Stuttgart, Germany – Karl Wolf, an alert reader and frequent visitor of NotTheNation, has thrust himself into the limelight of online activism this week, blowing the whistle on what he perceives to be a glaring omission in the site’s otherwise fearless satirical repertoire.
Posting to BlueSky, Threads, Reddit, and even the last bastion of chaos that is Twitter, Mr. Wolf has issued an urgent call-to-action: Why is NotTheNation conspicuously silent on the topic of Brunei?
“It’s pretty shady, to be honest,” wrote Wolf, in a post that quickly garnered 12 likes and 2 retweets, one of which appeared to be from a bot. “The writers seem more than willing to poke fun at every other nation in Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, as well as Europe, the United States, and even countries in Africa—but Brunei doesn’t seem to get even a single mention? I knew it had to be reported immediately.”
Wolf, self-described as “a frequent reader and aspiring watchdog,” embarked on an investigative journey into the archives of NotTheNation. Armed with the site’s search bar and a notepad, he painstakingly tallied the frequency of mentions of Southeast Asian nations.
“Thailand is obviously number one, which is no surprise since that’s their home turf,” he explained in a video posted to TikTok titled What NTN Doesn’t Want You to Know. “But after that, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia all got their fair share of roasting. Even Singapore gets dunked on, which is impressive considering how boring that place is. And Brunei? Crickets.”
The only reference to Brunei he unearthed was, in his words, “some wall-of-text article about an economic summit or something.” This discovery, or lack thereof, confirmed what Wolf had long suspected. “It’s a satire site, not The Economist. If they can’t find something funny to say about a country where being gay is punishable by whipping and jail, then something fishy is going on.”
Wolf’s posts have sparked a flurry of theories among his modest following. Some posit that Brunei’s relative obscurity as a nation of less than half a million people might simply make it an uninspiring target. But Wolf isn’t buying it.
“I regret to say this, but I think NTN is taking bribes,” he speculated. “It’s the only explanation. A few gold bars from the Sultan, and suddenly they’re too busy mocking Thai soap operas to notice Brunei’s human rights abuses. It’s a classic case of follow the money.”
At press time, an unnamed managing editor of NotTheNation was struggling to read anything even remotely interesting about the micronation, and coming up with exactly zero angles to make a joke.
