The minimalist movement has gone a long way in recent years. According to our polls, seventy-nine percent of all Americans view minimalism in a favorable light. In comparison, a record thirteen percent of Americans identify as minimalists, up from a mere five percent in 2018. But while decluttering your life by owning minimal physical possessions has reached all-time levels of popularity, it comes at a time when the minimalist movement has taken a radical turn.
The International Association of Minimalists (IAM) has released a public statement detailing its goals for the next decade. The expected goal of increasing the number of people who practice minimalism is not what the world is talking about. Goal 795 is to “take the principles of minimalism from the household and implement them in the environment by minimizing the oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere to the lowest level needed to sustain life.”
People are expressing their outrage over Goal 795 all over the Internet. On the world-renowned The Green Podcast for Greens, the famous environmentalist Tania Towns said the minimalists should “be more concerned with reducing carbon dioxide” than oxygen.
“This is ridiculous. It’s madness,” declared climate scientist Felix Feldberg. “We need the oxygen in the atmosphere to survive. If you minimized the oxygen, then you would be minimizing humanity.”
But that is precisely what the minimalists want. “We are taking minimalism to the next level,” IAM president Sandra Suarez said. It’s simply not enough that the minimalist movement seeks to minimize physical possessions. We must start minimizing humanity by minimizing the planet’s oxygen levels, so that our species cannot grow, only shrink.”
No one is happy about that. As this article is written, #stoptheminimalist is trending on every social media site.
In a televised address, President Trump informed the American people that he “will stop the lunacy of these minimalists” and has declared the IAM a terrorist organization. Every country has done likewise. Already, the FBI has arrested several leading members of the IAM, though Sandra Suarez isn’t among them.
While Suarez is the most wanted person in the world, she avoided capture by Spanish law enforcement in her native Madrid. Interpol is now conducting a manhunt for her.
Despite the IAM’s stated goals, some have come out to defend the organization and its members. “It is illegal to declare the IAM a terrorist organization,” Martin Bronw, a renowned lawyer, told this credible newspaper. “No IAM member has engaged in an act of terrorism, so IAM can’t be declared a terrorist group.”
“Of course, I can declare the IAM a terrorist organization,” Trump said. “They want to minimize the air’s oxygen; that’s a terrorist act.”
But Mr. Brown doesn’t think so. The lawyer has argued that since the IAM hasn’t attempted to minimize the earth’s oxygen, a terrorist act, that they can’t be marked as a terrorist organization. “And you can’t arrest people for a crime they haven’t committed yet,” Brown told this credible newspaper. “That’s not how the legal system works in this country.”
“Sweet, naïve Brown has a point,” said rival, but equally renowned lawyer Gered Goldstein. “But he doesn’t understand that when an organization is dubbed a terrorist group, then a whole bunch of legalities go flying out the window.”
With two experts staunchly divided, we here at TheFakeNewsGazette decided to find out for ourselves if the IAM members arrested are a bunch of dirty terrorists. So, we sent some of our dedicated journalists to interview the IAM members in jail.
“We’re not terrorists,” one IAM member claimed. “We haven’t done anything, except advocate for the glorious lifestyle of minimalism. Goal 795 is a goal we hoped to achieve through persuasion and activism. If Goal 795 is what caused world leaders to declare the IAM a terrorist group, that’s foolish because we haven’t even begun working towards the goal yet.”
Most of the other arrested members of the IAM shared the same sentiment, though there was one who admitted that the organization was a terrorist group. This prisoner, held in Guantanamo Bay and is high up in the hierarchy of the IAM confessed to our reporter that Goal 795 was made “with population reduction in mind” and that if the countries of the world didn’t agree with 795, then the IAM would “conduct a worldwide bombing campaign” killing civilians until the governments of the world began to reduce the planet’s oxygen levels.
While this IAM member is the only one to confess that Goal 795 involves population reduction and a bombing campaign, governments worldwide insist that this confession is true. As such, the International Association of Minimalists has become the most wanted terrorist organization in the world, easily beating out al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the drug cartels.
However, some suspect that the IAM member in Guantanamo was tortured and forced to confess that Goal 795 is to reduce the human population and has bombings as a backup plan. The American government vehemently denies such allegations.
“The guy wasn’t tortured,” President Trump said when a reporter who works for one of those boring newspapers asked him about the IAM possibly being tortured. “But if he was, it was on Biden’s orders, not mine.”
But critics argue that Guantanamo Bay is a torture facility and that the IAM member incarcerated there was certainly tortured. However, if the president of the United States says the man wasn’t tortured, then there’s no question that he wasn’t. The government is a credible source after all.
Still, the only person who can confirm if Goal 795 involved a terrorist bombing campaign is Sandra Suarez, who is, at the time this article is written, the most wanted person in the world. Will she be easily caught? Or will she dethrone Osama bin Laden as the champion of international hide and seek? Only time will tell, unless you’re a time traveler.
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