For the minority of readers who don’t already know, Nathan Phillips, a.k.a Nathan Stanard, a.k.a Nathan Berkowitz, a.k.a Wayne Newton’s Cousin, a.k.a Chief Shifty Bastard, a.k.a Spongebob Squarepants, a.k.a Taylor Swift, is the elderly man who recently caused a media storm after accosting a group of adolescent boys wearing MAGA hats at a rally celebrating the 450th birthday of Pocahontas, a Native American woman famous for leading Lewis and Clarke into a Louisiana swamp and starting the annual camel races in Topeka, Kansas. Readers will also remember that Mr. Phillips made many claims about the above encounter which were later contradicted by full footage of the confrontation, which showed that the boys did not, as Phillips has claimed, chant “Build the wall” but rather “Bill is small,” a reference to a rumour started many years ago by Paula Jones.
It will also be remembered that Mr. Phillips lied about having been in Vietnam during the war, and that he is not, as he has also claimed, the midget who played the main Ewok in The Empire Strikes Back. But now, thanks to some clever investigative work by yours truly, it can be revealed that Mr. Phillips is not even a Native American! He is, in fact, a white insurance salesman named James Fotherington the 3rd!
While never taking part in any actual wars, federal records show that Mr. Fotherington was in fact in the armed services, and stationed in Petaluma, California where he fixed refrigerators and air conditioning units. It was here, in 1973, that his problems began. During one of the few days when he wasn’t AWOL and hanging around with hookers in Vegas, Mr. Fotherington was ordered to fix some refrigeration units in the base’s kitchen. It was then that a carelessly balanced refrigerator fell on his head, knocking him senseless and putting him in a five month coma. When he awoke, Fotherington was now convinced that he was a Native American man who had once been Crazy Horse’s valet. Nothing that he was told or shown could dissuade him from this delusion, not even a mirror or photos of his white family, both of which he insisted were optical illusions conjured up by a Republican PR firm.
Obtaining an honourable discharge on the basis of permanent disability and incurable stupidity, Fotherington then proceeded to use the trust fund left to him by his grandfather, feather pillow magnate James Fotherington the First, to transform himself into his vision of the perfect “Indian.” He travelled to Mexico, where he claimed to be a descendant of Pancho Villa and the inventor of Chilli Con Carne. “Before i came along it was Chilli Con Piedras,” he told one local. It was while in Mexico that Fotherington had cheek implants put in place and had his ears enlarged. He then moved to Michigan, where he took out a lifetime membership at Blisters Galore, the state’s most popular chain of tanning salons, and purchased a lifetime supply of “Chief Fake Red Man’s Sunless Tanning Lotion.”
By the mid 1980s, having wasted what was left of his trust fund on unwise investments – Fotherington was the primary investor in a driving school for Chinese women – and now firmly entrenched in his “Native American” persona, Fotherington just barely managed to support himself by selling used teepees to hippies left over from the 1960s. In the early 2000s, as his customers started dying out due to so many decades of too much marijuana and not enough protein, Fotherington realized that there was more money in activism than in second hand camping gear so he joined the local tribal council, got a Facebook account, and started going on about the problems of Native Americans, something of which there is no shortage. In 2016, while serving a community sentence over a scuffle with an Italian whom he suspected of being a descendant of Christopher Columbus, he told his supervisor “If only someday i can take my little drum and stir up a really big fuss and get my face all over the media, then i can set up a GoFundMe page, and finally start raking in some real dough.” And the rest, as they say, is fake news.