by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service People Writer
Fascism is not just about the leaders who make policies and explain to the masses how they benefit from those policies even when they don’t. Especially when they don’t. It takes thousands and thousands of lower level functionaries the masses are never likely to have heard of to make fascism function. In its dysfunctional way. It’s kind of in the job title. This is one of their stories.
The Gooderthbadmannurz family has worked the Double 0 Nothin’ ranch in rural Oklaxas for six generations (five if you include Uncle Oswald’s experiment with emus). It was hard work. Honest work (if you don’t take Uncle Oswald’s experiment with emus into account, unlike the federal Department of Wildlife and Wild Life). The kind of work done by the salt of the Earth…or people who salt the Earth – in Ronald McDruhitmumpf’s Vesampucceri, it’s hard to know for sure.
Over the last five years, the Double 0 Nothing has suffered under a double whammy: on the one hand, Global Hot as Hellification has turned their primary crop into popcorn before it has been harvested; on the other hand, the fact that tariffs imposed on foreign goods and services have resulted in reciprocal tariffs on Vesampuccerian goods and services (by socialist bastard countries!) means that nobody outside the country is buying Vesampuccerian movie theatre snacks.
“It’s been rough,” Tanhauser Gooderthbadmannurz admitted. “Fer a couple a year’s, there, it felt like we wuz eatin’ mudpies five days a week!”
Despite tremendous pressure to sell the farm, Gooderthbadmannurz held onto it. “Big Agro thought they could get the Double 0 fer a song,” he chuckled mirthlessly. “But it was prog rock, and that don’t play in mah state!”
“To be fair,” stated Ned Enfeeblishment-Raye, Vice President External Affairs and Sumbitch Glares of MultiNatCorp (“We do exploitative agricultural stuff”), “the song was very popular in the 1970s. In any case, it would have been enough that Tanhauser would only have to have fed his family mudpie dinners three nights a week – four, tops.”
“If they had been offerin’ me them there Four Tops,” Gooderthbadmannurz retorted, “Things might have gone a mite different.”
As tempting as MultiNatCorp would like to think the offer was, Gooderthbadmannurz chose to take a different path: turning his ranch into a bot farm. “We extended thuh barn, installed stacks o’ computers in it and let ‘er rip!” he explained. “We had no more use fer cows and chickens and the like, so I figured there tweren’t no harm.”
The switch to bots hasn’t changed Gooderthbadmannurz’ routine all that much. He still gets up at dawn (thanks to the Rooster app on his phone which he doesn’t know how to change and is too proud to ask for help with, but still) and walks through the farm to see if any of his charges got up to anything “problematic” overnight. A couple of months earlier, for example, one of his bots hallucinated that it was the Queen of Spain and began demanding people’s heads be cut off.
“It kind o’ reminded me o’ Pooky, Mistress o’ the Dark, mah prize hen,” Gooderthbadmannurz chuckled. “Only, without thuh visit from that there FBI demandin’ ta know what thuh hell. Pooky sure earned her nickname!”
Part of Gooderthbadmannurz’ routine is to feed his bots four times a day on high calorie right wing outrage. “Gotta keep ’em nice and plump, nice and juicy,” Gooderthbadmannurz told me. “Asides, it’s a darn sight cheaper’n chicken feed!”
When a bot stops being productive (usually because left wing pundits have discovered that it isn’t one of them), Gooderthbadmannurz has to take it out back of the server and erase it from existence. “Any farmer’ll tell ya that cullin’ thuh herd is the worst part o’ thuh job,” he said. “Ever time, it just about kills me!”
On a happier note, Gooderthbadmannurz is proud of his polemicists, which have won the Double 0 many awards at tech fairs on the Deep, Dark Web, bots with names like @thefash&thefurious and @deepsixthedeepstate. They produce such nourishing nuggets as “Ronald McDruhitmumpf is the best president the world has ever known, and anybody who disagrees can suck a bag of dreidels!” and “Liberals die die die die die die!!!!!!”
He has also raised his share of stealth bots with names like @socialjusticeworrier and @berniebro4palestine. They post messages like: “I’ve voted Dumboprat my entire life, yeah, since I was four years old, hell in past lives, too, going back at least a thousand years, but I don’t like the way its drifting towards socialism, so this election cycle I’ll be voting for moderate Jill Wonsteinfordarhode!” and “As a lifelong Dum, I have been disenchanted with the way its drifting towards socialism. Is there an Independent in The House?”
Who buys Gooderthbadmannurz produce? A company called Vesamputech Ltd. Who is Vesamputech Ltd? You have to go through 27 shell companies to discover that it is a holding company owned by Vasily Inkydinkynov, a Fenwickian oligarch who is a close personal friend of Prime Minister Rupert Mountkilamanjoy.
How does it feel to rely on an enemy of Vesampucceri to keep your farm?
Gooderthbadmannurz shrugged and replied: “What kin ah say? It’s a family tradition!”