Trump Can Now Legally Eat Puppies

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers.

I am Andy Zaltzman, managing editor of the Bugle podcast International Inc.

Bow down and worship.

Welcome to that rarest of cosmic events, a two-bugle week.

We are recording today, Tuesday, the 2nd of July, 2024, our last pre-election bugle, and Friday, the 5th of July,

by which time, let me just check my crystal ball, Armageddon will be upon us.

Now, that's if a Daily Telegraph headline and article about the now probable Labour victory proves to be true, which it won't, even if the probable Labour victory proves actual, which it will probably.

that very, very probably.

So, where else to start than with the first of those two bugles?

This, the pre-election bugle, and joining me to give some icy-headed perspective on the final throbbings of the era of conservative-stroke destructive government here in the UK.

From almost as far away as it's possible to be without being in outer space, where, incidentally, if Nigel Farage's reform UK spring a big surprise and win on Thursday, all other 7.8 billion people in the world will be sent by the end of the year.

Joining us from Australia, it's the fount of all objective reason and wisdom herself, Alice Fraser.

Welcome, Alice, to this truly historic broadcast.

How are you?

I am well.

I'm very excited.

Ooh, a double bugle want to come out this week.

It's a lot of thrill to be on such an auspicious half of the output that you're putting out this week.

Have you voted yet

in the election?

I have sent in my pigeons, and they have been charged with their solemn official duty of pecking the eyes out of the electors.

So

see how that rolls.

And I think

some of your pigeons have been passing fairly physical satirical judgment on some previous incumbents of

our houses of parliament, judging by the tops of the statues around London.

So, well, well done.

And I hope all you buglers listening, wherever you are in the world, whether you are in the UK or not in the UK, whether you're eligible to vote or not eligible to vote, I do hope you have taken this opportunity to vote in the UK election because we need people like you to save us from ourselves.

Okay, first of all, it's not that hard to break into your government's website despite being geo-blocked out of it, which I found out this week when I had to send in my national insurance number to the BBC.

I have the right to work in the UK, but they could not be convinced of it.

And if you set up a complex apparatus of mirrors,

you can fool the government to believing that you're in the UK.

So we are recording two days ahead of the election on the 2nd of July, as I said.

On this day in 1698, Thomas Savory patented the first steam engine.

Initially, it was a method of pumping water to improve drainage in mines and to help with public water supply.

But sadly, the invention of the steam engine unwittingly set in train, ironically, an unstoppable chain of events that led inexorably to thousands of disappointed would-be passengers across Britain standing listlessly on station concourses, gazing at minimal utility information screens and surrounded by the same chain outlets, thinking, Oh, well, never mind, I'm not going to get where I wanted to get by when I wanted to get there, so I'll just enjoy being a living, breathing component of a metaphor for the manifold failures of our economy, politics, and society.

Thank you, Thomas, you engineering adult dream crusher.

Thomas Savory

is dodging nominative determinism there.

He was trying to invent a really complex salty snack and missed.

yes, although it's S-A-V-E-R-Y, which

is a biblical term for thrift or something.

Again, that's there's no place for that in the modern world.

On this day in 1897, celebrity engineer Guillermo Mark, well, Guillermo, how do you Guillermo?

Let's go with that.

Let's call him Marconi.

Marque Marconi

obtained

another patent for the first radio

ever.

Now that set in train an unstoppable chain of events that led inextrabubbly to people shouting at each other during an afternoon drivetime show about issues they have an at-best dangerously superficial level of knowledge about, whilst a host prods both bears with a poison-tipped stick of pseudo-impartiality before we then check in with Kim for the travel.

And today is International Joke Day.

And today's international joke is...

I've got the envelope here.

It's American Democracy.

Narrow win, a very, very hotly contested title.

Fair play, America, you have already put the legwork in.

More of which later.

As always, a section of the Buglers going straight in the bin this week, in this world, in this election week, and with much going on around the world.

In the bin, a very special thing, a moment of quiet reflection in this world of chaos and conflict.

Hey, can you quieten down, please?

We're trying to have a moment of quiet reflection.

Hey, we're trying to achieve some equilibrium here.

Just calm equilibrium.

Guys, can you take that shit back to the mid-15th century where it belongs?

For f' sake, put a fing sock in it!

Not now!

Not now!

Jeez!

You've really ruined this!

You've ruined it!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed our moment of quiet reflection, which has gone in the bin.

I still contend that Chris, instead of putting in the effects you suggest, should just put in you describing the the events.

Top story this week, Britain goes to the polls.

Yes, on Thursday now, as we record, less than forty-eight hours away, we will go with the pencil of destiny in our paws and we will write the letter X, a suitably negative letter in a small box to express a vastly oversimplified version of our political beliefs in the glorious dance that is democracy.

We've had the last knockings of this election campaign,

very similar to the end of the Glasmury Festival.

In fact,

most people are now barely conscious anymore.

They're sleep deprived.

Everyone's lost all touch with reality.

There's a mess everywhere that it will take ages to clear up and a massive gap between the generations over what is right and wrong.

And also no one's listening to the words anymore.

So

it's been a, it's been a, I don't know, it hasn't really been an interesting election campaign, Alice,

really it's been unedifying and unproductive.

Nothing's really changed in it apart from the increasing fear of Britain joining the increasingly trendy drift rightwards politically, despite all the evidence of history suggesting that is a fing stupid idea.

How have you seen it from your perspective, thirteen thousand miles away?

I'm looking at it from the bright side, Andy.

On the bright side, the Tories look like they might be letting the shucked husk of a nation strip mind of its own essential services slip from their clutching talons before they fly off into the sky like a bloated vulture.

That is rude to vultures, of course, who are essentially nature's cleanup service and therefore have probably had their funding cut by the Tories.

I would say rats fleeing a sinking ship, but that only works if the rats sank the ship by selling the bottom planks for parts, getting the repairs done by their rich mates who are shipboard termites and then blaming the ship for being lazy.

I would say leech.

I would say leeches, but those have medicinal uses, so it would be disrespectful of what remains of the NHS to use them as an analogy.

Vampires, too sexy, heartless villains, too sexy, zombies, too sexy, sentient shits, too sexy.

I don't know what metaphor to use for how badly the Tories have mishandled the social infrastructure of this once great nation, but let's just say I am old enough to remember a time when we used to be comfortably able to call the UK a first world country.

Yes, I think that's all fair enough.

The Conservatives' last hope really came in the final head-to-head election debate towards the end of last week between

interim Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and future former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Labour leader.

And as

democratic discussions go, it was...

sort of a bit like watching Aristotle and Confucius harmoniously and constructively discuss the nature and purpose of human existence, if, and only if, you compared it with the American presidential debate.

Otherwise, it was a playground level squabble bleep in which delusive fibsterism buttered up against obfuscatory expectation dampening, resulting in a soul-sapping nil-nil draw.

If you were playing election debate bingo, which I assume buglers, you all were, you would have been shouting, house, house, about every 2.8 seconds throughout.

The spurious claims, the petulant counterclaim, the deflections, the distractions, the wonky mathematics, the uncosted pledge, the repetitive catchphrases, the outright bullshit, the high-speed hypocrisy tennis, the unashamed propaganda.

It was all there for fans of feeling deeply queasy about what democracy has become.

Did it move the dial, as they say?

Well,

nothing has really moved the dial in this election campaign, Alice.

Both parties have fizzled slightly downwards in polling since the election campaign began.

And I think what that shows is that even the dial is immovably apathetic in this

election.

Look, I can't say I'm wildly enthused about the prospect of Keir Starmer in office, but at least if he is elected, he will have been elected.

We can say that.

Unlike the past few.

Yes, elected by more than a couple of hundred or a few thousand Conservatives, which is how the previous,

God, I've lost count now.

Four.

No, three.

Three prime, four.

No, four.

It is four.

Four prime ministers have been.

Andy, there's a lesson here.

Just say any number confidently enough and no one will fact check you.

That's right.

Have you not been watching the debates?

Exactly.

£2,000 is the chosen number of bullshit.

It'll cost you £2,000.

This episode of The Bugle will cost you £2,000.

Yeah, if you join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme and give us £2,000 or £100 and we'll call it £2,000.

That's just the way that British political mathematics works these days.

But anyway, the debate, I mean, some of the Tory press said Soonak did better in it, but it's not really, as I said, it's not moved the dial.

It turns out that 90 minutes of school debate snark attack does not outweigh 14 years of kaleidoscopic social and political mayhem.

So I guess that was the problem

he was up against.

And each attack Sunak tried to launch on what Labour might do was rather undermined by what the Conservative government has actually done.

or hasn't even slightly done, delete according to relevance.

And Sunak, I find him a hard politician to warm to on numerous levels, sort of comes across a bit like a whining teenager complaining that people don't understand his poetry.

And usually feelings of futility, exasperation and disenfranchisement are felt by the voters, but they're being expressed by the government in this

election.

It has been

a strange role reversal.

It felt like Rishi Sunak in his sort of political campaign in the run-up to this election has been playing the role of somebody who's unfortunately slid into a dimension where the person that they're meant to be is actually a villain.

And he's just a harmless guy who now has to live with the choices that that his other self has made

and sleep with his other self's hot wife, you know.

Yeah, I guess that's that does sort of explain things.

The key word in the debate for Sunat was surrender.

He warned, he warned the British public not to surrender to Labour.

Now, again, this doesn't sit well with, you know, for a start, you look back to

previous

election campaigns and warnings of the chaos that would happen if Ed Miniban won in 2015, the strong and stable government that Theresa May promised in 2017 and all the various bullshits of the Johnson campaign in 2019.

All words now are

not

simultaneously hollow and riddled with holes so that they will sink.

Very much like that boat that you described earlier on, I guess, Alice.

And that determination not to surrender doesn't sit particularly well with with the Tories' campaign, which has basically for the last three weeks been please don't make us lose by a totally humiliating margin.

Or indeed from Sunak's own toddling off from a memorial service

on D-Day for one of the country's more famous incidences of non-surrendering.

So

again, it's just one of the many missteps I think that the Conservatives have made.

Or even, you know, Boris Johnson hiding in a fridge, which in a way was really surrendering to the entire concept of human dignity.

They've also, a lot of their campaigners, been warning about labor tax rises, which, following on from the 14 years of austerity, economic hardship, and economic chaos, and the cost of living or cost of existing crisis that we've had, that is a bit like someone coming up to you saying, Yes, we have chopped your leg off with this chainsaw, but we are going to promise you a novelty sock for your bleeding stump.

And understandably, that's not really

resonated, Alice.

It's not resonated with us voters here

in the UK.

Even, you know, the tiny little economic uptweaks that we've seen recently or little moments of relative stability, essentially when the Conservatives say, oh, look, that shows that we can control the election.

That is clutching at the straws that have already broken the camel's back.

It's a lot like being in an argument with someone who goes, well, that's why you cheated on me.

And you go, wait a minute, I didn't cheat on you.

And they go, no, that's right.

Yes, I cheated on you.

That's why we're having this argument.

And every step they bet, there's undermined by some story coming out by events, reality, and facts, three massive enemies of most sitting governments.

And one particular story that stood out for me, Alice, was this story about what was described as the most wasteful government deal of the COVID pandemic, in which £1.4 billion worth of

COVID-era personal protective equipment, over one and a half billion items had to be destroyed or written off.

Now, Labour pointed out that this money could have paid for 37,000 nurses, although I think that would have been worse.

Imagine the furore if they destroyed 37,000 nurses.

I think that that would have been even more of a vote

for the Conservatives.

Interestingly, Andy, billion pounds worth is the name of my imaginary butler.

The best kind of butler.

Yeah, £1.4 billion.

That's £2,000 for every person in this country, if you do the maths wrong.

And

for it to be declared the most wasteful government deal of the pandemic, that, Alice, that is a proper gold medal.

Because some titles

aren't worth much because there isn't much competition.

You know, whether that's some of the less competitive Olympic events or whether it's world's most erotic lawnmower.

or most spiritually uplifting pre-election debate.

But most wasteful government deal of the pandemic.

That is like beating peak Raphael Nadal at the French Open, or like beating Damian Hurst in a least vegan-friendly artwork competition, or even seeing off Liz Truss in a shortest time between change of address cards competition.

So

they've really earned the defeat that all the polls and betting suggests is coming their way.

On Labour, who by the time we record our post-election bugle will be putting together a cabinet and a government, we assume, unless there is

a,

frankly, Trump times Brexit squared level of shock at the actual polls compared to the opinion polls.

Labour's focus has been pretty much on not focusing people's minds too focusedly on anything.

Change has been their key word, but the level of change being offered is fairly minimal.

And I do think, you know, it's hard to say at this point, and we will have to give them time.

I think there's a good chance that starmer and his government will be a more ambitious and radical in power than they've been in opposition um sort of the opposite of uh of blair in 97 uh similarly taking over after a prolonged period of conservative uh government but also you know i guess in this in this country you you can't offer too much change to people generally historically when we vote we are like a magnetic child at the bottom of a well during a coin sharpening and wish-making festival in that we fear change

so you can see why they're being a little restrained.

But as a result of which, as you say, Salma hasn't really captured the public imagination in this debate, and there were questions from the audience.

And an audience member said, are you two really the best we've got to be next prime minister?

And disappointingly, neither candidate had the guts to say, all right, smartass, why don't you have a f ⁇ ing pop at it then, you dick?

Or, no, the best that we've got is a Gary Lineker, Gary Neville dream team, but it won't happen because there's too much money in football podcasting.

anyone anyone can be a prime minister in in the uk anyone as long as you go to eton you can be the any as long as you go to eaton and do ppp ppe at oxford you could be the prime minister as long as you go to eton and oxford and do ppp to ppe and at a particular college then anyone

can be prime minister um and the absolute key is never to have had a real job that is absolutely critical

critical experience you need to be uh to be prime minister which might be uh kier starmer's undoing um ultimately.

That he was one of the most senior lawyers in the country.

That's not the kind of experience anyone wants.

But anyway, to all practical purposes, the answer is clearly yes.

These are,

they are, and as for whose fault that is,

as a nation, we really should not look too hard in our national mirror because we will not like what we see because this is what we have allowed ourselves to become politically now.

Looking at that debate, it's essentially an expression of British democracy as it stands, petulant, antagonistic, peeved, snarky, simplistic, unconstructive, and indirect, which is also the lineup for the Snow White film that sadly never got made.

Just quickly before we move on to other debates and await the results on Thursday,

I guess the big change, as we mentioned last week, was the advance of Nigel Farage's Reform UK.

And they've been slightly undermined, Alison, the last few days by the genuinely appalling reality about who they are and who their candidates are

and

daily stories of not even slightly concealed racism, prejudice, and abject crack pottery.

And you know, I guess why do these keep inviting scrutiny?

Like, they're skating along fine in their lives.

All they need to do is not go, everybody, look at me and what I've done.

Like,

yes, and you know, I guess that's the problem with it.

You can't, you can't stand for parliament under your social media tagline or your below-the-line commenter's name.

So

you can't have Mr.

at Too True For You Numbskulls campaigning.

You probably can, but I guess the problem for Farage is that if one bad apple can spoil a barrel, then several hundred bad apples that make up the entire barrel is going to produce some pretty rancid cider.

One of the candidates was a chap called Julian Malins, who declared, I'll give you a little question here, Alice, if you can get this, because I know you're really into global politics and global culture.

He declared that he was very impressed with which global mega celebrity.

I'll give you some clues.

Hope you narrow it down to probably two people.

A five-letter surname,

first name that ends with R,

in the news an awful lot.

Surname contains the letters I and T, responsible for several international hits, immovably ensconced at the top of their chosen profession and did not perform at Glastonbury.

So that's probably narrowed it down to V.

Putin or T.

Swift.

Who do you think

he went with?

I mean, I'm going to hope it's Taylor Swift, but assume that it's Vladimir Putin.

Yeah, it is sadly.

Putin is amazing at the number of similarities between Putin and Swift.

You don't think it to look at them.

I was going to suggest it would be Beyonce, but he'd pronounce it Beyonce.

Which is, I know, a Beyonce, like a cross between a

bath and a seance.

Sounds quite nice.

I must be quite up for that.

So it's just a Ouija board with a little rubber ducky.

Squeegee board, maybe.

So Malin said

that

he was to defend himself saying, I said he is a good Russian president, a good president of Russia, and for Russia,

which is similar to, I don't want to repeat what we said about Farage's comments about Putin the previous week, which have fallen to a similar ballpark.

But the interesting thing about Malin said was, he is not the Austrian gentleman with a moustache come alive again.

And that is the first time in a long time in British politics that anyone has called Hitler a gentleman.

I think

whatever you think about Hitler, he forfeited the right to be considered a gentleman in fairly conclusive style.

Say what you like about Hitler.

He did shoot his own dog.

Moving on to other democracy around the world now.

And well,

it's hard to know what to say about America at the moment.

We had the, as I mentioned earlier, on the Trump-Biden debate,

which

made a lot of people actively weep, I think, including, and this is not an exhaustive list, a lot of

supporters of the Democratic Party,

the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.

The Statue of Liberty herself wept tears of bronze, stroke, copper.

I don't know what.

What's the Statue of Liberty weep?

I don't know.

You don't weep what your body's made of.

I don't know.

I think she weeps tourists just out of the fire.

I mean, that's what's in a circle system.

I don't know.

Tourists are the lymph.

Yeah.

We've talked a lot about the

unsatisfactory nature of this Trump v.

Biden contest.

And I think this debate really re-emphasized everyone's concerns about it.

And also the vast and tragic irresponsibility of the Democratic Party not to have prepared for this massive inevitability from really the moments that Biden got away with it four years ago.

I mean,

I think my favourite part of the whole process is watching the American political panikarati and pundit class have they go they just have gone full Greek chorus on the subject of like mortality and and they're like oh Biden is so old Trump is so mean like yes yes everyone was everything everyone who hated them said they were and some guy who gets off on telling people I told you so had to be hospitalized because his balls exploded from too much told you so

it used to be that when like a kid was super smart and driven adoring adults would say oh you'll be president one day and now i think it's just the thing that you say to the child who used their phone under their desk in their maths period to cybercrime their grandma with a fake kidnap ransom demand written fully in letter emojis on iMessage.

I actually tried to watch it.

I did.

I tried really hard to watch it because I believe

debates are important and all of that.

And because, you know, writing political satire is part of my job.

I lasted about 10 minutes before I couldn't stomach how embarrassing both of them were being.

I would rather, and I do not say this lightly, I would rather have been watching watching them have sex with each other.

I might have made it to 12 minutes.

Well, it might have been slightly more

uplifting and constructive, to be honest.

I mean, there is a lot of inconsistency, Alice, between how Biden's lack of coherence and seeming struggle with reality is perceived and portrayed, and

Trump's similar struggles.

But I guess the difference is that Trump's unhingedness from reality is why people vote for him and Biden's is why they won't.

And I guess that's the

key difference.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel like we should sort of be blaming the team behind him, whoever was doing the delicate balance of whatever kind of diet, exercise and drugs he's currently balanced on the edge of death with.

Don't try anything new on race day is what I'm saying.

You don't like.

this reminds me of when I was rowing and and the boys school

first eight had been told that if you took a teaspoon of bicarb soda it would reduce the it would reduce put off the time before you went lactic during a race and so on the day of the race they all took a big big tablespoon of bicarb soda and shot themselves down the river

well we can look forward to that in one of the next presidential debates unless the Democrats

belatedly

do the sensible thing.

To add to America's problems and to all our American buglers, you have my deepest sympathies as you attempt to deal with your loss, the loss of the idea of America as a functioning nation.

And, you know,

we're very much on board that travelator,

as Alice suggested at the start, is the Supreme Court ruling basically declaring that Donald Trump is

Nero, I think, the Nero of the

21st century.

And only what he's fiddling won't be a fiddle.

It will be, I don't know, tax returns and God knows what else.

All hail the new king.

Yes.

I mean, this was the...

a 6-3 vote in the Supreme Court that essentially presidents are immune from prosecution for anything they do in an official capacity as president.

Another step towards the abyss as the tragic derangement and incurable arrangement of the USA continues.

I mean, America is, of course, world famous for many things, but perhaps most of all at the moment, it's world famous for being off its mind on the psychotropic, soul-destroying, necrotic drug that is its own deluded self.

And I guess, again, we shouldn't be surprised that a Supreme Court appointed specifically to skew the politics of the entire nation by Donald Trump should skew the politics of the entire nation towards

Donald Trump.

Biden said

in a moment of coherence that the judgment undermined the rule of law and was a terrible disservice to Americans, which is why it's so popular, I think, with Trump and his

supporters.

And Judge Sotomayor, one of the Democratic judges, and unsurprisingly that vote fell on party lines,

said that the immunity ruling makes a president, quotes, king above the law.

And Alice, I know you you spent some time in America

studying and

working.

But isn't getting rid of kings who are above the law kind of the whole idea that America was built on?

And, you know, a bit of an admission that they got it wrong back in the 1700s, like we've always said on this show.

I mean,

it's extraordinary.

I mean, there was always this kind of strategic ambiguity that allowed presidents to sort of bend the law and assassinate enemies and all of that.

But they had the mild behavioral check of worrying that if they did something blatantly illegal while in office, they might be held accountable for it.

And now they are, it's not just immunity, it's absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.

Official acts that include things like

pressuring the vice president, the Department of Justice to overthrow the government, and that talking to advisors or making public statements are also official acts, which means the evidence of what presidents say and do cannot be used against them to establish whether a thing is official or not.

You've got to laugh, Andy.

That's what they say.

They say you've got to laugh, or the new American God-King will define jizzing on an eagle an official act immune from prosecution and come jizz on your pet eagle.

This law

is a loaded gun in a Chekhov play that's just sitting on the table waiting for someone to cross the river with it and shoot democracy in the gravel pit for not being a working dog like Chrissy Noam's puppy.

I just think the problem with the ruling classes right now is they're hacking wholesale against these like irksome checks and balances that restrict their power and i can sort of see why they would want to do that that but the problem is that those checks and balances are in place to replace the old system where people in power had absolute power and could get away without abusing it until one day they would walk out the front door of their palace and go ah i wonder who put that guillotine on my lawn you know

that was the old system man don't bring that back

I mean, clearly we have a problem that, you know, this, the Supreme Court, which was,

you know,

I think Trump appointed three judges to the the Supreme Court who basically go to work wearing a what would Donald Trump do logo tattooed onto the inside of their eyelids.

And, you know, it showed that, you know, they're interpreting these sort of fairly old pieces of legislation and constitutional text.

And rather naively, it turns out that the founding daddies, fathers, sorry, didn't factor in the prospect of a Trump-like figure becoming president, very much like they didn't factor in

to their Second Amendment wording, the prospect of their words being twisted to mean anyone can have a machine gun if they ask.

So, you you know, I guess it was naivety on the part of those guys

all those years ago.

Sottomoyall said, you know, raises the prospect that a president could order, and this is a direct quote, orders the Navy's SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, immune, organises a military coup to hold on to power, immune, takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon, immune, immune, immune, immune.

In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.

And I've done a little bit more research into this, Alice, and it turns out the the president can now,

provided that he or she, by which I mean he is acting in an official capacity, can now steal all the money from the Federal Reserve and spend it on a 20-mile high statue of Freddy Krueger having sex with Martha Washington.

He can tip a special chemical into the national water supply that makes everyone grow an extra nose on their chin.

And he can organise a children's cutest puppy show on the White House lawn, then just as the excited kids parade their little doggies before the Commander-in-Chief, scoop them up with a magic dog magnet, feed them into a giant mincer one by one whilst eyeballing the children and telling them they'll be next if they even come close to barking.

Then turn the mince pups into a commemorative sausage, barbecue it, and tell the children that they cannot leave until they've eaten it and shat it.

But that's America.

That's obviously what was wanted by that initial piece of legislation.

That freedom for presidents to do that, if that is the correct thing to do.

Look, I feel like the only way that we can solve this pickle that America is in right now, with Biden in power and looking increasingly befuddled,

with the right to break the law being bestowed upon the president, presumably in the hopes that President Trump will take full advantage of it, is I want Biden to spend the rest of his term on a full crime spree, like just

a plateless motorbike with an endangered animal stapled to the front.

Like, that's what I want him to be cavalcading around in, doing wheelies on some old lady's law, and like just proving that he's still got some edge.

I reckon that could turn this whole thing around.

Yeah.

Well, I think we'd all pay to watch that.

What a way to go.

Let's move on to France, Alice.

And

the

well, Emmanuel Macron's wild spin of the political roulette wheel appears to have backfired right in his face.

The first round of elections saw the far-right National Rally Party take around about a third of the popular vote.

There is now a second round

that will require, well a level of cohesion and cooperation from those who are not in favour of a far-right takeover of a nation that really ought to know better.

In summary, Alice, Zuta, fking lordy, what the fk has happened in France?

I have to say, French politics has always seemed quite foreign to me.

And then when it was about a river of shit, it was suddenly like, oh, hey, we have that in the UK too.

Apparently, this could be the first far-right government in France since the World War II Nazi occupation.

And those are not words you want to hear.

Like, at least that time, they had the excuse that they were being occupied by the Nazis.

And now this is like the worst own goal you can imagine.

Look, on the other hand, on the bright side, it is nice to see people who are willing to admit to their mistakes.

And I think we can all agree with the French that getting rid of the aristocracy was a mistake.

You know, it's never been as cool to be French as it was when men were men and everyone had syphilis.

Yeah.

We look back.

These pillars of society that are that are stripped down by the woke.

It's all their fault.

We will have full updates on all these elections,

in particular the British one on Friday, and then the others, as they happen over the course of this year, the bugle is the world's only source for true democratic bullshit.

Billionaires news now, and oh what a headline this is Alice Elon Musk the fifth in the Lon Musk dynasty after ABC and D Lon Musk of course has announced plans to blast the International Space Station out of the skies

I mean this is I mean this is one of the great

news stories it's it's nice that he's being open about his plans uh now but he's he's intending to shoot the International Space Station down I think with a special laser gun is that correct

yeah he's he's leaning into his full villain era apparently they're going to build a vehicle that's capable of pushing the platform the orbiting platform of the international space station into the pacific ocean early in the next decade and for people who are worried about ocean pollution don't worry

they'll dodge the turtles i guess

and the ocean's massive and it's still over 99 water not even one percent plastic yet i don't know why people are so fussed about it i just feel like this is the wrong move you you want to push it into the sun isn't that the Isn't that the next move when you're done?

It's going to be £668 million

worth of

space thing.

And that sounds to me, to my ear, both too expensive and too cheap.

I don't know how much space things should cost.

But I'm definitely outraged either way.

Yeah.

I mean, the story is not quite as good as the headline.

And it's, you know, he's not actually doing this unilaterally.

Oh, yeah, no, it's sort of an appealing metaphor for the ways in which elon musk has encroached on the kind of uh government space of space uh with his commercial enterprises and pushed them uh pushed the socialized medicine aspect of space travel out of the air in favor of capitalism so i think that's probably why the why the headline appeals that he's managed to kind of eat everyone else's lunch.

For a bit of background, the International Space Station has been tootling around our skies since 1998, but is now facing certain doom at the hands of Musk, the world's leading escaped cartoon bond villain, as his scheme to take over humanity, ban the human soul, and turn us all into tunnelling robots continues apace.

As I said, the story isn't as good as that headline,

which is why, as all good third millennium paid-up card-carrying human beings should know, never read beyond the headline.

Therein lies details, facts, nuance, and if you're lucky, some vague element of reality, four things which are pretty much guaranteed to upset you these days.

And by these days, I'm referring to anything post-Stone Age and the Stone Age, just to be just to be safe.

Musk has also been in the news, Alice,

for rowing back on his go f yourself comments that he made to potential advertisers on his social media

platform.

He was speaking in Cannes

on Wednesday, and he told advertisers to go f yourself and then claimed that it was

it was actually a general point on freedom of speech.

So this is him walking back statements that he made when he was taking in the midst of taking over X and saying I don't need your money

you know I'm I'm the billionaire

I have f you money and then it turns out that the fk you money is not as f you money as he thought it was because advertisers fled in droves and now he's doing the embarrassing thing of having to walk back a f you which is

not not great you never want to walk back a f ⁇ k you you never want to be like I meant lightly finger you in the bushes you know he

he was trying to

flex and the flex strained his wrist I'm afraid

so he's trying he's trying to lure his his advertisers back with grovelling patheticness I guess

well it's a very potent very very potent tool through human history grovelling patheticness well he's he was sort of presenting it as an unreasonable thing that the advertisers on the platform X wanted what he calls censorship and what they call not wanting to have their ads posted next to a picture of a naked penis, you know.

Potato.

Because it does nothing good for their brand.

Like

potato, phallic-shaped potato.

In other news now, and well, it has been a great time, Alice, for fans of headlines that sound like they're from the 19th century.

We've had incurably divided America tears itself apart limb from limb.

War continues in the Crimean region.

Unstoppable pace of technological advance brings uncontrollable social change.

I mean, that's for quite a lot of history recently.

The headline: Everyone Pretty hacked off right now.

Again, that's maybe not exclusive to our time and the 19th century, but this one, I mean, this was a real blast of nostalgia for fans of the 19th century world.

Britain sends prisoner to Australia.

It's been a while, Alice,

but Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks Leaks Leaks,

has landed back in Australia after a prolonged 12-year staycation, first in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, then Belmarsh Prison, the 792-bed zero-star non-voluntary hotel.

Reviews include not glamorous at all, few angles for even a half-impressive selfie, one star, that's from ostentatious Traveller magazine.

Assange reached a deal with the US justice system whereby he pleaded guilty to one espionage-related charge and promised not to run for president even though though he was now a convicted criminal, which is a bit unorthodox.

I guess whatever words for him.

Are you excited, Australia, to have to have Assange back in the loving bosom of the Australiac nation?

Well, I hope to meet him again in real life.

And I had debated him once at Splinter in the Grass Music Festival.

We had a Skype debate.

He Skyped in.

It was basically trying to plug the WikiLeaks party.

And so we had some sort of half-assed debate where I think the premise was you can't trust the media and I was on the opposing scene and I said you can trust the media to be

anyway the most notable thing about this experience other than his absolute lack of enthusiasm for the topic of the debate

was a guy who came up after the debate enraged.

He looked like a miniature Julian Assange and he was outraged that I had debated against his hero and that our team, I mean, we'd been told like 10 minutes before what the subject was, but he was very, he took it very personally and he threw a bottle of water onto the stage in protest

or to hydrate us.

I'm not sure what it was.

Well, that brings us to the end of this first bugle of our Tube Bugle week.

As I said, yes, the polls are opening early on Thursday morning.

We're recording now, it's midday on Tuesday.

So just

hours to go.

We are, it seems, in the last, I think, I said last week 490 odd bugles under a conservative government and i'm sincerely hoping this will be the last uh with all due respect to our many conservative parties supporting listeners i'd just like some

just a new a new topic of conversation on this show a new target for satire that's all that's all i asked for there's not much to ask um

Some plugs before we go.

My stand-up tour begins on the 1st of November, the Zoltgeist.

It is splattered across several months and many, many venues in the UK and Dublin and hopefully some European dates to be confirmed shortly.

Details at andesoltzman.co.uk also Helen Zoltzmann, the quibbling sibling, is doing some illusionist live shows in the UK.

uh this summer it's been uh well a long time since she did shows here in the uk having uh immigrated a while ago um a fabulous show entitled souvenirs in august and september the 25th of august in newcastle the 26th of august in glasgow the 31st in Cambridge, and the 15th of September in Edinburgh with more dates to be added soon.

Details and tickets via the illusionist.org.

Alice?

You can find me at patreon.com/slash AliceFraser.

One of the things that I'm pushing on that at the moment is that twice a week I do a writers' meeting.

I do a whole bunch of other stuff over there.

You can get my stand-up specials for free, but I do twice-weekly Zoom writers' meetings.

So if you have a project that you are working on, that you want to work on or you'd like to start writing, come along.

It's a lot of fun, and I will help you with your thing.

If you are in Tokyo, however, you can come to a writers' intensive afternoon, which will be on the 12th of October at the Fab Cafe in Tokyo.

And you can come and we'll do a whole thing, and I'll give you a lot of feedback.

It's going to be great, it's very exciting and fun.

There'll be one in London too, but I haven't locked down the venue.

But patreon.com/slash AliceFraser, the application form for the Tokyo thing is up.

Now I'm keeping it very limited in numbers because I want to be able to give everyone like one-on-one time.

So it's like, go and get it now.

Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

And do also listen to The Gargle, the Beauty magazine assisted publication to this relentlessly news-focused broadsheet podcast.

Right, and if you want to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme, to help keep the show free, flourishing, and independent, and get access to the global exclusive monthly Ask Andy Show in which I answer all your questions, do go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

We will be back with our post-election bugle recording on Friday afternoon with the wonderful Mark Steele.

Until then, vote as furiously and fervently as humanly possible wherever you are.

Goodbye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.