April 1 Was Funny Once

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 1, 2026

In the fall of 2011, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Chicago were both supposed to be temporary actions. Occupy Wall Street was expected to run from September 17, 2011, to the day before Thanksgiving. Occupy Chicago was supposed to run from September 22, 2011, to Christmas Eve. That was the plan. Then the public energy got bigger than the original calendar, and both movements kept going on their own momentum.

That was not a bad thing at first. There was real life in it. There was real hope in it. There was also a sense, for a while, that ordinary people had finally found a way to push back in public and be seen doing it.

In Chicago, that long stretch eventually ran into the fight around NATO and the G8. That period changed the mood. Once those protests hit full force, the city establishment acted like the real problem was not the war machine, not inequality, not corruption, but the fact that people in the streets made Mayor Rahm Emanuel look like he did not fully control the city. The truth is simple enough: a mayor runs a city. He does not own it.

By April 1, 2012, the camps were gone, but the online energy was still there. On Twitter, some of us started tossing around fake headlines for April Fool’s Day—headlines we wished were real. Not silly nonsense for the sake of nonsense, but stories about a more decent country. Enough people took them seriously that I had to pull a couple aside and explain the joke. The point was never confusion for its own sake. The point was to show what justice would have looked like if this country had chosen it.

I cannot reproduce every one of those headlines now. Time has passed, and I have slept a few days since then. But I remember the spirit of it. It was funny because it was sharp. It was funny because it exposed what was missing. It was funny because the truth hiding underneath the joke was painfully obvious.

Now we are at April 1, 2026, and I am not participating.

There will be no spaghetti tree harvest here. There will be no spaghetti tree seeds. Barack Obama did not abolish all student debt by surprise executive action. Republicans were not suddenly held accountable for the Iraq War. Congress did not finally denounce adventurist wars in the Middle East. None of that happened. We do not live in that country.

And frankly, this is not the year for it.

There is already enough foolishness in real life. We do not need to manufacture any more of it for one day on the calendar. The political class is unserious. The media ecosystem is broken. The public is expected to treat permanent absurdity like normal weather. Under those conditions, April Fool’s Day stops being clever and starts feeling redundant.

So WPS News is sitting this one out.

We are not posting fake headlines on April 1, 2026. We are not pretending the country suddenly found a conscience. We are not staging a holiday around old internet jokes while real institutions continue to fail in plain sight. We are taking the day off from that tradition and going back to the real thing.

Today is Wednesday. Tomorrow is Thursday. The Thursday signal will post, and other material will go up as well. Normal operations resume on April 2.

For April 1, the message is simple: there is enough fraud, spectacle, and organized nonsense in public life already. We do not need any extra.

We will be back to regular news tomorrow. Keep your eyes open.

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For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

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Author’s note: This piece is a first-person historical reflection based on the author’s direct experience with Occupy-era organizing and online political commentary.