🗞️THE WTF GLOBAL TIMES
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When Freedom Comes with a Hashtag, a PowerPoint, and an Oat-Milk Latte
By: Quilliam Penstroke III, Senior Correspondent for Post-Colonial Paranoia & Boutique Coffee Affairs
👁️🗨️ This Blog uses WTF strictly in the context of: Weird, True & Freaky. Not as profanity. Unless the Ayatollahs start tweeting it — then all bets are off.
The empire is dead. Long live the empire.
Only this time, it’s wearing hemp trousers, sipping cold brew, and sending you “capacity-building toolkits” instead of cavalry.
Gone are the redcoats and gunboats. In their place? Grant-funded activists who “raise awareness” while raising your blood pressure. Instead of shouting “God save the Queen,” they murmur “Civic engagement matters” — right before they rewrite your constitution in a hotel lobby during a Zoom call with Brussels.
This is Democracy 2.0: Colonialism with a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion slide deck.
The Ritual
It starts the same way everywhere: ballots flutter into villages like mechanical butterflies. Everyone smiles — until they notice the ballots have tracking numbers and a QR code linked to a donor database in Washington. The jungle stops singing.
The city holds its breath. Suddenly, your ancestral council is replaced by a “Local Electoral Commission” staffed by people who think the biggest problem facing your country is the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms in war zones.
In the old days, an invader planted a flag. In the new days, they plant hashtags:
#Empowerment #OpenSociety #SponsoredByTheEU
The Sales Pitch
Once upon a time, conquest came by cannon. Now it comes by TED Talk. The new Viceroys wear lanyards, not swords. They arrive on flights paid for by the same NGOs that write your “human rights reports.” They bring banners of smiling women, stock-photo farmers, and a PowerPoint presentation titled “A Brighter Tomorrow: Your Culture 2.0.”
They sip oat-milk lattes while mapping your resources on Google Earth. You thought they were mapping for aid delivery. Nope — they’re mapping for “future investment partnerships,” which is diplomatic-speak for asset shopping spree.
The Illusion of Choice
You vote. You dip your finger in purple ink. The observers smile for the cameras. CNN plays soft piano music over the footage. Then — surprise! — the guy who went to Yale, has an offshore account in the Caymans, and can say “sustainability” in five languages wins by a landslide.
Your cousin who ran on a platform of “actually fixing the water system” loses. He’s called “anti-democratic” in the press. The West sends him a LinkedIn request anyway.
The Priests of Process
The new colonial officers aren’t soldiers — they’re consultants. They write laws no one reads, in English no one speaks, for people who never asked. They call themselves “facilitators.” They chant words like “resilience,” “visibility,” and “empowerment” as if they are magic spells.
They export elections the way McDonald’s exports fries: fast, identical, and mostly bad for you.
And Then Came Trump
While the liberal preacher class drones on, Donald J. Trump bursts into the scene like a malfunctioning hologram from The Apprentice. He doesn’t arrive with ballots. He arrives with deals.
The West says: “We’re here to promote democracy.”
Trump says: “I’m here to promote you. But you gotta buy American missiles, okay?”
The West says: “We’ll give you grants for civil society.”
Trump says: “I’ll give you a trade surplus… or a trade war. Your choice, champ.”
Some countries prefer the blunt offer. It’s less hypocritical. Others panic, because the entire game was built on the polite fiction that the West cares more about your freedom than your lithium deposits.
The Multipolar Rumbling
Outside the NGO bubble, the world remembers its old gods. Villages keep their shrines. Mountains hum with unscripted chants. Russia, China, India — they’re not here for TED Talks. They’re here for turf, trade, and treaties that don’t involve lecturing about pronouns in rural militias.
The ballots keep falling. The slogans keep spinning. But the sacred doesn’t go quietly. It whispers through the ruins, louder than the press releases:
“We had laws before your laws. We had voices before your microphones. We had freedom before your democracy.”
TRUMP COMMENTS
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“Look, I love democracy. Big fan. Greatest system ever invented. But ours is better, obviously. No one does democracy like the U.S.A. And nobody does winning like me — unless you count Putin, but that’s different.”
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“These so-called democracy exporters? They’re like bad real estate agents. They sell you the property, then charge you rent. Sad!”
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“Under me, we don’t do this ‘nation-building’ stuff unless it’s a Trump Tower. That’s nation-building I can support.”
TOP COMMENT PICKS
@VillageElder_RealTalk:
“Democracy? We ordered freedom, not a 400-page instruction manual in legal English.”
@GlobalSouthMemeLord:
“New colonialism is when they steal your oil and make you attend a gender workshop.”
@FreedomFries420:
“They said ‘open society’… now my village has an open-air Starbucks but no hospital.”
FINAL THOUGHT
Democracy, in its modern export form, isn’t about self-rule. It’s about brand consistency. The packaging changes, the empire remains. Whether it’s British gunboats or Brussels grant proposals, the goal is the same: control, but make it photogenic.
Next Week on WTF Global Times:
“From Bayonets to Blockchain: How Empires Keep Finding New Ways to Own You”
Two Funny End Lines:
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Survive weird. Thrive freaky. Stay tuned to The WTF Global Times — where we ballot, then bayonet.
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Because when leaders say “democracy,” the aftermath is rarely democratic.
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