With the news breaking recently that former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and American pop star Katy Perry are now an ‘Instagram official’ couple, I am wondering: has anyone checked to see if these two people are, um, like, real?
Yes, of course I know that Trudeau was in fact in charge of Canada – the United State’s large but slow kid brother – and that Perry dresses up like a sexy robot and prances about on stages singing songs, or something. But are we sure they aren’t some kind of hologram programmed in a lab, where the instructions were: ‘Create two of the most anodyne simulacra of beautiful successful people and let them loose on the world to do inane woke crap all the time!’
I jest. Trudeau is actually a serious person – in that he did serious harm to the country he led for nearly a decade. I have spent half of that time trying studiously to avoid all news of him – that’s how little I care about Canada. But it was impossible. His smarmy face and perfectly coiffed hair were all over the internet, at all times. He was called ‘the anti-Trump’ for hugging Syrian refugees and tearfully apologising in 2017 to the ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit communities’, (yes, really) in Canadian parliament. He then entered into his totalitarian era with Covid. Canada had one of the longest lockdowns in the world. And when people got fed up with living under medical tyranny and started to protest, he took the ‘unprecedented step’ of using emergency powers to freeze their bank accounts.
Trudeau is the epitome of this dismal recent trend of banal, smug, authoritarians who swan around on private jets while lecturing the filthy masses about cow burps and driving gasoline-powered cars (how dare we).
Such performative woke nonsense meant he was given a pass for things that woke people typically hate. For instance, he is the ultimate nepo-baby (his dad was also PM). And he loves blackface! But no matter, he also loves drag queens and took a knee at a Black Lives Matter protest, so he was still the progressive, neolib wet dream.
Still, the halo has faded somewhat since. The nice, harmless country he led for so long is now considered to be a woke hellscape with a lust for killing its own citizens and calling it healthcare. He hailed the 2016 legalisation of assisted suicide to be ‘a big first step’. Sure, Justin, but a first step towards what? According to this Atlantic article, Canadians have now normalised the procedure to the point where you can plan out your own voluntary execution using an app, customising elements like ‘collecting tears from witnesses’.
As for Katy Perry – well, actually, who cares? The most interesting thing about her pop career is how often it showcases her excellent tits, as in the video for a recent song: ‘Woman’s World’, which I was able to endure for all of 58 seconds. The opening lines are ‘Sexy, confident, so intelligent, she is heaven sent, so soft, so strong’. So… AI is writing song lyrics now?
Unsurprisingly, both her record sales and world tour sales have been poor lately, and mostly unremarked upon. Unlike her PR disaster of a trip earlier this year to space with a bunch of other wannabe girl bosses. They got all dressed up in blue space suits and brought cutesy props with them for the 11-minute ride into orbit, only to be Mean Girl’d by cooler celebs like Emily Ratajkowski and Olivia Wilde upon their return.
Perry may be the most vapid singer in the business, but in her defence, at least she did not shut the bank accounts of tax-paying truck drivers, or give a standing ovation to an actual Nazi in parliament, and then try to blame the gaffe on Russia, as her new beau has done.
May they be very happy together!
Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.
