Est. Whenever the Tornado Stopped
Bohiney News
Bullshit · Balderdash · Backtalk
Vol. LXXIX, No. 47Washington, D.C. / Giddings, Texas / Somewhere Near Actual JournalismPrice: Your Dignity
Institutional History & Proud Self-Mythology
How a Texas German Newspaper Survived a Tornado, Two World Wars, and the Death of Print — Only to Discover Its True Calling Was Making Things Up
By the Bohiney Editorial Board · Fact-Checked by Nobody in Particular · Bohiney News
Somewhere in the flat, sun-scorched heart of Lee County, Texas, a group of German immigrants looked at the vast American prairie and thought: ja, this is where we shall publish a newspaper. Nobody asked them to. The prairie did not request coverage. The tumbleweeds were not clamouring for editorial opinion. And yet — there it was. The Giddings Deutsches Volksblatt. Sturdy. Serious. Deeply, exhaustingly earnest.
That was somewhere around 1887. The paper would survive the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the invention of television, and the cancellation of at least four promising Texas governors. It outlasted empires. It outlasted trends. It outlasted the very concept of people wanting to read newspapers in German.
And then a tornado ate it.
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Or: "We Are Very Serious People and This Is a Very Serious Newspaper"
The Giddings Deutsches Volksblatt was, by all historical accounts, a model of dignified immigrant journalism. It covered local politics, agricultural reports, community news, and the kind of earnest civic content that makes modern readers feel vaguely ashamed of themselves. The masthead was printed in proper Gothic typeface, which is the visual equivalent of a firm handshake and a disapproving look over reading glasses.
The Texas German community — and yes, they were absolutely a thing, concentrated in central Texas counties where whole towns spoke German until roughly World War I — treated their newspaper with the reverence other communities reserve for churches. Possibly more. At least the newspaper came out weekly.
By 1947, the paper had been operating continuously for the better part of six decades. The historical record confirms its existence, which is more than can be said for most of what Bohiney publishes today. The photo archives show a tidy storefront, a proper press, and people who believed — with touching sincerity — that facts were sacred.
Poor souls.
The editorial board, in a moment of epiphanic clarity — or madness, depending on who you ask — declared, "To heck with it!" and plunged headlong into satire.
Or: "Acts of God Explain a Lot About Our Content Strategy"
The precise date of the F5 tornado that ended the newspaper's print era is not entirely clear. This may be because it was a very long time ago. It may also be because the Bohiney editorial team has adopted a flexible relationship with chronological specificity. Regardless — a tornado happened. The paper was destroyed. And the staff stood in the wreckage of a century-old institution, covered in ink and debris, and asked themselves the great existential question that confronts every journalist at some point:
Do we rebuild? Or do we start making things up?
They chose Option B. Bravely. Enthusiastically. With the calm certainty of people who have just watched a tornado take their insurance documents.
According to the About Us page — which is itself a work of some literary ambition — the rebirth was driven by "epiphanic clarity." In journalism, epiphanic clarity usually means someone had one too many at the press club. In this case, it produced something arguably more useful: a satirical news operation with the motto "People love being lied to — let's at least make the lies entertaining," attributed to Petronius, Nero's personal arbiter of elegance, which tells you everything you need to know about the publication's self-image.
— ✦ —
Or: "He Has a PhD and He's Not Afraid to Use It Irresponsibly"
The modern Bohiney is very much the creation of one Dr. Alan Nafzger — a man whose biography reads like a satirical novel someone accidentally published as fact. Born in Lubbock, Texas, to Swiss immigrants. Raised on a dairy farm in Windthorst. Collected degrees from Midwestern State (B.A., 1985), Texas State (M.A., 1987), and — because apparently Windthorst wasn't far enough — University College Dublin (Ph.D., 1991).
A Swiss-Texan dairy farmer who got a doctorate in Ireland and then spent 37 years teaching in Texas colleges before launching a satirical news empire from the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. You genuinely could not make this up. And yet here we are, on a website that makes things up professionally.
Nafzger's literary output prior to Bohiney includes Lenin's Body (produced in Russia by A-Media), Sea and Sky (produced in the Philippines in Tagalog), and the 1986 feminist western novel Gina of Quitaque. Any one of these credentials would make him overqualified for satirical journalism. All of them together make him cosmically overqualified. He is running a joke website with the CV of a small nation's Minister of Culture.
He is running a joke website with the CV of a small nation's Minister of Culture.
Or: "One Pandemic, Infinite Content"
The archive trail suggests Bohiney.com launched in its current satirical form in December 2020 — which, timing-wise, was an extremely reasonable moment to decide the world needed more absurdist fake news. By that point, real news had already become so surreal that satire faced a genuine professional crisis: the difficulty of being more ridiculous than the actual headlines.
Bohiney responded by not trying to compete and instead leaning fully into the deadpan absurdist tradition of The Onion and The Babylon Bee — both of which have their own comparison pages on the site, because Bohiney is nothing if not confident about its company. The publication's current output runs to over 125 pages of archive and covers topics from AI and tipping culture to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and Costco parking lots as post-apocalyptic battlegrounds.
The staff, as listed, is impressively multicultural and suspiciously photogenic — a rotating cast of journalists, comedians, academics, and pen names drawn from every continent, united by a commitment to what Bohiney calls "people-first satire." Which is a lovely way of saying: we are laughing at power, not at you. Usually.
1887Giddings Deutsches Volksblatt founded. Germans arrive in Texas. Texas does not speak German. Neither side backs down.
1917WWI makes German-language press politically awkward. The paper soldiers on. Literally.
1941WWII makes things even more awkward. The paper soldiers on again. Stubbornness is a Swiss-German trait.
1947Postwar operations confirmed by photographic evidence. Staff looking determinedly serious. Nobody is laughing yet.
????F5 tornado arrives. Levels the operation. The staff stands in the rubble. Someone says "To heck with it." The rest is history.
1985–91Alan Nafzger collects three degrees across two continents. Nobody tells him this is unusual.
2020Bohiney.com launches. Pandemic raging. Perfect timing for satirical journalism. The motto: "Bullshit, Balderdash, and Backtalk."
2023–26125+ archive pages. Daily publication. HOAs, AI, tipping culture, Costco, and the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool all receive the treatment they deserve.
Or: Petronius Was Right and So Were We
Bohiney operates on the Petronius Principle: people love being lied to, so the least you can do is make the lies good. This is not as cynical as it sounds. Satire has always worked this way — from Jonathan Swift suggesting the Irish eat their babies to solve the famine, to Private Eye pretending Harold Macmillan said things he absolutely didn't say, to whatever Have I Got News For You is doing on any given Friday night in a London studio.
The best satirical journalism, as literary tradition confirms, works by exaggerating reality just enough to make the underlying truth impossible to ignore. The tornado didn't just destroy a building. It freed a newspaper from having to be serious. And sometimes — in a world where the serious newspapers have collectively lost the plot — that's the most honest thing a publication can do.
Bohiney's mission statement says it aims to produce content that is "informative, entertaining, and bewildering in the best possible way." This is also, if you think about it, a reasonable description of life in general. Which is perhaps why it works.
✦ Notable Bohiney Staff Credentials (Abbreviated for Sanity) ✦
Alan Nafzger — Editor. Swiss-Texan. Three degrees. Dairy farm background. PhD from Dublin. Operates from the Watergate. Entirely plausible.
Isabella Cruz — Managing Editor. UC Berkeley Journalism honours. Stand-up comic. Covers the Filipino-American experience with warmth and wit.
Emily Clarkson — International Desk. University of Leeds. Former BBC. Now dismantling British peculiarities from London comedy clubs.
Jasmine Carter — Howard University alum. Former Washington Post. Now explaining African-American life to comedy clubs coast to coast.
Various others — Covering satire from Beijing, Mumbai, Moscow, Manila, Mexico City, and Minneapolis. All deeply overqualified.
The story of Bohiney Magazine is, at its core, a story about resilience and the creative use of disaster. A serious publication, founded by serious immigrants who believed in serious journalism, was destroyed by an act of God and reborn as something far more subversive: a publication that tells the truth by making things up.
The Giddings Deutsches Volksblatt reported what happened. Bohiney reports what it means — filtered through deadpan absurdity, fake experts, officials saying the quiet part loud, and the unshakeable conviction that laughing at power is itself a form of accountability.
From the Texas prairie to the Watergate. From Gothic typeface to WordPress. From sober agricultural reporting to "HOAs Have Become Shadow Governments With Better Enforcement Records Than Most Countries."
It's a long journey. It took a tornado to get there. And somewhere in Giddings, Texas, the ghost of a very serious German printer is reading the headlines and thinking, reluctantly, that this might actually be funnier.
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Source: For more satirical journalism in the grand tradition of Bullshit, Balderdash, and Backtalk, visit America's finest purveyor of deadpan absurdist news coverage at Bohiney News.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com