He’s done it again. Elon Musk has broken X.
I say this pretty much every week, so call me dramatic if you will, but it really does feel like each fresh “quality of life” update makes what is already an unusable hellsite even more unusable and even more hellish somehow.
Over the last few days, some H-1B hire has clearly been fiddling with the knobs and levers, because the algorithm now seems hellbent on populating my feed with posts that are all about the same thing. The omnipotent AI that controls the food supply has decided, by observing some minute kink of my attention, to serve me up an endless buffet of exactly the same meal, over and over and over again.
I scroll, I scroll, I scroll but nothing changes.
Over the last day or so, pretty much every single post on my timeline has been a meme about Vivek Ramaswamy. I hovered over one for a moment—I think it was Vivek as “Abraham Stinkin,” complete with stovepipe hat and chinstrap beard—I had a brief chuckle, and now I just can’t get rid of him.
Today I’ve seen Vivek as “Chief Shitting Bull,” “Shartin’ Pooper King Jr.,” “Dwight D. Icantshower,” and the extremely immature, but nevertheless very funny, “Adolf Shitler.”
(I’m of the opinion that, as a man gets older, he comes to realise the things he thought were funny and cool at age eleven are the right things to think are funny and cool as an adult too. An eleven-year-old Charles Cornish-Dale would definitely have laughed at “Adolf Shitler.”)
Some of the film memes were pretty good too. Forrest Dump gets an A-, but my personal favourite was “No Country for Indoor Plumbing,” with its tagline, “There are some things you just can’t flush.”
Again, eleven-year-old me—rolling on the floor, gasping for breath, eyes cloudy with tears.
But I have a feeling the GOP increasingly feels the same way about Vivek: that he’s become a tiresome tom-tit that refuses to disappear round the U-bend. Unfortunately, for the GOP, Vivek Ramaswamy is still running for Governor of Ohio, and the election is mere weeks away.
Vivek has been making headlines after releasing a new attack ad against his Democrat opponent, Amy Acton.
The 60-second ad stars Acton’s own mother, Donna Arthur, and gives air to some very dirty laundry. The mother says the daughter “has a serious problem;” is a “liar;” “lies about her past,” claiming she “grew up living in a tent;” “has lied her entire life;” and “needs help.” The mother urges Ohioans not to vote for her daughter, because she’d make their lives worse. The mother also insists she loves her daughter, and is speaking out for that very reason.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel grubby just watching it. I went and sat in my cold-plunge barrel in the rain, then covered myself with olive oil and scraped it off with my custom-made brass strigil from Etsy. Only then did I feel clean again.
But here’s the thing. The video missed an important fact about Amy Acton’s childhood: She was almost certainly raped by her stepfather when she was ten years old. Acton was removed from her childhood home by social services and, by her own account, hasn’t seen her mother since 1978. Her brother corroborates her story. Despite the stepfather being charged with rape, the mother stayed with him till his death.
When you know those facts—and, trust me, the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign knew those facts—the animosity between mother and daughter takes on a whole new light.
Now, politics is a contact sport. We all know that. President Trump is maybe the best full-contact athlete in the world of politics today. Just ask Rosie O’Donnell, Meghan McCain, Hillary Clinton. Trump knows, as well as any postmodernist, that the personal is political, and vice versa. When the Access Hollywood “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape dropped in 2016, Trump lined up a half a dozen women who claimed Bill Clinton had raped them and brought them to the studio for the next presidential debate. Sure, rape can be political ammunition, especially when your president could be the wife of an alleged rapist and she’s making out she’s a great champion of women.
But saying a candidate is unfit for office because she was raped? Say what you want about President Trump, but I don’t think he’d do that.
Of course, Vivek denies that’s what the ad is actually saying, and he’s had some full-throated endorsement from President Trump and some rather less enthusiastic support from the VP.
Vivek has said the ad isn’t about the abuse Amy Acton faced but a lifelong pattern of “dishonesty” and how that should disqualify her from public office. He’s not embarrassed about the ad at all, he feels not even a blush of pudeur. In fact, he’s paying $4 million to make sure as many Ohioans see the ad as possible before casting their votes.
Do you believe him? I don’t, and here’s why.
