We’re Being Ruled Over by the World’s Biggest Losers

Surely, they must be joking. This simply doesn’t pass the smell test! Even if you set the politics aside—Katie Miller went on to say Mr. Miller greets the morning by telling her, “Let’s start the day! I am going to defeat the left!”—there’s not a woman alive who, in her heart of hearts, looks upon that visage with anything approaching envy. Non-losers don’t have to argue and beg like this; their might is self-evident. Only bone-deep lame-Os have to work this hard at it.

Perhaps the world’s most overt loser, Elon Musk, also failed to come up with an original thought about Kirk, his supposed friend, seemingly cribbing remarks from Miller (or perhaps both strains came from preapproved administration talking points). In a clip Musk posted to his Twitter account, he told a reporter Kirk was killed because “he was showing people the light. And he was killed by the dark.” Profound stuff. (Miller, for his part, pledged in his speech that “the light will defeat the dark.”)

Musk has set a new standard for being washed. Let us not forget that he bought and tanked a beloved website as part of a years-long campaign to get people to think he’s cool and funny, a losing battle if I’ve ever seen one. After buying Twitter for what many judged to be a wildly inflated valuation, he set about tweaking the algorithm to artificially flood our feeds with his tweets (er, posts, I guess?), all because a Joe Biden tweet about the Super Bowl was performing much better than his own.

One of the Tesla CEO’s first orders of business was to gut the site’s verification system, which previously gave the place an air of legitimacy for journalists, public figures, and celebrities. The result has been hugely successful for the kinds of losers who previously couldn’t get verified, mostly because they’re anonymous Nazis who post from behind the job-preserving safety of a Greek statue profile picture. (Even with all this algorithmic meddling, valued power users like “Catturd” still regularly complain about being shadow banned. Meanwhile, you can actually get shadow banned for criticizing god-emperor Elon.)

Further evidence of Musk’s serial cringiness abounds, and to document it in full would require a book deal. (Call me!!) But allow me to point to the sheer number of times he’s tweeted the word “epic.” One recent, extraordinarily embarrassing example was a reply to Jeff Bezos, in which Musk earnestly tweeted, “It’s nice to know that epic events are happening somewhere in the world, even if one is not present” and wishing the Amazon founder “an epic wedding.” (Musk was reportedly not invited to the June carbon-burning-palooza/nuptials in Venice.) The South African businessman, who could become the world’s first trillionaire, also tweeted a meme about Harambe, the gorilla, just a year and a half ago. It would be difficult to watch if he weren’t so hell-bent on world domination.

Loserdom is innate to the people currently running our lives and shaping the future of humanity. I’d be remiss not to mention Ted Cruz’s entire being, or Vice President JD Vance’s making the office seem even more useless by mostly using it to defend his boss online while acting like he’s in on the joke, or the recent story in Semafor that included the detail that a Trump appointee said his “radicalizing experience” was being banned from the Gawker comment section.

What’s so galling is that these utter losers are, in actuality, getting away with it: They control the Supreme Court, have all but fully legalized government corruption, and are routinely circumventing due process in immigration courts. Every day, they trample over another of our supposedly sacrosanct civil rights, and mostly, they’re allowed to proceed. And still, it’s not enough, because they know no one really likes them or thinks they’re cool. They effectively own our bodies and our freedoms, but deep down, they know they’re not winning any new hearts and minds, and it eats them up. Look at how the entire conservative apparatus whirred into unified motion to clamp down on the idea that maybe, just maybe, Charlie Kirk’s legacy is open for debate.

These losers aren’t hemmed in by the laws of the land or human decency, but they’ll never be MacArthur or Truman, and we’re never going to buy the tough guy act they’re working so hard to manufacture and impose on us. It should be enough to simply rule the world in their image, but that would demand a shred of confidence—and faces that didn’t all look like that.