Doxxing. Ghosting. Felching. Dorries. New words frame hideous new concepts for which there were previously no words. How would we have navigated the weirdness of the modern world without Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque, George Orwell’s Orwellian or Heinlein’s Grok? If they didn’t exist we would have to invent them. Which is of course what the Trump government has done with the phrase ‘Consequential Culture’, two words that are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the job of shovelling several million KFC party-sized bucketfuls of shit over everything we once naively admired about America.  

The newly minted idea of Consequential Culture allows the newly minted idea of Fascist America to appropriate the supposed techniques of the ‘leftist Cancel culture’ it purported to abhor, but with a different name. But it won’t work for me. I still call Snickers Marathon, Boss Cat was always Top Cat, and Ultravox! were never merely Ultravox to me, even after new frontman Midge Ure accidentally left their exclamation mark behind at the moustache groomer’s. Here’s how Consequential Culture, formerly Cancel Culture, works.

Mention that the belatedly beatified Charlie Kirk had called George Floyd a scumbag, said some black women weren’t very clever, and insisted that Taylor Swift come and live with him and have his dinner on the table every night at 5 o’clock whilst wearing stockings, suspenders and a 17^th century puritan hat or she’d go to hell, and you’ll lose your job. But this isn’t ‘cancel culture’. It’s reframed as Consequential Culture, a sort of natural phenomena that apparently operates of its own agency without official steerage, as inevitable as rain, wind or having loads of free holidays on a paedophile’s island.

Last Wednesday I travelled from Cardiff, where I was painstakingly satirising endemic global unpleasantness for hard cash all week at the New Theatre, to Newport, to eat Lamb Cawl with the Welsh punk mystic Carlton B Morgan. We were celebrating the vinyl release this week of his career retrospective album Living In Treachery, its title taken from an American fan mishearing the title of Max Boyce’s 1974 stand-up comedy album, Live At Treorchy.

I went to get the Flixbus coach round the back of Cardiff castle but by the time the bags were loaded on, the departure time had passed and I was unable to buy a ticket because the system believed that the coach, which was standing in front of me full of empty seats, had left, and only pre-booked passengers could board. The driver was suitably embarrassed, but technically he was already halfway up the A4161 so couldn’t help. So I got a £35 mini-cab to Newport, wasting the earth’s resources and hastening the collapse of the planet’s delicate ecosystem whilst listening to a local radio phone-in about whether climate change was a mitigating factor in mass migration. It was Kafka-esque. Thanks Franz Kafka. What would we do without you?

And thanks too to George Orwell, without whom we wouldn’t have the suddenly ubiquitous Orwellian, or the invaluable Doublethink, a word which should be tattooed on the face of every American commentator threatening ‘Consequential Culture’ to anyone addressing Charlie Kirk’s legacy in anything but glowing terms. But Doublethink is doing doubletime here at home too. Check out this uncut Keir Starmer shit!

Peter Mandelson lost his job for being friends with a paedophile. Donald Trump, who was friends with the same paedophile, was given a state banquet hosted by a King whose brother lost his job because he was friends with the same paedophile. Don’t get me wrong – I hate Peter Mandelson as much as the next north London champagne socialist, but aren’t there Doublethink double standards at work here?

Trump and JD Vance accuse Starmer’s Britain of having a problem with freedom of speech, and Vance circulated a made up-story saying you weren’t allowed to say a Christian prayer within five hundred yards of a pregnant woman in case the foetus later grew up and decided to be a Muslim or something. Obviously, they want unfettered access to the UK’s human meat farm, without any restrictions on content, for all their tech-friends’ social media platforms to spew their lies and propaganda. Starmer’s strategy for proving just how free we are here was to arrest the Lions Led By Donkey blokes for projecting a funny film about how Trump was friends with a paedophile onto the walls of Windsor Castle, a castle which, ultimately, we’ve all paid for anyway. 

How long will it be before Starmer starts, like Trump with Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, closing down all the TV and radio comedy shows that tell the uncomfortable truths that we so desperately need to hear in these troubled times? Luckily there aren’t any so he won’t. But if you are a fan of the new Reform MP Danny Kruger, who wants easier access to psilocybins and tighter access to abortion, and who was once fined £120 after his puppy stampeded 200 deer around Richmond Park, you can see his mother showing you how to make scones on Channel 4’s Bake Off. It’s not known if the scones want to reduce women’s reproductive rights, or contain hallucinogens. I can’t watch it anyway because my son’s left home and I don’t know how to access any terrestrial TV channels.

In a further demonstration of Doublethink, to prove how free we are, Downing Street forbade journalists that had been critical of Trump from attending his UK press conference due to ‘logistical reasons, including weather.’ It’s possible that this excuse was true, but it looks bad doesn’t it? Instead of being protected by a supine Starmer, Trump needs to be exposed to the twin disinfectants of journalism and satire, but not to real disinfectant as there’s a risk he might think it had medicinal properties and drink it.  

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year. Stewart appears with Daniel Kitson in a benefit for Medical Aid For Palestinians on 20 October at London’s Union Chapel