Republicans Vanish in Puffs of Smoke when called Evil

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—Democrats are rejoicing after the Republican population has shrunk by nearly two thirds because its opponents have discovered a technique for making the conservatives literally disappear.

Hugh Bloomfeld, the technique’s originator, recalls his Eureka moment. “My right-wing sister dragged me to a Donald Trump speech,” he said, “and I remember hearing all this xenophobia and crass jingoism. Trump was demagoguing and pandering like a politician’s supposed to, but he was doing much worse than that.” 

After the event, Bloomfeld went home and pondered what Trump and his supporters were saying. “Trump was, like, calling himself the best and hating on everyone else: everyone who wasn’t like him. And he wasn’t just hating with words. He was promising to annihilate everyone else, to crush and ruin them. Then it dawned on me. I thought, ‘Isn’t that just plain…evil?’”

Over Christmas dinner, Bloomfeld sat across from his conservative sister who was doomed to be the first victim of this revolutionary new weapon in the American culture war. “She was spouting the most awful bigotry,” Bloomfeld recalled, though tears. “She was blind to America’s many faults, heaping demonizations onto everyone else. It was so childishly narrow-minded, so nakedly callous and coarse and maniacal and egotistical and greedy and boorish and unfair and malicious and troglodytic and repulsive and inveterate and deranged and bellicose and obscene and hateful and cold-blooded and arrogant and narcissistic and immoral—I just broke down and said, ‘Stop it, Sally! You’re being evil.’”

Instantly, Sally Bloomfeld disappeared in a puff of smoke. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Hugh. “I thought it was some kind of twisted magic trick. But she was gone—just gone, like Rumpelstiltskin.”

News spread of Bloomfeld’s accidental discovery. While Bloomfeld hadn’t intended to send his hapless sister to some netherworld by calling her by her true name, liberals were quick to apply the technique in earnest. Entire Trump, Cruz, and other Tea Party rallies disappeared in billowing clouds of smoke, having been surrounded by liberals shouting 'You’re evil!’ into megaphones.

Claire Feminista attended one such anti-Republican incursion. “Some libertarian crackpot was on the stage,” she reminisced. “Some social Darwinian who was saying the sick and the poor should be left to die because that’s what ‘The Market’ wants. And the Tea Partiers were cheering like they were drunk on rage. We closed in with our megaphones. One by one the offenders disappeared into thin air. You couldn’t see them through the fog. Some of the evil ones tried to flee, but we hunted them down with our megaphones and applied the bald truth to their faces. They vanished too. We left none unidentified.”

Mengyao Zyu, physicist at Caltech, led a team of researchers to study the phenomenon. Describing his experiment, Zyu said, “We wanted to see whether the Republicans are somehow transformed into smoke or the smoke merely signals that they’d been teleported somewhere by the utterance of the magic word.”

Zyu’s team lured Fox-watching Republicans to his laboratory by offering them memorabilia signed by their favourite right-wing demagogue. “They came in droves,” he said. “We called them evil and at first nothing happened. My colleague, Marcus Wannabanger, noticed that the Republicans were fixated on the memorabilia. He asked one of the test subjects, an old blue collar fellow, to look him in the eyes for a moment. ‘Did you know that you’re flat-out evil?’ he asked him. And the old man vanished on the spot. So we determined that if you want them to disappear, you have to look them in the eyes when you call them what they are. 

“The smoke itself is mysterious,” he continued. “It issues forth in prodigious quantities. We had to clear the building after a mass truth-telling. We had a hundred subjects in there clamoring for Fiorina T-shirts, Sean Hannity pens, and George W. Bush mugs. We asked them to look at us and then we pointed out that their beliefs make them crazy evil. We were choking in the fog left by their departure from this plane of existence.”

The researchers went on to discover that because the abundant smoke nevertheless possesses less mass than the Republicans, the law of the conservation of mass dictates that the individuals aren’t turned into the smoke. “We don’t know where they go,” Zyu concedes. “What we do know is that many people are just glad they’re no longer here.”

When Republicans first learned of their vulnerability, many refused to believe it. Conservative pundits continued to appear on CNN and Fox News, defying their liberal counterparts to call them evil and maintaining that the rumor of their liability to be whisked away in such a fashion is a socialist conspiracy. Each of the true believers was never seen again. Curiously, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck were impervious to the truth-telling. Eventually, they admitted they had been acting as performers all along and had been “in it just to sell books,” as O’Reilly put it.

Donald Trump’s departure was an epic event. “My polls are higher than ever before,” he boasted at his last rally. “I apologize for nothing!”

“Yeah, that’s because you’re a straight-up evil clown,” shouted Todd Donahue, a Democrat who had sneaked into the rally. Mr. Trump vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving behind his peculiar hair on the stage. Trump’s buildings themselves also disappeared, leaving gaping holes in the New York cityscape. One architect responded, “Glad they’re gone. They were monstrosities too.”

According to political scientists, the hardcore Republicans were incapable of surviving the intervention precisely because they were what people were finally saying they were. “They can’t apologize or change their ways,” said one. “They’re too macho and their pride’s on the line. They couldn’t see the truth for themselves because they lived in the Fox News bubble. They hated everyone but themselves, they couldn’t empathize, so they couldn’t even pick up a book written by someone with an opposite viewpoint.”

Bewildered by the loss of their conservative heroes, some Republicans went on rampages, shooting up liberal areas of the country before police could bring their new weapon to bear. The officers merely applied the E-word and saved their bullets as well as the city the cost of imprisoning those who were evidently evil.

Other Republicans opted for a more underhanded stratagem, pretending to have converted to the more modern, liberal perspective. Frank Tankman, a lifelong conservative, piled his collection of firearms onto his lawn and dynamited them. “See?” he shouted to liberal onlookers. “I don’t love guns anymore. I love people. Give me a baby to hold! Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. I love everyone equally. I’m one of you liberal do-gooders now.”

A child, Sarah Toddle, was the first to spy the machinegun tucked beneath his shirt. Sarah’s mother reported that her daughter tugged on her dress, pointed to the concealed gun and asked, “Is he still evil, Mommy?”

“Only one way to find out,” Mrs. Toddle answered.

Asked why he was still carrying the flashy, over-killing firearm, Mr. Tankman answered, “Just for squirrels and varmints and such.” The crowd challenged him, accusing him of belonging to the same sort of death cult as the jihadist terrorists. “I don’t love death and destruction,” he hollered. “Well, maybe when the End Times come it will be pretty sweet. I mean, it will be just like in the movies: cities on fire, the godless masses on their knees, ravaged by demons.”

When Mr. Tankman began drooling in anticipation, Mrs. Toddle nodded at Sarah and encouraged her to call the man by his true name. “You’re an evil scallywag,” said Sarah to his face, drawing the appellation from her favourite picture book. Frank Tankman dematerialized, the smoke settling like fog in the twilight.

Democrats now easily win their elections in what remains a two-party system, but there are indications that the millions of eligible Americans who don’t vote expect the unrivalled Democrats to succumb to the temptation of forming a tyranny. “When that happens,” says one who is religious in his nonvoting, “we’ll be ready with the truth-telling E-word.”

Sole Survivor of a Flurry of Mass Shootings Opposes Firearms Regulation

Even as the rate of all other gun-related crimes had been decreasing in the United States for decades, the rate of mass shootings had steadily increased as gun show loopholes were found to circumvent bans on assault rifles, mental health centers were defunded by the government, and the NRA captured both political parties. Experts on television declared that the solution to massacres in movie theaters was to add more guns to theaters; to slaughters in malls, it was to add more guns to malls; and to school shootings, it was to add more guns to schools. Soon enough, the United States was overflowing with guns.

And Americans were angry, very angry, because their political system was corrupt and unresponsive to the plight of the middle class and the poor. Both parties had catered to the wealthy business elites in exchange for their campaign contributions and for cushy jobs in the private sector. The combination of mass resentment and rage together with millions upon millions of state-of-the-art firearms boded ill for the nation’s survival.

In 2017, Texas alone sustained 362 mass shootings. The survivors fled the state, leaving it barren, but there was no escape. New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and all the other southern states erupted in gunfire as the mentally deranged, the marginalized, and the dispossessed as well as the jihadist terrorists vented their frustrations by spraying bullets in crowded places. Militarized police forces were deployed and demonized by fear-mongering right-wingers who awaited the prophesied End of Days. Militias went to war against the police, eventually leaving the southern states desolate and bereft of human inhabitants.

Liberal lawmakers took the loss of the southern half of their country as an opportunity to push for mild gun control laws, but they were ousted from office by NRA-backed candidates who merely had to call the liberals “communists” to win popular support even as the voters were cut down by hooligans’ gunfire soon after they left the U.S. Capitol.

Again, the survivors fled to the north, but the northerners found they had to arm themselves or be shot to pieces by the traumatized southerners. Through 2019 the mass shootings continued and looked increasingly like a civil war.

By 2020, the U.S. population dropped to around 100,000 proud, patriotic Americans.

Before the government fell, Congress again debated whether to regulate the shrunken gun industry that was still pumping out firearms and selling them to the beleaguered remnants of American civilization. Congress decided against halting the nation’s impending collapse, insisting that the Founders had been rabid anarchists who intended for the country to resemble not fattened, spoiled Middle America but something like the Wild West which had truly been the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As one Republican representative said, “The Founding Fathers upheld everyone’s right to bear arms for the purpose of stocking a militia. A militia has to be powerful enough to take down the government if the government should fail to uphold the law. Therefore, every American citizen has the right to carry even weapons of mass destruction to keep the government in check.”

Cosmopolitan Americans abroad rushed home to attempt to salvage their nation, but were picked off by gunfire soon after they stepped off the tarmac.

Canada and Mexico, too, moved into American territory and were promptly blasted en masse by Americans boasting the latest in military hardware. Thereafter, foreigners kept their distance.

When survivors in Montana realized that the government had neglected in their last firearms bill to allow for the sale of newly-designed magazines capable of carrying 400 rounds of ammunition, they nuked Washington D.C., rendering the country lawless.

In 2021, after a series of further mass shootings, there were only twelve Americans left alive. Six of the survivors engaged in a Mexican standoff over a dispute about who spilled beer on the shoe of whom. All six pulled their triggers and died in a hail of bullets.

The remaining five Americans deemed it wise to spread themselves out across the land to keep alive the American Dream. One, however, Howard Derringer, was mentally ill and hunted down the others, executing them with an assortment of submachine guns until only two Americans remained: Derringer and a former bus driver named Mark McEwan.

Before Derringer could locate and shoot McEwan, Derringer succumbed to an unknown ailment in 2023.

Mark McEwan was the sole survivor of American freedom. A peaceable man, McEwan allowed foreigners to observe his actions without launching a crazed assault on them.

He spent the bulk of his time agonizing over whether to impose restrictions on the use of firearms. One day, standing before a mirror, he gave a speech to himself.

“I speak to you today as president of this great nation,” he said, “having just voted for myself last week. I speak to you also as someone who is terribly thirsty. There’s no water for miles. Aside from that, I feel it’s incumbent on me to take up the issue of arms control. There’s no NRA anymore, so passing a ban on assault rifles would be feasible. I could throw all the long guns I see into a river. 

“But as the last American, I also feel I have a duty to honour the American spirit. For that reason, I’ve decided not to control the use of firearms. Instead, I’ll shoot this sonuvabitch, blowing my brains out with a Colt M4 carbine. Let the blessed guns inherit the earth.”

With the loss of Mark McEwan and of the United States, China became the world’s largest gun manufacturer. In 2025, China annexed what had hitherto been the American heartland, honouring those previous generations of brave American souls who had eked out a living under the constant threat of being shot like a Third World dog in the streets, by turning that territory into a giant gun manufacturing facility.