KEYSTONE, SOUTH DAKOTA
Donald Trump plays with fire, both literally and metaphorically — only he doesn’t know what a metaphor is.
On this Independence Day, this apocryphal newspaper faces many challenges, because there’s ever so much to report on.
So, making full use of Zoom Technology, we convened a global conference of as many of our far-flung associate solitary reporters (ASRs) as we could locate.
ASR Johanna Jones, who reports directly to us and to DC Chair Tom Perez, convened the meeting by noting that in July 1776, thousands of brave American patriots, chafing at the yoke of the notably oppressive King George III, set in motion a political experiment such as had never been seen anywhere in the world except for a few short-lived experiments in proto-democracy in Ancient Greece.
First, she called on Sylvia Kenwood, a full-blooded Lakota, and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Western American History at the Univeristy of Park Hill, to ask her what she thought of Donald Trump's intrusion into the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, where he held a rally in the shadow of slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
As a Lakota, and fully aware of her Nation’s continuing claims to the land taken from her people when the Gold Rush hit the Black Hills (see our earlier report at https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2020/07/02/what-pence-will-say-tomorrow-at-mount-rushmore-when-introducing-trump/), Kenwood was intent on asking Patricia Trap, Acting Superintendent of the Memorial, whether it was safe to shoot off fireworks there because of the danger of starting a forest fire in the Black Hills National Forest.
“Sylvia,” Trap said, “Trump plays with fire all the time, but he’s the boss, so I have nothing to say."
Next, Jones called on our Seoul-based ASR, Ko Il-sun. We recently sent him to Beijing to ask Xi Jinping when he intends to free the several million Uyghurs in Xinjiang from his 82 or so concentration camps.
In the twinkling of an eye, Ko found himself in shackles in the notorious Turpan Reeducation Through Labor Camp in remote Western Xinjiang (better known by Xi’s opponents as East Turkestan), where he was not in the least socially distanced from hundreds of Uyghur separatists whom Xi insists on converting from their Muslim faith into Communist Party loyalists.
Next, Jones asked our Moscow-based ASR, Foma Kheroshonsky, to ask Dictator-for-Life Vladimir Putin for his thoughts on independence for Chechen separatists.
That’s why Kheroshonsky’s now confined in the notorious Dalstroy gulag in the Russian Far East.
Next up was our London-based ASR, Danielle Packwood. She told Jones that Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to redo history and take back the American colonies because he realizes he made a huge mistake by advocating for Brexit. “Danielle,” Johnson told Packwood, "I have nobody to trade with, so I need Trump now more than ever.”
But what Jones was most intent on discussing was what Trump said yesterday at Mount Rushmore.
In the course of his forty-minute rant, in which he decried the removal of statues of Confederate generals, he said he is “too damn busy” trying to keep his job, but that, having thought about the Civil War for five minutes, he now advocates for the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment, in which slavery was (theoretically) abolished.
In the crowd just below the podium, and huddled within inches of his confederates, was notorious neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who headlined the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Spencer’s been banned from the European Union because he insists that all people of color in Europe must be relocated to — well, maybe the Turpan Reeducation Through Labor Camp in East Turkestan.
When Trump called for repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment, Spencer leapt up onto the stage and got a big big hug from the man who’s supposed to be the Leader of the Free World.
Black Lives Matter.