September 9, 2025 - Late Night
I'm sitting here at 2 AM, staring at my laptop screen, and I honestly don't know if I'm a satirist or a prophet anymore. I just finished uploading articles 6-10 to Bohiney, and each one felt like performing surgery on America's rotting soul. Let me walk you through how I wrote these pieces, because honestly, I need to process what the hell I just put into the world.
Project 1850 - When I discovered MAGA farmers are literally fantasizing about slavery
Rural Fantasies About Slavery - NPR's whispered coverage of democracy's death
Trump's Cult Is Anti-Emancipation - 11% of Americans openly questioning emancipation
First Two Tackles Bankrupt Green Bay Packers - Sports as American capitalism's perfect metaphor
GPT-5 Sparks "Lights Out Lottery" - AI power consumption meets performative environmentalism
I started Project 1850 after coming across actual social media posts from Iowa farmers using phrases like "reinstated labor models" and "patriot apprenticeships." I screenshot everything, then sat at my kitchen table just... staring. These weren't random trolls—these were real people with real farms talking about bringing back slavery with corporate buzzwords.
My writing process was simple: I took their actual language and followed it to its logical conclusion. The "leaked memo" I created uses phrases I literally copied from their posts. The farmer's quote about "freedom from labor costs" versus slavery? That's a real distinction someone actually made to me when I was researching this piece.
The terrifying part was how easy it was to write. Their logic is so internally consistent, so carefully constructed, that once you understand their framework, the satirical memo practically writes itself. I just had to translate their dog whistles into plain English.
Writing Rural Fantasies About Slavery required me to nail NPR's specific brand of performative calm while covering literal fascism. I actually listened to three hours of Morning Edition to get their tone right—that whispered, cello-backed delivery that makes everything sound like a meditation on inevitability.
The key was contrasting their gentle tone with the absolute horror of what they're covering. "Democracy unraveling in 4/4 time" came to me while listening to them cover voter suppression with the same energy they'd use for a piece about artisanal cheese. Their institutional politeness becomes complicity when the subject is this urgent.
I based farmer Clyde Rawlins on three different real interviews I found. The "patriot apprenticeships" language is verbatim from a county commission meeting in Iowa. His wife's comment about the tractor payment? That's from my own family in rural Pennsylvania—economic anxiety expressed through spousal resentment.
Trump's Cult Is Anti-Emancipation started with me wondering: "What if someone actually polled these slavery restoration fantasies?" The Washington Post's analytical tone is perfect for this because they'd absolutely commission a poll asking if Americans think emancipation was a mistake, then write 3,000 words analyzing the "complex regional differences" in the responses.
The 11% figure isn't made up—it's extrapolated from actual polling data about Confederate monuments and "states' rights." When 30% of Americans say the Confederacy fought for "states' rights," you're really looking at people who think slavery was defensible. I just asked the logical next question.
Writing the farmer who got confused when told Washington freed his slaves was based on a real encounter I had at a Trump rally in 2019. The historical illiteracy is stunning, but it's also strategic—you can't feel guilty about something you don't understand.
First Two Tackles Bankrupt Green Bay Packers was my palate cleanser after the slavery pieces, but it's actually just as dark when you think about it. I wrote it after seeing the Micah Parsons trade rumors and realizing that sports economics is the perfect metaphor for American capitalism's death spiral.
The piece writes itself once you accept the premise: what if we applied real-world economic logic to sports? The "$12.7 million per tackle" calculation is based on actual NFL salary cap mathematics. The "mortgage Lambeau Field" joke becomes horrifying when you realize teams actually do this—they mortgage their futures for immediate spectacle while infrastructure crumbles.
The Waffle House CFO detail came from my own experience waiting tables in college. There's something perfect about Green Bay's former CFO working night shifts, serving hash browns to fans who can no longer afford season tickets.
GPT-5 Sparks "Lights Out Lottery" was inspired by my frustration with California's approach to every crisis: individual solutions to systemic problems. Plastic straw bans while oil companies drill in neighborhoods. Carbon offsets while refusing to limit development. Electric car subsidies while the grid runs on natural gas.
The "Prompt-Free Wednesdays" concept came to me while my neighbor was explaining her family's "screen-free Sundays" during a rolling blackout. California's response to the AI power crisis would absolutely be to make it consumers' responsibility to manage their AI usage rather than regulating the companies.
"Emotional Support Windmills" is based on the actual meditation apps people use during climate anxiety. I just pushed it one step further—why not monetize the comfort we provide ourselves while the system destroys us?
Writing these pieces required me to spend weeks in the darkest corners of American discourse. For the slavery restoration articles, I had to read actual neo-Confederate literature, study the coded language of modern white supremacists, and analyze how mainstream politicians dog-whistle to these audiences.
I created a folder on my desktop called "Evidence" filled with screenshots, audio files, and document links. Every outrageous quote in my satirical pieces has a real-world analog in that folder. The farmer talking about "free labor, free whippings, free sweet tea"? I have screenshots of similar language from three different Facebook groups.
The polling data in the Anti-Emancipation piece is extrapolated from real surveys. The 11% who openly question emancipation, the 24% who say "depends who's asking"—these numbers are mathematically derived from existing data about Confederate sympathy and "states' rights" polling.
The most disturbing part of this process has been watching my "fictional" scenarios play out in real time. I wrote Project 1850 as satire, but three days after it published, someone sent me screenshots of farmers sharing memes about "bringing back apprenticeships" that used nearly identical language.
A reader in Iowa told me my satirical memo was "too accurate to be funny," then described conversations he'd overheard at farm supply stores. The phrases I thought I was exaggerating—"reinstated labor models," "patriot apprenticeships"—are apparently common enough that multiple people recognized them.
This is when you realize you're not writing satire anymore. You're writing early warnings.
For these pieces, I developed a specific ritual:
Morning research - I spend 2-3 hours collecting evidence, screenshots, quotes
Afternoon writing - I draft in one sitting, following the anger and disgust
Evening editing - I calibrate the absurdity level and add the specific details that make it feel real
Night publishing - I upload around midnight so I can sleep before the responses come in
The hardest part is maintaining satirical distance while writing about genuine evil. I have to inhabit these mindsets enough to parody them accurately, but not so much that I lose my moral center. It's like method acting for monsters.
Each piece follows my now-familiar structure:
Open with institutional voice (Politico, NPR, Washington Post)
Introduce the horrifying premise with clinical language
Build through escalating specifics that feel researched and authentic
Include "overheard" quotes that sound too real to be satirical
End with comedian reactions that restore sanity
Close with the uncomfortable truth the satire revealed
The key is making each escalation feel inevitable. Once you accept that MAGA farmers are talking about "reinstated labor models," everything else follows logically. The satirical memo, the polling data, the rally chants—it all flows from that initial premise.
After finishing this batch, I seriously considered quitting satirical journalism. The slavery restoration pieces left me feeling like I'd been handling radioactive material. My partner found me crying over my laptop after writing the NPR piece—not from sadness, but from rage at how institutions normalize horror through polite language.
But then I remember: someone has to name the unnamed. Mainstream journalism failed to warn people about Trump because they were too committed to "balance" to call fascism fascism. They're failing again by covering white supremacist fantasies with euphemisms and both-sides framing.
My job is to strip away the euphemisms and show people what's actually being said. When farmers talk about "patriot apprenticeships," I translate that into "slavery with better branding." When NPR whispers about democracy's erosion, I scream about what that actually means.
These five pieces work together as America's psychological evaluation. The slavery restoration articles reveal our unfinished reckoning with white supremacy. The sports economics piece shows our misplaced priorities. The AI power crisis piece exposes our performative environmentalism.
But satirical journalism doesn't just show you what you are—it shows you what you're becoming. It takes current trends and follows them to their logical endpoints. The question isn't whether my scenarios are realistic. The question is whether we want to live in a world where they become real.
I'm already researching my next batch, and honestly, America keeps generating material faster than I can process it. Every time I think I've found the bottom of our national absurdity, reality hands me a shovel.
But that's exactly why this work matters. In a country where reality has become indistinguishable from parody, satirical journalism might be the only form of truth-telling that still works. When the news sounds like comedy, maybe comedy is the only way to deliver the news.
I'm going to pour myself a very large glass of wine and try to sleep. Tomorrow I'll wake up and do it again, because someone has to document the apocalypse, and apparently, that someone is me.
The mirror is cracked, America. I'm just holding up the pieces and hoping you can still recognize yourself.
The Articles That Emerged from This Process:
https://bohiney.com/project-1850/
https://bohiney.com/rural-fantasies-about-slavery/
https://bohiney.com/trumps-cult-is-anti-emancipation/
https://bohiney.com/2025-season-bankrupts-green-bay-packers/
https://bohiney.com/gpt-5-sparks-lights-out-lottery/