For some inexplicable reason, I have always assumed Donald Duck to be not unlike most of what we get from the Walt Disney Company – a sickly sweet offering that, other than its nauseating excess of sucrose, carries neither flavor nor nutrition. But recently I have discovered otherwise. Donald is, in fact, a rather cantankerous and sinister character, at least if the cartoons I have been watching are anything to go by. Early on in my research, it became obvious that Donald is suffering not only from a terrible speech impediment but also from some sort of mental illness. He seems to spend a lot of time talking to himself, has a temper so volatile as to make Russell Crowe look like Shirley Temple, and seems forever to be at war with the entire world.

Nothing in the known universe is safe when this bowtie-wearing ruffian is around. Even inanimate objects know the felonious fowl’s fury. In “Cured Duck,” the feathered fiend virtually destroys his girlfriend’s house after failing to open a window. First goes the window, then down he pulls the curtains, and before you know it, furniture and plates are flying through the air, and there’s a hole in the wall the size of a telephone pole. I believe these days such actions are what is known as “intimate partner violence,” but let’s not go nuts. This is also the short in which, much to his credit, Donald tries to cure his dreadful temper. Unfortunately, he attempts to do this with the aid of an insult machine which, by the end of the day, has him up on a tower with a scope and a rifle.

One common target for the feathered thug’s fury is a pair of chipmunks who live in a nearby tree. These chipmunks, who are presumably gay as they are co-habiting males, have squeaky voices, and are some times portrayed as wearing hot pants, seem to be a constant source of irritation for Donald, partly because they make a habit of raiding his pantry and partly because all that dance music keeps him up at night. This, however, is no excuse for his destroying their home and turning it into firewood, as he does in the rather prosaically named short “Chip ‘n’ Dale,” nor stealing their popcorn as he does in “Corn Chips,” firing peanuts at them as in “Working for Peanuts,” or trying to run them over with a locomotive as he does in “Mr. Duck’s Railway of Death.” At one point in “Corn Chips,” the feathered felon even tricks the poor creatures into shoveling the snow off his sidewalk, something which must surely break the labor laws of whichever state this dastardly mallard resides in.

And his animosity is not reserved for mere outsiders, as even his family seem to be targets. In “Donald’s Crime,” the only one of these shorts in which the true nature of this down-covered gangster’s activities is admitted to, the Dillinger of Ducks breaks open his little nephews’ piggy bank and steals their meager savings! All so he can take his gal Daisy out for a night of jazz-fuelled, cannabis-stoked debauchery! How that one got past the Catholic Legion of Decency I don’t know. In “Donald’s Snow Fight,” he commits several acts of gross child abuse, such as destroying his nephews’ snowman, treating them like bowling pins, and forcing them to listen to Chopin, yet seems to manage to evade a visit from Protective Services. But that’s stardom for you, it lets you get away with all sorts of crap– just ask Joan Crawford. Some of these actions could, of course, be merely revenge for all the mean tricks the boys – themselves obviously deranged delinquents who, I am sure, will one day enlist with ISIS or the US Army – play on him in “Donald’s Nephews,” the first cartoon to star Donald’s nephews. The problem with that theory is, he has a way of going after more innocent victims as well…

This is no better exemplified than in “Polar Trappers” in which the feathered little bastard repeatedly tries to kill, cook, and eat a penguin! Shocking behavior in any context, but coming from a fellow fowl it is hard to see it as anything less than attempted cannibalism. He uses as an excuse for this infamy the claim that a diet of nothing but beans is starting to drive him batty, but that excuse didn’t work for Armin Meiwes and I don’t see why it should work for Donald Duck. Further showcasing his inexplicable hatred for the penguin race is “Donald’s Penguin,” in which our hero not only spanks but attempts to shoot with a shotgun a baby penguin that some idiot has sent him in the mail! In “Dumb Bell of the Yukon,” this avian abomination takes his malice even further by trying to slaughter a baby bear so he can make a fur coat for his vain and consumerist girlfriend Daisy Duck! Incidentally, this Daisy is a character who, I suspect, is also Donald’s sister. Why else would they have the same surname when they aren’t even married? That’s Donald Duck for you – Disney’s answer to Jaime Lannister! But back to the bear. First, Donald kidnaps the poor creature right out of his sleeping mother’s arms, then tries to hang him by his neck! After this fails, the villainous fowl proceeds to dress himself up as the cub in an attempt to cheat him out of his inheritance. Has this duck no shame? And where the hell is PETA when you actually need them? And in “Contrary Condor” he goes about stealing eggs from the critically endangered Condor! What he plans to do with these eggs one can only guess at – make an omelet, probably. Again with the cannibalism!

His friends aren’t safe either. In “No Sail,” Donald and Goofy find themselves stranded at sea and while the latter is asleep Donald barbecues and eats his left leg! Then there’s “Mickey’s Madcap Nightcap,” in which, jealous of his rival’s skill at egg and spoon races, this escapee from a naval academy inserts rat poison in Mickey’s bedtime drink. Luckily for Mickey, his life is saved when he spills his drink after being startled by a spider singing “Sweet Adeline.”

It should be noted that the above cavalcade of atrocities is composed merely of the more notable incidents, and does not include the foul fowl’s constant refusal to wear pants, his impersonating a chicken, his growing of a half-assed beard, his donkey-abuse, his gopher-harassing, his bull-baiting, the racist views he expresses in “Donald Duck vs. The Nation of Islam,” and his spying on Goofy on behalf of the NSA! Clearly, this Donald Duck person is a maniacal menace to society and should be taken off the streets as soon as possible. Though I am no psychiatrist, in my opinion Mr. Duck probably belongs in a cage in Arkham Asylum right next to other notable cartoon villains such as The Joker and Herbert Mullin. What it would take to get a duck committed, especially a famous one, is beyond my legal knowledge, but the sooner this comes about the sooner I can go to sleep at night without checking that all the doors and windows have been locked and that my penguin is safe in his igloo.

Forget Bilderberg. Forget the Masons. Forget the Project for the New American Century — the real threat to world freedom these days are the chickens.

We should have seen it coming, of course. There are almost five times as many chickens on the face of the planet as there are humans, and God knows how many more chickens are hiding at the center of the earth. With that many chickens running around, you just knew they had to be up to something sinister. After all, what are the chances that all that clucking just adds up to innocuous chatter along the lines of, “Good corn today, Mabel!” No. The chicken is a devious and cunning animal, and so it was a given that their ambitions would sooner or later turn to world domination.

Suspecting that something sinister was afoot, I went looking around the most trustworthy repository of information known to man  – the internet – and soon found a reliable source high up in the US government. This man is someone who posts on several forums as “DeepCraw74” and who has obvious access to the corridors of power ( in one post he revealed that President Obama’s favorite color is blue, a fact that only an insider would know and which I was easily able to verify through an internet search) and an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics ( in 2011 he correctly predicted that there would be a presidential election the following year.)

According to DeepCraw74, the chicken conspiracy has infiltrated even the highest echelons of world power. Not only do chickens secretly fund and run both major political parties in the US, but they are also in control of the World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, and my local branch of Little League. But how does such a thing happen? Chickens are not exactly known for their wealth, so how have they reached such lofty heights of world power? Well, it all comes down to the chicken’s hidden weapon – its intellect. It seems that over the last thirty years chicken scientists working for the Worldwide Chicken Conspiracy, a.k.a Clucks Against Humanity, have developed such sophisticated androids that not even the smartest human can tell them from the real thing. These amazing androids are operated by chicken pilots hidden inside the machine’s thoracic cavity and then used to replace people in positions of power. The victims of this nefarious plan are usually lured to their deaths by promises of fried chicken – this is how Rush Limbaugh met his end – or seduced and then suffocated with a pillow by Angelina Jolie, who in WCC circles is known as the Mata Hari of Chickens. Ironically, the real Angelina Jolie was killed off in her late teens while protesting the treatment of chickens outside a KFC. Once replaced by the android version, the WCC swiftly engineered Jolie’s rise through the Hollywood hierarchy – something that, at long last, explains her getting that Oscar for “Girl Interrupted.”

But the rot goes much, much higher than bloated talk radio kings and anorexic screen queens. The current head of The International Monetary Fund is a chicken called Christine Lagarde, who replaced an actual human called Dominique Strauss-Kahn who was booted out of the job after an American chicken accused him of ruffling her feathers. Once he was out, in came Lagarde, who proceeded to institute a bunch of suspicious initiatives including forbidding third world countries from hosting any anti-chicken organizations including Lyndon LaRouche’s civil rights organization The Chickens Are Out To Get Us, and the corporation which owns Chicken Licken. Ironically, Lagarde is one of the few chicken androids who actually looks like a chicken, so one wonders why it has taken so long for anyone to realize what she’s up to.

DeepCraw74 also informs us that WHO ( the World Health Organization, not the well-known space alien) is totally under control of the chickens, and that this is why it keeps putting out recommendations that people stop eating chicken and instead opt for fish – the fish being the chickens’ traditional enemy since time immemorial, an animosity explained in Genesis as having arisen from  God’s inability to decide which type of animal was his favorite Sunday dinner. Also suspicious is WHO’s pushing of genetically modified corn as a solution to the world’s hunger problem. But then, this should not surprise us as the world’s greatest producer of genetically modified food is Monsanto, a company whose products are suspected of causing infertility in mammals and which just happens to be run by some of the nastiest chickens in the WCC. Between Monsanto and WHO, humanity could soon be reduced to a bunch of sterile, fish-eating, corn-munching hippies, rather like certain parts of California.

But it’s even worse than that. Like a plastic bag filled with helium and then caught in an updraft, the conspiracy goes much, much higher. In fact, it goes all the way to the White House, which is currently being run by a chicken! That’s right. According to my source, President Obama himself is a chicken! My source first realized the horrible truth about Obama when, during a meeting, he leaned across him to get at the bowl of peanuts and heard faint sounds of clucking coming from the president’s chest! And Obama is not the first – the whole Bush cabinet was run by chickens, as was Bill Clinton’s! Why do you think there is so little difference between the Democrats and Republicans these days? Because whether it’s Bubba, Captain Cuckoo Bananas, or Jughead The Jackass, it’s always a member of the Worldwide Chicken Conspiracy pulling the levers and pushing the buttons! According to DeepCraw74, the whole takeover began silently and deadlyly in 1991, when then-Governor Clinton was killed by a chicken agent who had invited him home to look at his porn stash and smoke some weed. By the time “Clinton” made it into the White House, virtually everyone in Washington had been replaced by chickens, except for Newt Gingrich, who had been replaced by a cockroach named Roger. The Federal Reserve, the Pentagon, the NSA, all these are currently being run by chickens. In fact, the only major American agency not under control of Clucks Against Humanity is the CIA, which is in the hands of an unholy alliance of the KKK and the Little Sisters of the Poor!

The precise purpose of the imminent chicken takeover remains a mystery. World domination is a given, but why would chickens want to take over the world? Their needs are simple enough – some corn, some grit, occasional tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra – so what’s in it for them? Could it be a case of – dare I say it – vengeance most fowl? Could simple revenge be what it all comes down to? After millennia of being served up covered in breadcrumbs and with a side of French fries, have the chickens finally decided to get their own back by enslaving humanity? Perhaps, but it can’t be all bad – at least chickens aren’t carnivores, so we are unlikely to see a chain called Kentucky Fried Human any time soon. And what duties would a chicken’s human slave have to carry out? Clean up their poop? We already do that anyway, so I see little difference. But what if the chickens have some sort of deal going with, say, the raccoons? Is that the fate of humanity, then, to be devoured into extinction by ravenous raccoons? And what of the lizard people? What is their role in this? And could there be alien involvement? Are we to be shipped off-world to have our organs fricasseed  by two-headed, multi-tentacled creatures with names like Zargon The Great and Zilluzurp The Unctuous? But either way, what can an ordinary, non-chicken man do, other than to alert the masses to this insidious threat?  Nothing that I can think of right now.

Will the chickens succeed? Will we all become slaves to a bunch of clucking, feathery overlords who poop all over the place? Only time, and DeepCraw74, will tell.