to YouTube; one such message, published on Jan. 3 warns that Daddy is off defending the Constitution and may not be home for Christmas. Speaking to the press, an organizer wearing a camouflage jacket said, “There’s nobody in camouflage,” before correcting himself, adding, “well, other than my jacket.” They run low on snacks the first day.

Those right-wing extremists took over the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, near Burns, Oregon, on Saturday night. By Sunday morning, the comedy was crystallized on Twitter with a trending hashtag, #YallQaeda. #Yeehawd followed suit, then #VanillaISIS.

Redneck terrorism makes for easy comedic material. “Oregon militiamen are willing to be martyred for their cause. And if they die, they will receive 72 cousins in the afterlife,” read one popular tweet. “Next thing you know, Shania Law,” another said. Mocking the laughable is well and good. But too often, the liberal and left response to conservative extremism is confined to derision, as if it were enough to be on the right side of the joke to be on the right side of politics and history.

The presidency of George W. Bush should have been an unforgettable lesson in the limits of laughing. He needed no comedic skewering because he was a walking punchline and a reliable buffoon. A cottage industry of comedy detritus, not to mention Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s careers, was sustained by mocking Bush. And for good reason. Liberals could come together in a vast act of identity affirmation, lacking all force or content beyond deriding that moron in the White House.

Now we have entered a year in which Donald Trump will pin the political fulcrum with his rabid racism and rampant misinformation — meme-worthy face and hair be damned. Clowns such as Bush and Trump are certainly worthy of ridicule, but laughing at them doesn’t undermine their political influence.

The idea that satire from the left can serve as a bulwark against far-right ideas is provably false. #YallQaeda tweets might be some harmless fun, but liberal laughing along deserves no great celebration on its own merits.

For one thing, occupying government property, armed or otherwise, is not a risible political act per se. The Oregon protesters’ demand that federal ownership of land be relinquished to the public wouldn’t seem too reprehensible if we didn’t know the patriot movement to be informed by racism and conspiracy-theory-drenched paranoia that believes welfare provisions to be the utmost tyranny. However, given the current state of deadly racism in this country, it’s clear that the well-worn political tactic of armed occupation is reserved for the white man. Black children get shot for holding toy guns; white men can stage an armed siege without intervention. And that’s not funny. In 1967 a group of 30 Black Panthers garnered crucial national media attention by entering the California Capitol with shotguns pointed skyward. When Native American activists occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969, they were eventually forcibly removed by the government, after a series of suspicious fires and having their electricity cut off, but they held the island for 19 months. I can’t help thinking that today that would mean certain death by police bullet for a black or brown person.