We shouldn’t have to live like this. You wouldn’t open the washing machine door and put a kitten in when it was on a spin cycle. But open a newspaper and you’re subjecting the kitten of your own consciousness to a news cycle that is arguably worse for your brain than being in a washing machine. And you don’t even come out of it feeling clean. You just feel dirty. Tony Blair’s horrific face? Again? Really? I’ve had post-phall cistern-blocking episodes that are easier to flush away. What’s he doing criticising Keir Starmer anyway? Shouldn’t he be doing his important Tony Blair work for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, helping to spread Tony Blair peace and love throughout the Gulf states? Like last time.
Online conspiracy theorists tried to convince us that, on 28 February, the Iranians shot two successive misappropriated American Tomahawk missiles at an Iranian girls’ school and then filled the rubble with over 170 dead Iranian schoolgirls’ bodies that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard kept in freezers in case they ever needed to stage the scene of a slaughter. Presumably they got the idea from the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, which you’ll remember was faked by anti-freedom-of-speech activists to discredit the online toothpaste salesman Alex Jones.
On 7 March, Donald Trump welcomed home the charred remains of six dead soldiers, the first American casualties of the illegal war the adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster has embarked on in partnership with a man bearing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for alleged war crimes and alleged crimes against humanity. And, to add insult to injury, Trump did so while wearing one of his tasteful Trump merchandise white baseball hats, with the numbers 45-47 on the side. Does this man’s depravity know no end?
So disgusting was Trump’s appearance with a bad hat that, had Fox News viewers seen it, the sickening image could have risked turning the tide of American public opinion against the war, a bit like the 1963 photo of nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down a road in Vietnam covered in burning napalm. And she wasn’t even wearing an inappropriate hat. Or anything.
Luckily, Fox News viewers didn’t see the Trump hat footage, as somehow it was substituted by Fox for film of Trump at a different event respectfully not wearing a hat.
Fox News employed Trump’s self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, as a presenter from 2014 to 2024. Hegseth left to cover himself in Christian white-supremacist tattoos and immanentise the apocalypse on behalf of investors in military drone technology like Trump’s sons and the returning Christ. Yet the broadcaster claims the hat switcheroo error was inadvertent, although it continued to repeat it in further bulletins after the mistake was pointed out, perhaps hoping to be able to franchise the footage for daily showings on every regional TV station in perpetuity, like the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond.
(To be fair to Fox, what they did or didn’t do is no worse than in 2019 when, after Boris Johnson laid a wreath upside-down at the Cenotaph, the BBC replaced the footage with film of him managing to lay a wreath the right way up, a rare example of the UK pioneering the drift into disinformation, rather than following America’s lead.)
Hegseth left Fox to immanentise the apocalypse on behalf of investors in military drone technology and the returning Christ
On Tuesday, the American military finally started to take responsibility for the missile attack that killed all the schoolgirls. Was it human error using obsolete data? Was it an AI error? And if so, perhaps the same AI software that targeted the Iranian girls’ school has a program that substitutes images of Donald Trump at funerals with no baseball cap for images of Donald Trump at funerals with a baseball cap, and had gone rogue inside the Fox News machine?
The possibility that the mass killing was the result of an AI hallucination by the technology provided to Operation Epic Fury by Peter Thiel’s Palantir should worry us. It’s the same Trump-loyalist company with whom Peter Mandelson set up a secret meeting for Keir Starmer, and to whom we are handing over our health and defence data. Hopefully there won’t be any similar mix-ups here. When I next go to the chemist to collect another batch of statins I don’t want to return home to find my house has been accidentally destroyed by an American Tomahawk missile due to a data error.
Despite complaints, the wrong hatless-Trump funeral footage still remains, mislabelled, on Fox’s website. When Joe Biden checked his watch towards the end of a war-dead ceremony during his time in office, the Republicans used footage of the disrespectful act in advertising campaigns. And Pete Hegseth did a furious editorial about it, denouncing the then president’s “betrayal” of American families, on, ironically, Fox News. I suppose the difference is Biden wasn’t being used by God as a tool to bring about the apocalypse.
Even though the American military accepted responsibility for killing all the girls, by Wednesday still no one had told Donald Trump, who, when asked about that fact, said: “I don’t know about it.” Instead he steered the conversation, as he has in all his public appearances since, towards his plans to end the transgender “mutilization” of children, and to protect women and girls. Unless they are Iranian schoolgirls killed by American missiles. In which case he doesn’t know anything about them. Although this has never stopped him talking about things before. Like wind. Or the second world war. Or the presence of British service personnel in Afghanistan. Besides which, some of those girls may have grown up to design missiles of their own so it’s probably better they are out of the way early as a precautionary measure. Like Iran generally.
And what is “mutilization” anyway, a made-up but brilliant word which Trump has suddenly started using repeatedly as if it were real? Is it meant to describe the ongoing collective alteration of the faces of all the Republican women in the public eye, whose Teflon features are now ideally suited to convey the impression of unflinching certainty in the face of uncomfortable truths? Or has the supra-literate Trump somehow gone beyond language as we know it and stumbled intuitively on what may yet be the word of the year? Because Trump has managed to describe exactly how the Trump-driven news cycle is making me feel. Goddammit! I’m being mutilized! You’re being mutilized!! We’re all being mutilized!!!
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, and Stewart will introduce a screening of the film The Memory Blocks, with the artists Andrew and Eden Kötting, at the Watershed in Bristol on Saturday 28 March