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Publication Date: September 7th, 2025
The Shallot: Hudson Common Sense’s Satirical Dispatch from the Frontlines of Local Absurdity
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. State Department announced Monday that it will begin sending young Americans to Hudson, New York as part of its new “Hudson Corps” initiative, a program modeled on the Fulbright Program and Teach for America, with a touch of Peace Corps. The goal is to expose youth to “foreign dysfunction” without leaving U.S. borders.
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The State Department’s Hudson Corps will let U.S. youth study the failures of government without leaving New York State.
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“Hudson is perfect,” said Undersecretary David Blanchard at a press briefing. “A third of the town lives in public housing, the mayor denies glaring conflicts of interest, and every time something goes wrong, citizens immediately call the government instead of solving problems themselves. This is exactly the immersive environment our youth need to understand failed systems.”
Local bystanders appeared puzzled but supportive. “It’s like central Africa, but with artisanal coffee,” said one man waiting for the Amtrak.
The police department and its oversight committee, comprised largely residents with an axe to grind and extensive criminal and civil records, were highlighted as a major educational feature. “Our Hudson Corps youth will see how a police department remains dignified and restrained in the face of constant open disrespect,” Blanchard explained.
Hudson’s school system was praised as a teaching tool in its own right. The district’s budget continues to rise, the number of teachers increases, yet student test scores fall year after year. Sources within HCSD insist most teachers are miracle workers, deeply committed and hardworking, but stuck in a bad system with revolving superintendents more interested in padding résumés than fixing classrooms. “Scientists could not design a better natural experiment to show the destructive forces of a lack of competition and administrators rewarded for growing budgets and head counts instead of producing national merit scholars,” Blanchard said.
Concerns were raised that documentarians might discover Hudson and “ruin it.” Officials reassured reporters:
“That’s why we’ll send our youth in quietly. Noblesse oblige requires us to preserve Hudson’s dysfunction intact.”
Applications have already surged from across the country. Missionaries from Protestant churches to Mormons, along with cool valley girls from Orange County, California, are enthralled by the chance to do service work, collect résumé fodder for college essays to Duke, UVA, and of course St Andrews in Fife, Scotland, while spending weekends in Manhattan. One applicant gushed, “I was really not looking forward to living in a tent next to the Zambezi River with our church. Now I can live in a 19th century Victorian on the Hudson, go see a Broadway show on the weekends, and still get extra-curricular points.”
Organizers said they were not worried that the Galvan Foundation’s recent gift of its vast Hudson property portfolio to nearby liberal arts college Bard would change the program’s appeal. “If anything, the arrival of a hyper-progressive college with a tax-shielded endowment subsidizing privileged students who specialize in playing expensive musical instruments, studying human rights, and volunteering for the Working Families Party on weekends will only make the program more valuable for patriotic, hard-working Americans,” one official noted.
Billionaires have also descended on Hudson, eager to experiment with the kinds of ideas they first heard about at TED or Davos. Local “human rights groups” eagerly push for criminal records to be expunged and housing to be made free. It is hard to find another American town where small business owners and shopkeepers are so maligned, and where people who once robbed City Hall both literally and figuratively are later welcomed back to lecture their neighbors on ethics and morality.
A French journalist described Hudson as:
“Miraculous… all the worst of Cuban socialism preserved in miniature, surrounded by weekenders who sip natural wine.”
From the pulpit, a visiting Nigerian Baptist preacher offered his own verdict. “No one seems to notice the churches are gone and the 501c3s have taken their place. Both avoid taxes and tell people how to live, but the nonprofits pay their leaders better and collect checks from government. Churches may have preached too much, but at least they relied on faith and donations. These new replacements run on grants and ideology.”
Stanford economist Dr. Alan Meriwether told The Shallot that Hudson survives only because of geography. “If transplanted to Africa or Asia, it would collapse instantly. But nestled between Manhattan billionaires and Albany subsidies, Hudson is like a farm that cannot farm, yet lives off perfect weather, free labor, and a neighbor’s tractor.”
Sociologist Dr. Jane Holbrook praised the program for cultural preservation. “Only in towns like Hudson would authentic 1940s-style racism still be acceptable. The rest of America has moved on. Here, students will see how it is still common to judge people by skin color and frowned upon to treat everyone equally.”
The outgoing City of Hudson Common Council President, Dom DeSantis, who lost his seat by a historic landslide, told the Register Moon: “Let those losers come. It is not like the State Department or USAID managed to stop poverty and hunger in Africa.”
The program is funded jointly by the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institution, an unlikely pairing described by observers as “proof that dysfunction makes strange bedfellows.”
A Missouri father sending his son added: “My grandfather fought fascism, my father fought communism, and I fought to make a living when the internet killed my job. I was worried my son would grow up soft. But thanks to Hudson Corps, we can just put him on a Delta flight to Albany and let him experience dysfunction in relative safety. He will return grateful and determined to avoid the fate of the average Hudsonian.”
A mother in nearby Ghent summed it up: “Oh Hudson. A bunch of social engineers in a historic-town-themed Disney park. Except unlike at Disney, parents can drink in Hudson.”
Officials confirmed that members of the Hudson Corps will also be allowed to play on the local high school football team, giving Hudson “a long overdue taste of what it feels like to win regional championships.”
Never missing an opportunity, Democratic Party leader Josh Hinley suggested the Hudson Corps program be made reciprocal so that Hudson youth can be sent to Amish country in Pennsylvania to learn how to build housing effectively and quickly. The proposal is under review.
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Last edited/updated:
September 15th, 2025
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📖 Read More: 🧅 **Hudson’s New Moral Aristocracy |** 🧅**The Hudson Accords: Local Elites Convene Shadow Summit to Preempt Voters and Preserve Vibes**
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