The fictional content of a mock edition of the Washington Post that appeared on Wednesday feels much saner than the reality depicted in the actual edition of that paper. This could be depressing or delightful, and it is certainly disturbing. The authors of this work of protest art hoped that it would be inspirational.
Jacques Servin, a member of the self-described “trickster art duo” the Yes Men, told me that the paper had been created by three people: Servin and the writers L. A. Kauffman and Onnesha Roychoudhuri. As of Wednesday afternoon, Servin told me by Facebook Messenger, activists had handed out twenty-five thousand paper copies of the fake newspaper to D.C. commuters. There was also a Web site. Servin said that they were considering printing more copies, after they got the typos in the original edition fixed.
The lead headline on the front page of the real Washington Post on Wednesday said, “Administration calls back nearly 50,000 workers.” The banner headline on the front page of the fake Washington Post was much bigger, running across the entire page, and it said, “UNPRESIDENTED: TRUMP HASTILY DEPARTS WHITE HOUSE, ENDING CRISIS.” Secondary headlines in the real Post were depressing: “Standoff starts to take the shine off federal jobs”; “A Mueller report may stay secret, Barr says.” The fake headlines were jubilant: “Celebrations break out worldwide as Trump era ends.” “BLAME CROOKED HILLARY AND HFIOR: Surge of protests proves too much for Trump.” That last headline purported to quote a note on a napkin found by White House aides in the Oval Office following the President’s middle-of-the-night departure and apparent abdication.
I asked Servin for a definition of “hfior.” “It’s related to covfefe,” he explained. “You actually mix it with covfefe to get wpnei.”
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The fake Post was neither a parody of the newspaper nor a caricature of the current moment; it was, rather, a vision. Servin said that the project began last summer, when he attended an activist brainstorming session “about how to rally grassroots support for impeachment—to, in turn, pressure newly elected Congress members.” At first, Servin said, he’d had no ideas to contribute, but then he remembered a fake newspaper that the Yes Men had created a decade earlier, right after Barack Obama had been elected President. That was a New York Times, and the banner headline was “Iraq War Ends.” The project was to imagine what was possible—as Servin put it, to “create a future-set fiction in which all the great things have happened.”
The vision contained in the fake Post is detailed. It’s not just that Trump has abdicated; it’s that “the massive women-led protests that paralyzed cities around the country last weekend are similarly unprecedented.” It’s not just that Mike Pence is stepping up to begin a “ ‘clipped duck’ term,” as a front-page headline indicates; it’s that thirty-eight freshmen Democrats in Congress are pushing sixty-four different bills that would overhaul the American social contract. The bills, known as “The Bundle,” fall into eight categories, including Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and Opportunity for All, which includes universal basic income and an end to mass incarceration. Some of the correctives offered by the fake Post are subtle. For example, every expert quoted in the paper’s five broadsheet pages—every fictional historian and Presidential biographer—is a woman. Also, the paper positions Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the representative from New York, as part of a larger force of congressional insurgents rather than as a lone disruptive voice.
To Servin, this vision of an emergent force from the left is the heart of the project. “Democrats embracing neoliberalism for forty years, leaving millions in the dust who should be their base, is why we have Trump,” he said. “And the only way to oppose this hideous right-wing populism we’re seeing is to offer an ambitious and appealing vision from the left.” The potential result is summed up in a headline on Page A3 of the fake paper: “Team progressive steals a base.”
There is more. The broadsheet-paper edition contained a tabloid-size insert: an action guide to turning the mock Post’s fake news into reality. In twelve short articles—three of them by Kauffman, two by Roychoudhuri, and several culled from sources as different as the Serbian direct-action group Otpor! and Gene Sharp, the American theorist of nonviolent action—this sixteen-page pamphlet may be the best primer now available on understanding protest. It is titled “Bye-Bye: A Guide to Bringing Him Down.” Kauffman, who has been writing about direct action for a quarter century, suggests actionable frames (“target his enablers”; “win through campaigns, not actions”) and specific advice: organize a series of protests and proceed from smaller to larger actions. In a piece titled “Act Like the Majority We Already Are,” Roychoudhuri applies logic to defeatist arguments. “Straight white men—the historical flavor of choice for those who wield power in this country—amount to fewer than 30 percent of Americans,” she writes. “That means the marginalized Americans among us—the queer folk, the black and brown, the immigrants, the women—are indisputably the majority. . . . If we want to win, we don’t need to ‘reach across the aisle’ so much as reach out to prospective allies to ensure they recognize our shared interests, and the power we have as a movement.”
Unlike the real Post, the fake paper on Wednesday said nothing about the Russia probe and very little about the past. Instead, it described a present that many Americans, possibly most, would like to see in our future. And then it made readers feel like this future could be achieved—perhaps even by May 1, 2019, the date on the fake front page.
