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.”
