Celebrating Four Years of the Bastiat News Network!

Happy April Fools Day ladies and gentleman. Four years ago during the early stages of the Chinese Bat Flu, BNN was started as an April Fools Joke by Rareest Pepper and Gohndim. The idea itself was a joke that we turned into a reality without giving it much thought. We just knew it could be funny. And it might make Bastiat (Warren Rhea) a bit upset!

Since then BNN has shut off the lights half a dozen times but we’ve always come back. There is something incredibly thrilling about writing a good piece of political satire, even in an online-driven world where it can be hard to discern reality from a drug-induced nightmare. What has puzzled me through the years is the collection of folks who have enjoyed BNN. Our most dedicated fans span the political and autism spectrum. Our biggest enemies have typically been liberals, and rightly so, as they are our usual targets.

The early days of BNN was full of controversy. Bastiat was not thrilled by one of our very first articles, a story claiming RBG came down with Bat Flu. He indicated in direct messages and in a voice call that he thought there is something “sacred” about the judiciary, a weird sentiment that I’ve heard other lawyers express over the years. Our attention then turned to Touring News after he got drunk on stream and said some nasty things about his family members. After the second article “attacking” Touring, he called Pepper and I on discord and we trolled him for a solid 90 minutes.

The first person to threaten to sue BNN was Baela. We published a piece calling her a sham environmentalist on Earth Day. In the article I included a doctored image and said she was telling her audience to reuse tampons among other things. After she dm’ed me and I sent her to Pepper and Pepper sent her back to me, she threatened to sue our beloved new endeavor. Things calmed down for a bit after that until we turned our attention to Imreallyimportant, a move that I think came right after Cousin Brad demolished Wicked Supreme and Dylan Burns on China.

BNN has done surprisingly well with views and clicks over the years, with a few of our articles going “semi-viral” on what I call Boomer Facebook. I think most of those conservative pages really didn’t think that our story about the Clinton Foundation Nuking Beirut was a meme. But thanks for the views. What surprises most people is that BNN has actually made more on our Teespring than it costs to maintain the website. A huge thank you to Grandadchristmas for making the original BNN logo and the art on our merch.

As promised in a post a couple of months ago, I have plans for BNN. They aren’t too big but we have some exciting stuff cooking. It can be hard to post as regularly as I used to as I truly don’t want Twitch anymore unless someone direct links me to some content or I’m going to troll Geekwithglasses for two minutes before getting bored. BNN was at its best when Bastiat still streamed, long time passing. But I’ll continue to post now and again and I expect the frequency to tick up during this election season. Stay tuned and until then take a look back at some of our best pieces of all-time.

Lastly, I want to thank our readers and supporters. I recently heard from a BNN superfan (Ragepope) that some random dude he was talking to in voice chat a week or so ago had mentioned how much he liked BNN and didn’t know we were still around. I’ve received more messages on Twitch and Discord than I would have ever thought from people suggesting new content or just begging for me to get off my ass and post more. I appreciate all of you, all the way back to our first core supporters who allowed me to spam links in their discord and who would read our articles on stream. Thank you and God Bless!

-Gohndim