For the past few years, Cards Against Humanity has run what they call their Holiday Bullshit campaign. Also known as “10 Days of Kwanzaa or Whatever,” it works as follows: You pay Cards Against Humanity $15; they send you 10 mystery gifts throughout the month of December. It’s fairly amusing, all things considered — my boyfriend shelled out for it last year, and we ended up with some odd yet hilarious additions for both our deck of cards and our home — but have you ever wondered what CAH does with all the money the Holiday Bullshit campaign pulls in? Well, here are your answers.
According to the company itself, 250,000 people participated in Holiday Bullshit this year. That’s a lot of money, right? Furthermore — and yes, this figure will seem unrelated, but there is ultimately a point to it — 11,509 professional lobbyists spent $2,414,337,089 in 2014 “trying to sell their bullshit to Congress” So, CAH did a little math: Taking one dollar from each successful Holiday Bullshit sale, what could they buy?
They’ve put together a length interactive that details all the things they could have bought before revealing what they did use the funds for; here are a few highlights (head on over to CAH for the full interactive).
Things Cards Against Humanity Could Have Bought with $250,000:
- Five percent of James Watson’s Nobel Prize for Kentucky Senator Brandon Smith, who actually uttered the following words while claiming that climate change is a hoax: “I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly what as it is here. Nobody will dispute that.” Uh... yes. Yes they will.
- A year’s salary for one full-time butler and four manservants for Nevada Assemblyman Jim Wheeler. Wheeler said in the past that he would vote for whatever his constituency wanted — and in 2013 when someone asked him, “What if your constituency wanted slavery?” he said, “Yeah, if that’s what the citizens of the, if that’s what the constituency wants that elected me, that’s what they elected me for.” To be fair, he used a lot of qualifiers along with it — but I mean, wow. Just… wow.
- 2,808 high-end butt plugs for Michigan Senatory Tim Walberg, whose response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that Prop 8 was unconstitutional was this: “Society itself is at risk and cannot continue.”
- 11,363 Meat Lover’s pizzas from Pizza Hut for former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. Cain, who was a never-ending source of fodder for The Colbert Report and The Daily Show during the 2012 election, said in 2011, “The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is. A manly man [doesn’t] want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.”
- 13,000 clown costumes for Michelle Bachmann, who, in 2011, claimed John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa — except that he wasn’t. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr. was from Waterloo. John Wayne the movie star was from Winterset.
- 71,438 Auntie Anne’s pepperoni pretzels for Mike Huckabee. Huckabee said in 2013 that allowing gay marriage would twist “holy matrimony… into an unholy pretzel.”
- 1,250,000 AOL subscription CDs (remember those?) for Ted Cruz because of his claim that “Net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet.”
What Cards Against Humanity Actually Did with $250,000:
- Donated $250,000 to the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit geared towards creating a “more open, transparent government.” The foundation does this by allowing us to see who in politics is spending money, where their funds are coming from, and how much they’re spending — because if we’ve learned nothing else in recent years, political money can be a terrifying and deceptive thing.
Now, it might be worth noting that if, as Cards Against Humanity says, 250,000 people participated in Holiday Bullshit this year at $15 a pop, that still leaves a pretty substantial sum left for the company to do with as they please. But hey, $250,000 is a start. Find out more about the Sunlight Foundation here.
Images: Brett Jordan/Flickr; Giphy (3)
