About

New York Times Opinion Parodies refers to a series of parody tweets and newspaper articles based on an op-ed piece by Erik Prince, the founder of a private military contracting firm, about how private military contracts will end the war in Afghanistan. Online, people interpreted this through faux op-eds about how a bad thing benefitting one person will enrich mankind.

Origin

On August 30th, 2017, the New York Times Opinion Twitter^[1] account shared an op-ed written by Erik Prince, the found of Blackwater, an infamous private military firm. In the article, Prince argues for the use of private military contractors, or mercenaries, in the war in Afghanistan. The tweet was captioned, "Trump's plan to increase troops in Afghanistan will merely continue the conflict, says Erik Prince," and received more than 10 retweets, 21 likes and 100 comments.

Spread

Following the tweet, people online began posting photoshopped opinion articles and parody tweets about how nefarious goals of fictional evil characters are good for mankind. Essentially, the tweets joke about how Prince is arguing for something that would directly profit him, in this case, war (examples below).

That day, Twitter^[3] user @davelozo posted a photoshopped op-ed written by the Night King from Game of Thrones, arguing that an army of mindless, undead killers could save the world. They captioned the post "what has happened to the @nytopinion section?" The post (shown below) received more than 1,400 retweets and 4,500 likes in 24 hours.

Throughout the day, people continued to post faux op-eds that placed fictional bad guys as the author of an article about how their evil plan is good for the world.

Several media outlets covered the meme, including Mashable,^[4] New York magazine^[5] and more. Twitter^[6] published a Moments page to archive some of the most popular posts.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References