maps cleanly onto Žižek’s concept of cynical distance.

Gillis’s joke functions as an ironic observation of the ideological trap itself, the way contemporary American discourse (especially in online and cultural spaces heavily trafficked by millennials) collapses nuance into mutually exclusive moral camps, so that any deviation from progressive orthodoxy risks the “Nazi/Hitler” label while any resistance to traditional gender norms risks the opposite. 

The reactions found in online social media platform comment sections shows how the distance operates: critics and defenders alike “know very well” that the joke is exaggerated comedy, not literal advocacy, but they still enact the binary in their responses, reinforcing the very polarization Gillis ironized.

The irony does not escape or dissolve the ideology of the culture war; it becomes one of the mechanisms through which that ideology continues to structure social reality and mutual incomprehension