Wow! That escalated quickly. Last time I filed my supposedly funny column, only two weeks ago, Los Angeles wasn’t on fire; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t abandoned the guardrails that restrict neo-fascist lies, or “free speech” as they are now known; the US hadn’t threatened to invade Canada and Greenland; Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson hadn’t declared the sniff-conked sunbed fraudster Tommy Robinson the new Nelson Mandela; and the next US president, though already an adjudicated sexual abuser, wasn’t actually a convicted felon who would have been in prison were he not in the White House. Jesus! I only popped out for some (oat) milk.
Twenty or so years ago, I had a friend whose flat was clearly infested by hundreds of rats that she never saw. We’d come in, put the Happy Shopper bags on the kitchen table, go to the loo, and return to see the sacks shredded and everything attractive to rodents disappeared into the cavity walls. Either that or there was a really hungry flatmate who was usually out whenever my friend was in. And wasn’t paying any rent. And left tiny oblong droppings under the units.
But the rats have been in the walls of the world all along it seems, just waiting for us to go to the bathroom for a quick number two. And now the Jacob’s Crackers of truth are stuffed up the chimney stack of our shared certain doom. Or something.
For example, the last time I heard black lesbians being blamed for everything was a few years back, when a rich white dad explained how bias in favour of black lesbians was the reason his son wasn’t assured his rightful Oxbridge place. But, after the year when we finally managed to hurl our civilisation over the 1.5C threshold that will destroy everything, Elon Musk tells us the LA inferno was down to employing black lesbian firefighters. The Trumptatorship will pin the blame for the climate crisis on anyone but the oil industry, and as far as I know black lesbians aren’t especially flammable.
This is just one example of the bullshit tsunami suddenly engulfing the world, the rats breaking out of the walls as one, funnelled and amplified by the pragmatic obedience to Trump pledged by the dark tech-lords Elon Musk of Twitter (currently X), Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and wrecker of the Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, the latter of whom just gave Donald $1m, and Melania a further $40m to make a documentary about herself. Why? At least Imelda Marcos had 6,000 interesting shoes.
(Perhaps Melania could make a series about how she met Donald? Bizarrely, Melania’s relationship with Trump began when he chatted her up while on a date with a woman actually called Celina Midelfart, heiress to the Norwegian Midelfart fortune. It’s sad to think that Melania prevented the possibility of a Midelfart-Trump dynasty. I’d have put up with the rise of the far right worldwide if it meant I got to read news about the social lives of the Midelfart-Trumps.)
I’ve written before about my BNP-voting auntie, who 20 years ago forwarded on to me an Islamophobic tract she had been emailed which, I noted, was written by an academic who did not exist from a university that didn’t exist either. “Never mind,” she said, “I still think it makes a lot of good points.”
Nascent neo-Nazis are looking for confirmation bias for their worst instincts, but back in the good old days at least they had to look. Now social media, stripped deliberately of safeguards and, in Twitter’s case, re-algorithmed to steer far right, will ping lies straight on to your phone unbidden. One in five British adults aged between 28 and 44 would now prefer a dictatorship to a democracy, apparently. Hopefully they will have the consistency not to vote.
We can’t let Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos reshape our reality, and have to encourage every friend, relative, celebrity and institution to disconnect from them. I opened a Facebook account for the first time last year – to find a lost cat – and shut it down for ever last week; I opened a Twitter account two years ago to follow feeds about archaeology, art and jazz, but like millions of others I went to Bluesky at new year, leaving David Baddiel, Robin Askwith and that woman who makes woodcuts of moss to their lonely fates, the Titanic dance band in full flow, as an iceberg in the shape of Prime Minister Tommy Robinson looms out of the mist.
And last week, a long-term physical media addict, I weaned myself off the midnight hit of instant Amazon shopping. Where once my cart creaked, I instead bought a new uncensored edition of Rose Macaulay’s 1918 feminist sci-fi fable What Not direct from publishers Handheld Press, who sent me a personalised thank-you. Twenty years I’ve been buying shit off Amazon and all Jeff Bezos ever did was suggest that I might be interested in buying books written by me, and films I appeared in.
Realistically, we should now be imposing the same boycotts on Musk’s hideous fascist US that we once did on apartheid South Africa; and which we clearly should impose on Afghanistan now, where it appears the thwack of leather on willow trumps the sound of the keys turning in the locks that imprison women all over the country. It’s just not cricket. Oh hang on! Sorry. It just is cricket!
So sit your kids, and their grandparents, down. Tell them not to believe anything they see on Facebook, Twitter, Threads or Amazon TV without checking it somewhere reliable. Make your family into a little Lindisfarne for this era of lies, somewhere we can wait out the information dark age, like monks poring over illuminated manuscripts as the black dragon sails of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos flutter on the horizon, until the future fascists either tear themselves apart, or slaughter objective truth wholesale.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
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