The Dada News Manifesto Of Dash MacIntyre

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

I am a card-carrying Dada News journalist inspired by the absurdist Dada art movement during and following WWI.

This is the Dada News manifesto:

Dada News is a harlequinade for eliciting doomscrollers’ involuntary reactions, specifically fury from conservatives who love to dish fake news but can’t take it, and comedic catharsis from liberals who briefly fall for the Dadaist headlines before recognizing that the brazen fictional absurdity of Dada News is ironically nearly imperceptible from the absurdity of reality in contemporary American politics.

Dada News doesn’t report the facts, it improves them.

Dada is an antidote to fascism. When fascists lie to obstruct and confuse the masses’ recognition of reality, Dadaists’ lies are like a double-negative. A lie about a fascist lie is mathematically a truth.

Any expectations of Dada News to be objective will be happily unmet. Dada News doesn’t tell how it is, Dada News tells how it really is.

Dada News is a Leftist vaccine against Rightists’ authoritarian propaganda, and mainstream both-sides-ism in the center.

Dada journalists are repulsed by American conservatism’s tyrannical demand for illiberalism to be taken seriously, so Dada News is an advocate for the abolition of demagoguery, personality cults, ethno-nationalism, Christofascism, and dictatorial sympathies.

Dada News is objectively subjective, and subjectively objective.

Dada News is precisely calculated to inject enough nonsense into the national conversation to keep the universe from imploding or exploding (difficult to tell which until you’ve done the requisite daily mainstream news doomscrolling).

Dada News is not entirely stupid, though it is formidably stupid.

Dada News is absurd for absurdity’s sake.

Dada News practitioners are less specious journalists than most by being supremely rational in their relentless pursuit of perpetrating irrationalism.

Dada News headlines are most successful when received disapprovingly by liberal moral absolutists, and infuriatingly by conservative neo-monarchists.

Dada News is most politically effective when it compels conservative critics to waste their free time crafting long, laborious responses attacking the integrity, intelligence, and sense of humor of Dada journalists that the Dada journalists do not read.

Dada News is the political equivalent of Hugo Ball reciting “Verse ohne Wrote” at the Cabaret Voltaire wearing a cubist costume with lobster claws.

Dada News is an equal and opposite reaction to Trumpism, and a muscular flex of freedom of speech against authoritarianism in the defense of liberal democracy.

Dada News is a charming little reminder that if Donald Trump wins in November and manages to strangle American democracy and freedom, at least we Dadaists can giggle to ourselves while toiling and starving to death in the concentration camps remembering how utterly, spectacularly, and hilariously stupid he is, and how we never gave him any of the respect his malignant narcissism demanded.

Cheers to all my fellow Dadaists! 🥃

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