satire 
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/20/2023
Excerpts from a Civics Textbook I Assume Would be Welcome in Florida
by Alexandra Petri
"American history is full of many heroes, whose accomplishments we will have no problem telling you about in the state of Florida! They fought for justice, which was brave of them, if a little redundant, because there was no specific injustice to fight against."
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SOURCE: Slate
12/31/2022
What Happened to Pieing Powerful People in the Face?
by Rossi Anastopoulo
For three decades beginning in the 1970s, political groups used the time-honored comedy move as a way of humbling the powerful and (mostly) non-violently resisting bigotry. Why have public pieings nearly vanished?
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SOURCE: NPR
10/4/2022
The Writer of "The Onion" SCOTUS Brief Takes Parody Seriously
The satirical newspaper's brief employed the rhetorical mode to lay out the free speech implications of a case involving a man who faced retaliatory arrest for making a parody facebook account for his local police department.
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SOURCE: New York Daily News
2/24/2022
Weaponizing Accusations of Racism to Squash Political Criticism of China
by Jonathan Zimmerman
Two recent incidents show the dangers of allowing a foreign government to leverage college speech and bias codes to squelch criticism, and the need for administrators to understand the difference.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
8/11/2021
Did Cartoonist Billy Ireland Really Push the KKK out of Columbus, Ohio?
by Eliya Smith
Local lore held that Columbus Dispatch cartoonist Billy Ireland's merciless taunting of the KKK forced it to leave town in the 1920s. Could newspaper cartoons really do that?
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SOURCE: Washington Post
11/12/2020
The Great Knights of Donald Trump and their Quest for the Voter Fraud
by Alexandra Petri
The Washington Post's house satirist gets medieval on the voter fraud allegations.
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10/4/2020
Corrected American History: The Cheery Colonial Period
by Lawrence Baron
Peruse a leaked lesson plan from the 1776 commission.
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SOURCE: The Onion
9/24/2020
New Patriotic 1776 Commission Struggling To Find Ways To Improve Upon Education System’s Existing Propaganda
"Members of President Donald Trump’s new patriotic 1776 Commission struggled Wednesday to find ways to improve upon the education system’s existing propaganda."
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SOURCE: Mel Magazine
9/11/2020
An Oral History of the Onion's 9/11 Issue
The satirical newspaper The Onion struggled to find a way to apply its trademark irreverance to the 9/11 terror attacks. For fans, however, the issue of September 27, 2001 met the grief and anger of the day with humor.
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7/3/2020
This Independence Day, We Need a Patriotism Index
by Gregory D. Foster
We must now develop a long-overdue Patriotism Index to quantitatively distinguish real Americans from the many poseurs and potential enemies who lurk among us.
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11/17/19
Which Would You Prefer―Nuclear War or Climate Catastrophe?
by Lawrence Wittner
A satirical examination of the threats facing the world.
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11-4-17
Satire Is Changing. Have You Noticed?
by Matt Fotis
Satire no longer uses exaggeration. Now satirists just repeat what politicians actually say and people laugh!
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1-25-15
Satire, Tolerance, Humility, Terrorism, Islam -- And Charlie Hebdo
by Walter G. Moss
What are we supposed to make of it all?
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SOURCE: Special to HNN
6-2-13
Steve Hochstadt: Review of Lawrence S. Wittner's "What's Going On at UAardvark?" (Solidarity Press, 2013)
Steve Hochstadt teaches at Illinois College and blogs for HNN.What if the trend toward commercialization of higher education continued and accelerated? What would the fully commercial university look like? Lawrence Wittner presents UAardvark: every building named after a corporation; TV sets that can’t be turned off, broadcasting commercials in classrooms, dorms, and offices; and a president negotiating to store radioactive waste in the New Technology Center.Wittner taught history for thirty-six years at the State University of New York at Albany, and has widely published on peace movements and nuclear disarmament. His recent memoir, Working for Peace and Justice, identifies him as an activist intellectual; he serves on the national board of Peace Action. This is his first novel.
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SOURCE: The National Interest
3-22-13
Gordon N. Bardos: Marxists in the State Department
Gordon N. Bardos is a Balkan politics and security specialist based in New York. Don’t laugh—but maybe Joe McCarthy was on to something. And the problem might be even more serious than he realized. Stepping back from contemporary policy debates reveals that Marx’s materialist view of history and Lenin’s voluntarism have been the ideological basis for many of our imperial misadventures from the Balkans to the Mideast to Central Asia.Actual commies are probably not crawling Washington’s hallowed halls. But a very Marxist-Leninist understanding of human nature and historical change has nevertheless had a significant impact on U.S. foreign-policy making in recent decades. Some forty years ago, Walker Connor, one of the deans of the study of ethnic nationalism, had already observed (and decried) the ”propensity on the part of American statesmen and scholars of the post-World War II era to assume that economic considerations represent the determining force in human affairs.” This “unwarranted exaggeration of the influence of material factors” on the world is of course a direct outgrowth of Marx’s belief that existence determines consciousness....
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SOURCE: Time Magazine
2-10-13
New satire unleashes Hitler on modern, multi-cultural Germany
What would happen if Adolf Hitler woke up in modern-day Berlin to find that it was not occupied by Russian soldiers but instead by a vibrant, multicultural citizenry? This is the premise of the debut novel by German journalist Timur Vermes, Er Ist Wieder Da (He’s Back), which has topped Germany’s best-seller list.Narrated in the first-person by Hitler, the story follows the Führer as he awakens from a 66-year sleep in his bunker beneath Berlin to find an entirely changed Germany. In the celebrity-obsessed modern-day city, everyone assumes the fulminating leader of the Nazi party is a comedian in character — and soon he becomes a celebrity with a guest slot on a Turkish-born comedian’s TV show. His bigoted rants are interpreted as a satirical exposure of prejudice, leading him to decide to start his own political party....
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