Nothing funny here, guys

GOING VIRAL for all the wrong reasons, and sealing their immediate futures in a moment of infamy, a group of boys or young men— we don’t know which—from Kentucky found out what happens when you take a dumb and offensive photo and put it on social media.

As the expression goes: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

In question is an abhorrent photograph showing seven boys/young men wearing “Team Mitch” shirts groping, choking and kissing a cardboard cutout of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), dubbed AOC by her millennial fans across the country.

One or more of the featured few posted this photograph on Instagram. And it didn’t take long until the distasteful photograph generated backlash. It seems the guy who posted the picture took it down, but you know how social media posts are. Screenshots and copies of the deleted photo are making their way across the Internet even now. And these boys are in a peck of trouble.

Their faces are clearly shown in the image, and it didn’t take long for others to identify them on Twitter. This is the kind of quick mistake that will likely follow them for quite some time—through college and job applications and then some. It’s just another in the sea of endless examples of how people need to be careful what they put on social media in 2019.

Whatever disagreements these boys may have with AOC’s policies, it is absolutely baffling that they thought this was okay in today’s climate, or even yesterday’s. Hey, guys, Google “Al Franken.”

Hopefully these boys/young men are capable of shame, and they’ll reform the way they do things, even if they can’t reform the way they think. They might even grow up and become respectable men who know it’s absolutely not acceptable to choke or grope women, even card-board cut-outs of women.

On second thought, let’s not refer to them as boys/young men. They’re boys until they learn that grownups don’t act this way.