By Cooter Jackson, Editor-in-Chief

MUD LAKE, NV—Well friends, it finally happened. Them Government thugs finally came to drag ol’ Cooter away.

I thought I was finally safe, after our Dear Leader Trump took office. I thought that with the Lizard Queen vanquished, I could finally relax a bit. How wrong I was.

It started out as such a great day in Mud Lake. I’d finally caught that chupacabra that had been getting into my trash cans. This was no simple task, I assure you. I constructed a simple, Elmer-Fudd style trap for the little fella, but that was the easy part.

You see, it’s well known that Chupacabras are predators that hunt by tracking psychic brain waves. Of course, lacking their natural prey in this dimension, they resort to sucking the blood out of domestic livestock. Anyway, they locate their prey with sensitive psychic antennae, making them almost impossible to surprise. But I was prepared. Using a finely tuned mixture of absinthe, diphenhydramine cough syrup, Adderal, and powdered monkey scrotum, I was able to neutralize my brain wave frequencies, masking them within the normal psychic pulsations of the planet. I then concealed myself in the pile of discarded beer cans and pizza boxes next to my trailer, and waited for the little guy to fall into my trap.

Long story short, that chupacabra never saw me coming.

Turns out, chupacabras look an awful lot like mangy raccoons. To the untrained eye, that is. But this little fella was pretty upset with me. I decided I’d name him Chupey, and we were gonna be best friends. I was so busy chasin’ him around the inside of my trailer, tryin’ to convince him to accept my love, that I didn’t hear the helicopter until it was too late. I was tryin’ to pry Chupey out from behind the refrigerator when finally, I heard them knocking on the door. When I answered, there at my doorstep were two hulking government thugs. The Men in Black. They found me at last.

“Wait a second here, fellas,” I said, “Trump won. We’re on the same team now.”

It didn’t matter a bit. They chucked a black bag over my head and then beat on me—with what felt like gym socks full of nickels—until I passed out.

A few hours later, I woke up. I was tied to a chair in a dark room with a cement floor. A single bright light shone right at my face. “You cold-blooded lizard bastards!” I screamed. “You think you can get away with this? When Trump hears that you’ve escaped from your dimensional exile, he’s going to be pissed!”

I was interrupted by a voice from behind the light. “Are you Cooter P. Jackson, writer and publisher of The Mud Lake Proboscis?”

I struggled against my bonds, squinting into the white glare of the spotlight. “Hell yes I am!” I asserted. “You just wait until I expose you cold-blooded animals with my hard-hitting journalism!”

The man behind the light chuckled. He said, “So, you sincerely believe that our government is at constant risk of being infiltrated and subverted by trans-dimensional Lizard People?”

“You’re damned right I do!” I yelled. “You just wait until our Dear Leader gets hold of you scaly bastards! He’ll wring your scrawny neck with his entirely normal-sized fingers!”

“Hmm . . . and you seem to believe In UFOs, the flat earth theory, the lost continent of Atlantis, Bigfoot, and leprechauns?”

“Well, that’s a gross oversimplification,” I responded. “How would you like it if I boiled down your entire Lizard cultural belief system to one sentence?”

“Our information also indicates that you have only a sixth-grade education?”

“I don’t need no fancy education to see the truth!” I said. “Einstein didn’t need no education to come up with that theory of evolution.”

“But, Einstein held a doctorate in . . . oh, nevermind. Moving on. According to our reports, you’ve been arrested more than sixty-five times, on charges ranging from public intoxication to harassing livestock. And you had most of your temporal lobe removed, after using high explosives to try to blast cocaine into your nostrils.”

I nodded. “Yes, but that’s but an arugula of the brain that’s not belfry important.”

The voice spoke again, deep and sinister. “Well, Mr. Jackson. We’ve reviewed your file, and come to a conclusion. In the new world that we’re creating, there’s only one thing to be done with individuals like yourself.”

“Just try it, you scaly bastards!” I screamed. “I’ve been inoculating myself with ethylene glycol antifreeze for months! You try to feed your grub children on my pasty flesh, and they’ll drop dead!”

“Oh, it’s much worse than that, Mr. Jackson.” Someone turned on the main lights. Sitting at a desk behind the spotlight was a gray haired, overweight man, disheveled like someone who’s been living in an airport for a week. “We’re not going to feed you to any lizard grubs. We’re going to make you Secretary of Education.”

“Whut,” I said.

The man said, “Hello, Cooter. I’m Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s Obergruppen—I mean, Chief of Staff. When I saw the Mud Lake Proboscis, I knew that we had to get you onboard. Your brand of batshit crazy, reality-averse, disjointed rambling is exactly the kind of thing we like to see in our spokesmen and cabinet appointees.”

“So, wait, why with the kidnapping, and the black bag, and the beating?”

Bannon laughed. “Oh, I just find it adds a bit of panache to the selection process. Don’t you think? Betsy Devos can take a kidney punch like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Well, I don’t doubt that.”

“Of course, there’s still that pesky confirmation process. Don’t you worry about any of that. But, just to prepare, we have to ask you a few more questions.”

“Okay. Can you untie me?”

“No.”

So, then Mr. Bannon asked me a whole bunch more questions, about everything from Lemurians to my burning hatred for liberal traitors. With every answer I gave, Mr. Bannon got more and more excited. By the end, he was all sweaty, and his jowls were quivering like a bulldog that’s about to get fed some pork chops. And then finally, he leaned in close and said, “Mr. Jackson, tell me: What do you think about the Jews???”

I blinked a few times. “The Jews? Oh, they’re alright, I guess.”

“Alright? They’re alright? No conspiracy theories you’d like to expound on? No sinister plots? No dastardly alliances? No hidden organizations bent on world domination?”

“Nah,” I answered, “The Lizard People basically have that sewed up. I mean, the Mole People are trying, bless their hearts, but the Lizards are in a whole other league. If the Beetle Men would get their act together they might be contenders, but so far they’re more concerned with internal politics.”

“But surely you know about the Jews . . .”

“Oh yeah, sure. I’ve seen Blazing Saddles like a hundred times. I love Mel Gibson movies.”

Bannon stared at me in disbelief. “Wait, you’ve never heard of the Jewish banker’s plot to control the world?”

“I mean, I’ve heard of it. But it seems a little far-fetched, you know?”

Bannon’s face fell. He sighed and waved his hand. “You can go, Mr. Jackson.”

“Wait, but wasn’t I gonna be secretary of abdication?”

“You may go.”

After that they put the bag back over my head and beat on me some more. When I came to, I was back in my trailer in Mud Lake.

I guess that’s the way it goes. I’ll never know what went wrong, but I sure am sad about losing my chance to serve my Dear Leader. But at least now I’ve got Chupey to keep me company. He’s been coming around. He only bit me three or four times today, and it’s gotten to where he’ll eat right out of my hand. He gets so excited to see me that he starts foaming at the mouth.