fashcat

😺 Fascism Cat

It's the cat command, except it redacts the NSF list of prohibited words.

🚫 Inspiration

This tool is inspired by the word list published at https://gizmodo.com/the-list-of-trumps-forbidden-words-that-will-get-your-paper-flagged-at-nsf-2000559661

🙌 Public Domain

fashcat by Brian Enigma is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

⏮️ Prerequisites

• Python 3. No more. No fancy libraries or anything.

⌨️ Usage

Use fashcat.py in place of cat. For example, a snippet of the output of ./fashcat.py test_document.md looks like this:

Every federal agency in the U.S. is currently trying to figure out how to purge forbidden words from documents posted online, in a desperate attempt to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order to purge “███” from every facet of American life. And nowhere is that effort more bizarre than the National Science Foundation, which is currently combing through websites and research papers for a long list of words that include “██████,” “██████████,” and “████,” among a host of others.

🔃 Updating

• The word list is in wordlist.txt
• The script process_wordlist.py will take that wordlist and turn it into the word_list: list[str] array expected in the main app.
• Take that and replace the word_list in fashcat.py.

‼️ Known Issues

Okay, this is a toy program. It's here to make a point. Some known issues that haven't been addressed include:

• It works line-by-line. If your phrase is split across lines, it won't match.
• The redaction uses UTF-8 characters. Your terminal must support UTF-8.