Satire

The Fourth of July is nothing to celebrate

As a resident of the UK I knew very little of the Fourth of July until very recently when I read an article in Salon about it. For my fellow Brits, here’s a short summary of why the US celebrates Independence Day based on what I’ve learned from reading mainstream publications and watching a few historical movies...In the 1400s an Italian man named Columbo (no relation to Peter Falk) set out to discover America, but he ended up landing at The Bahamas instead and spent the next several years discovering its exotic beaches, aquariums, and bustling nightlife before dying of scurvy or something.

fourth july godfrey

Conservative snowflake Andy Ngo can’t handle a peaceful beating

Right-wing possible Nazi collaborator (I have no real evidence of this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was) Andy Ngo was ‘attacked’ at the Portland rally on Saturday. For those unaware, Andy Ngo is a so-called ‘journalist’ who is apparently well-known for aggravating situations by attending political events armed with his fascist GoPro camera and ‘reporting’ what happens. Now, if this isn’t an act of right-wing terrorism, I do not know what is. Mr Ngo supposedly sustained ‘injuries’ after a small group of around 25 or so noble Antifa comrades bravely surrounded him and peacefully protested by throwing objects at his head. The subsequent outcry from the alt-right has been depressingly predictable.

Louis C.K. is still not OK

Like Kath Barbadoro, I am incandescent with rage that Louis C.K. is getting on with his life and continuing his career despite the fact he did things that were completely abhorrent, acknowledged them when called out, apologized for them, had a movie and several lucrative shows canceled and didn’t work for around eight months. None of this should let him off the hook. He should not be able to just return to a career he is good at. In her article, Kath writes: 'When he disappeared from the public eye, his defenders and fans wondered if his career was over. Then he began popping up on stages around New York City less than a year later.

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Mark Field: the Handmaid’s Tale becomes reality

On Thursday night in London, dozens of brave Greenpeace climate change activists infiltrated a posh dinner for toffs in order to draw attention to evil weather. Instead of listening to their howls of distress at the destruction of the planet, the political elite chose to carry on with their meal which I have no doubt included a plate of ‘Clubbed Baby Seal avec Strangled Fox Cub Tears’.

mark field

Fellow men: it’s really not that difficult to respect women

Guess how many women I sexually assaulted yesterday? Zero. You see, it's really not that difficult. I steadfastly refuse to rape a woman or kill a black person; despite the fact I am a straight white male. By being vocal about this I hope to encourage other straight white men to follow my example. Respecting women is a full-time job if you’re a privileged white man (n.b. all white men are privileged by default), but I am living proof that it is possible. Every white man on the planet is guilty of horrendous abuse, even if he believes otherwise (apart from myself of course). I aim to change this. Every day I strive to recognize my own masculine toxicity and male arrogance. I rise above the urge to mansplain.

respect women

My terrifying journey into the dark heart of far right comedy

If you find yourself laughing at stand-up comedy, it probably isn’t sufficiently progressive. This is why I’ve been so disturbed lately to hear about Comedy Unleashed, a popular monthly event in London that claims to oppose censorship and promote ‘free-thinking’ comedians. As anyone who cares about social justice knows, concepts such as ‘free thought’ and ‘free speech’ are typical racist dog whistles of the far right. To confirm what I had already decided, I went undercover to infiltrate this den of crypto-fascism with my good friend Yohann Koshy, whose devastating account of the goings-on at the club has since been published by the online magazine VICE.

far right comedy

Trump is not the UK’s president

At approximately 8:30am on Monday morning I awoke in a cold sweat. My alarm was not set to go off until 1:30pm. What had disturbed my sleep? Something felt wrong, like an unseen force of evil was spreading its insidious influence across the land. I was confused, nauseous. Waves of anxiety were crashing against the shores of my usual stoic calm. I sat up in bed, straightened my man bun and resolved to find the source of this malevolent aura. I grabbed my phone from my bedside table and opened the Twitter app. Almost immediately, my eyes were drawn towards a news article, the headline of which made me almost vomit into my mouth: ‘Donald Trump has landed in the UK’. Of course.

donald trump jarvis dupont

Daenerys did nothing wrong

YASSSSS! SLAY KWEEEN! [insert several hand clap emojis here] After a two-week break at a Tantric Orgasmic Virtue Eco Retreat in the Yukon, I finally got around to watching Season 8 of Game of Thrones. I had heard that people were disappointed at how it ended to the point of creating a petition to change the results very much like Brexit, and I have to say, I was not in the least bit disappointed at not being disappointed. One thing that confused me however, was the way that many influential social justice bloggers were angry at how the character of Daenerys was portrayed. They accused the show of falling into the sexist trope of a woman being mad and hysterical, claiming that the writers had ‘failed women’. In my opinion that could not have been further from the truth.

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Here comes the sun

From our UK edition

When you see the opening caption ‘4.6 billion years ago’, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re watching a programme presented by Professor Brian Cox. And so it proved again this week, as his latest exploration of the solar system began on BBC2, with an episode about Mercury and Venus. Being an officially designated ‘landmark’ series, The Planets (Tuesday) has many of the features you’d expect: lush music, an impressive CGI budget, a ten-minute behind-the-scenes segment at the end. More surprising is Cox’s willingness to anthropomorphise the planets — and to regard the ones that aren’t lucky enough to be Earth with a touching level of sympathy. After all, it’s not their fault they’re so lifeless.

A milkshake a day keeps the fascists at bay

Yesterday a hero appeared in our midst. A valiant warrior armed only with a cold milk beverage. Not since the Normandy Landings have I seen such bravery against an impending Nazi invasion. Over here in the UK we have our own version of Donald Trump. His name is Nigel Farage. Like Trump he is a hideous Nazi, Hitler incarnate. A walking harbinger of xenophobic hatred, spewing fascism and racism. He is the cause of Britain’s pain and division. He was the one who decided that we should hold a referendum on whether to leave the glorious EU. It’s the mark of a typical fascist authoritarian to inflict democracy upon the ignorant masses. The result of that hateful vote has split our once tolerant and peaceful country in two.

milkshake godfrey elfwick

No #SexStrike please, we’re intersectional feminists

Alyssa Milano is a Hollywood actress, singer and activist, perhaps best known for her roles in box-office hits such as Embrace of the Vampire, Dinotopia: Quest for the Ruby Sunstone, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2. On Saturday, Alyssa posted the following call to arms from her 3.5million follower Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/1127040792281767936 She was applauded and supported by the pro-choice movement, and by feminists and feminist allies from all over the media. On the face of it, you might think she was being incredibly brave and progressive. But let me tell you...

sexstrike godfrey elfwick alyssa milano

An interracial couple have birthed a mixed-race youngling

Over the past few hours I’ve been forced to endure the ignorance of regressive ‘logic’ on the television, in newspapers, magazines and across social media platforms: ‘Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have had a baby boy!’ If I went into detail about how many ways that sentence is incorrect, I’d need to write a novel the length of which would rival Tolstoy’s War and Peace. For the more progressive thinkers out there, no explanation is necessary and so this article is for you alone. Anyone who believes that men have penises and womyn have vaginas should close this browser window, leave their house, travel to the nearest coastal town and throw themselves into the sea.

royal baby godfrey elfwick

Brace yourself Donny, spoilers are coming

Ever since that agonizing day on November 8 in 2016, Donald Trump’s Twitter feed has been dark, and full of errors. His Lannister-blonde hair glinting in his avi as his tiny fingers mercilessly excrete torrents of egomaniacal tweets, like an illiterate Cersei drunk with power. Well, no more. This will not continue. Last November, Trump made the fatal mistake of revealing himself to be a Game of Thrones fan by posting a meme, a commitment he reaffirmed in January and April. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1058388700617498625 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1081735898679701505 https://twitter.

godfrey elfwick spoilers

My day: Joe Biden

I’m running. Yes, I’m really running. One more time. Just not too fast, because at my time in life you don’t want to trip and bust your new knees. I’m a pretty damned good athlete. Young people like Bernie Sanders can take it slow in the carpool lane, but I’m running, because this is a battle for the soul of this nation. We can’t let old men like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris steal our future. I wish we were in high school — I could take him behind the gym. You know, I’d like to take both of them behind the gym. That’s what I wish. My days have never been busier. The first thing I do in the morning is check if my teeth are clean. They are, because they’ve spent the night in a glass by my bed. I get up, do some light stretching, and take a shower.

my day joe biden
matilda olofsson

My name is Matilda Olofsson and I am Greta Thunberg’s arch-nemesis

Greta Thunberg first came to my attention one Friday after I had spent the final hour of school putting cling-film over every toilet seat so that the following Monday, students and teachers would find themselves in a horrible mess when it came to do potty-time. The next week however, Greta encouraged the other children to join her in a strike, the purpose of which was to demand the Swedish government take steps to reduce carbon emissions. While this was going on, the school caretaker discovered my plan, and undid all my hard work. Curses. I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for Greta and that pesky janitor. From that day, I swore revenge.

Greta Thunberg, a modern-day Cassandra

Listening to Greta Thunberg, an articulate 16-year-old girl who feels passionately about climate change issues, I am astounded that our political leaders have not yet taken steps to relocate the entire human race to Mars. She makes it very clear that unless we all drastically change our ways, the world as we know it will end in the next two or three years. I for one, believe her. Americans may not be aware of Greta yet, even though she’s listed on the 2019 TIME 100 but it is imperative that we help this modern-day Swedish Cassandra to spread the word of our impending doom as far as possible. I spent the bank holiday Easter weekend digging a hole in my garden in order to install an underground bunker.

greta thunberg

I embrace my White Guilt, and so should you

As a child, I was horrifyingly oblivious to what it meant to be a white male. I ignorantly assumed that skin color should never be an issue. I went around treating everyone the same regardless of gender or race. I look back on those days now and cringe. Thank goodness I ‘woke up’ so to speak! I was lucky to grow up on a moderately large 20,000-acre estate in a 23-bedroom Georgian house which had been in my family for at least six hundred years. For the first few years of my life, I was blissfully unaware of my standing within society. This glorious childhood utopia did not last long. At the tender age of 12, I watched a film which put it all into perspective: Ratatouille. I remember the impact this movie had on me as if it were yesterday. My mind was awash with confusion.

white guilt

Twitting the twits

From our UK edition

Titania McGrath is the alter ego of the schoolteacher Andrew Doyle. A perpetually enraged ‘activist, healer and radical intersectional poet’, her job was to lampoon the imbecilities of the achingly ‘woke’ middle class left, and expose the manifest contradictions in what they were spouting. Her forum for this was, of course, that vast lagoon of hastily jabbered nonsense, Twitter — and it was very effective. So effective that for a while Twitter users could not be sure that it was a joke at all — an understandable confusion, given the real-life existence of people such as the journalists Laurie Penny and Suzanne Moore, for example, or the French academic Myriam François-Cerrah.

Jack Dorsey opened my eyes to Vipassanā

For my birthday this year, I took inspiration from Jack Dorsey’s enlightening experience and answered an advert on Craigslist for a 10-day deluxe Vipassanā retreat. Here is my diary documenting the experience... I called the number on the advert and was put through to ‘Graham’. I told him I was enquiring about the advert and asked where the retreat was based. ‘Doncaster, not far from Sheffield,’ he told me, and informed me that the train tickets were not included in order to give me an enhanced poverty-stricken experience. I booked my ticket for Doncaster that very night and went to sleep in anticipation of the gloriously spiritual awakening that lay ahead.

Vipassanā

Fortnite should be banned, I agree with Prince Harry

This week, Prince Harry called for the popular game Fortnite to be banned, saying: ‘That game shouldn't be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household? It’s created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It’s so irresponsible.’ I could not agree with him more. These days children spend far too much time indoors, playing on their video games consoles and other electronic what-have-yous. Very often, I hear the argument ‘But many kids come from backgrounds where the internet and video games are the most easily-accessible way for them to socially engage with other like-minded young people.’ What utter rot!

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