YOU’VE BEEN TRUMP’D! Newsweek Becomes Punchline By Fact Checking Future-Predicting Prank Painting.
To the non-journalistic eye that’s a fake image. But, Newsweek said, ‘No so fast! This involves Trump! We must warn the public!’ What proceeds is a floundering ‘news’ outlet falling for a twist on the popular Deez Nuts meme.
They actually ran with it: Fact Check: Did Deitz Nuutzen Painting Predict Trump Dinner With RFK Jr?
Looking at the “painting” it looks AI-generated. The composition exactly matches the photograph, down to the person in Musk’s position having their hands on their thigh with four fingers visible, the gold bar as the base of the table, and the figures in Kennedy and Musk’s position both wearing modern leather dress shoes, not typical of the early 18th Century.
Deitz Nuützen is a homophone of “Deez Nutz,” an internet slang term for testicles (these nuts).
The meme has its origins in rapper Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic. It has a track called “Deeez Nuuuts” in which rapper Warren G tells a joke to a woman on the phone, the punchline of which is “deez nuts.”
In March 2015, Instagram user @WelvenDaGreat posted a video of himself calling his friend asking whether something came in the mail today, because he was expecting “deez nuts” before letting out a screeching laugh and yelling “gotteem.”
That video became a viral sensation and internet meme. Musk himself has posted at least two “deez nutz” memes on his X account this year.
As Warren Squire of Twitchy notes, “You have to feel sorry for the ‘journo’ who got drafted to do this. Someone, please feed this kid a sandwich. He looks starved.” Maybe RFK Jr. or Trump can give him a few of their Quarter Pounders and Big Macs:
Up until 2010, Newsweek was owned by the Washington Post, who published it as a magazine with largely American staffers reporting mostly on American news. But along with Nicholls, both the person whom Newsweek employed in late October to remind their readers that the “photo” that Trump tweeted depicting him with massive biceps and a taut waist in a Pittsburgh Steelers uniform was “81 percent likely to be constructed by AI,” and the person who ran a health inspection from afar on the Pennsylvania McDonald’s where Trump served fries and worked the drive-up window for a few hours were Brits. Just out of curiosity, is there some make-work program that Newsweek has with British universities to hire their J-school students and let them write up their first articles on the cheap covering American politics? Is Newsweek the Fleet Street farm team?