TAKOMA PARK, MD – Inspired by The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, local satire publication The Takoma Torch has purchased its own local disinformation website, Community Vision for Takoma (CVT), a retired conspiracy theorist-run blog meant to sway political opinions.
CVT filed for bankruptcy after spending all of their money to help elect their own members to the Takoma Park city council, and the government has forced them to sell all of their assets at auction – really just a 1998 Dell computer and a button maker valued around 13 dollars.
The Torch plans to reintroduce CVT as a parody website renamed as Community Vision of Takoma Torch (CVTT), by including articles meant to highlight their goals of lower property taxes and blocking any change to their neighborhood despite calling themselves “progressive.”
“It’s really not a lot of work for us to rebrand and get the site live again,” said a spokesperson for the Torch. “All we really need to do is simply repost every article they’ve ever written without any edits. Nobody can tell if what they say is real or satire anyway.”
In a humorously sarcastic post titled “Here’s Why We Decided to Buy CVT,” The Torch joked that it plans “to collect all of the organizations’ clipboards to combine into one ‘super clipboard’ where we can walk around in a display of dominance and power over all longterm residents.”
Former CVT President Colin Chorus called the purchase a “developer hijacking” in a lengthy post on the PEN Listserv. He claimed other groups interested in buying CVT placed higher offers, including Takoma Park Mobilization and a local moderator of at least a dozen listservs and Facebook groups, but strangely, The Torch unfairly won despite its low-ball bid.
“That’s all coming out in my next listerv post,” said Chorus who claimed to have gathered all of the evidence by calling people at their place of business who had nothing to do with the auction. “We gotta continue to restore our people’s republic, but we won, Jessica and Roger are in despite distancing themselves from CVT, and we’re turning the tide of support for the Minor Master Plan.”
