As George Orwell famously wrote in his novel 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” The deceptive United States government continues to slap us in the face with its invisible hand of unspoken influence in a desperate, ferocious, and unquenchable effort to silence the most prevalent and latent truth that has haunted the very Constitution since America’s inception: the fact that Wyoming doesn’t exist.
I sure hope those words were as relieving to your ears as they first were to mine. For the duration of my childhood, I had long held a sneaking suspicion that Wyoming was an intangible and fictitious construct, but I had never put my deep feelings into words before. Adults often called me crazy, but look who’s crazy now. Alas, after being a devout Wyomian antirealist for the past three years, I would like to unveil to you the most profound and fundamental of North American truths that you have ever had the faculty of hearing.
Since the very first explorers of the New World crossed the Western Great Basin, there has been a recurring fault in their descriptions. Both John Colter and Jim Bridger’s reports of the area described a gorgeous land of unspoken beauty and wildlife, a place that teemed with the very spirit of the nation which beseeched them to embark on their quest. The issue? Absolutely nobody believed them in the slightest. In fact, the consensus among many was that it was “the stupidest [profanity redacted] thing they had ever [profanity redacted] seen.” In spite of the public commentary, however, President James K. Polk wished to elaborate upon their tales and fabricate a glorious area on the road to the West—in order to draw people there and further his Manifest Destiny aspirations. So he pushed forward with the spreading of the construct of “Wyoming.”
His little lie had worked beautifully right up until the Civil War concluded. Then, as President Grant put it, a “big ahh” problem presented itself. Nearly all of the land in the West was being settled and formed into territories, except for one glaring area: Wyoming. Now that the transcontinental railroad was being built, settlers were pouring into Western areas, and pressure was rising on Grant to explain why the borders of the Dakota Territory looked so stupid and ugly. He was in a petrifying pickle, but he ultimately decided to double down on the lie and declare Wyoming a territory. The declaration was oddly successful, and nobody really questioned it, so he got bored and decided to give women voting rights in the territory just for the fun of it. And now, over 150 years later, the lie continues to perpetuate.
The more you investigate, the deeper the rabbit-hole goes. For one, there were never any gold rushes or silver rushes in Wyoming but such events abounded in every other Western state. Second, Yellowstone has been confirmed to be in Eastern Idaho by the Anti-Wyomian Realist League’s 7th District. Even stranger than this—do you actually know what Wyoming looks like? Can you conjure an image in your head? That’s what I thought. I mean, do you even know anyone from Wyoming?
Actually, about that—if you do happen to know anyone from Wyoming, please don’t be too harsh on them. Investigations on what exactly the Wyoming Resident Protection Program does to its victims are unclear, but we know that they have, at the very least, been brainwashed. If anyone claims to live in Wyoming, please remember to just listen—they are trauma patients. Every night, I pray for the “people of Wyoming” who are being brainwashed and potentially abused day after day just to keep up Polk’s little lie from the early 1800s.
The people of America and the world deserve better than this, so rise up. Never forget what Orwell wrote—the government’s final and most essential command is to forget what your eyes and ears are telling you. But we can never forget. We can never bow. This ends with us. Let highly accredited Reddit Philosopher kt0kether’s words reverberate as powerfully now as they did six years ago when he was asked why he thinks Wyoming isn’t real: “It’s just common sense.”