Dingus of the Year 2023

It's a real dinguspalooza

Welcome to the fourth annual Dingus of the Year Awards. The DOTY is a dinguspalooza, celebrating the best of the worst of humanity. Past DOTY winners include Kim Reynolds (2020), Jeff Bezos (2021), and Elon Musk (2022).

The Dingus Awards began as a way to find humor in the fight. A way to vent a little, try to fend off nihilism and find some humor in the everyday horrors. These awards are offered in the spirit of the late columnist Molly Ivins, who once said, “So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.”

Here is a spreadsheet of all the dinguses to date!  And here are links to the DOTY awards from 2020, 2021, and 2022.

The DOTY Awards also function as a small fundraiser to give to causes that help people fight the widespread effects of dingusry. In past years, we’ve given to the 1619 School in Waterloo and OneIowa. This year, I am donating $750 to the Iowa Abortion Access Fund.

$750 is the average cost of an abortion in Iowa.

This year, I joined the board of the IAAF and I’ve seen firsthand how the fund helps people access the healthcare they need. We are the second-oldest abortion fund in America and have only two paid staff. The rest of our money goes straight to clinics who reach out to us on behalf of clients who need help paying for their abortions.

Listen, I know it can feel disheartening living in a red state and watching legislatures systematically dismantle our rights. But there are people out there doing good and giving to those in need. And it makes a difference. And if you believe in expanding abortion access, then donate to IAAF or any of your local abortion access funds. They do the work.

This year, we saw a request come through for over $3,000. An abortion procedure that costs that much means that the situation was dire. Because of generous donors, we were able to give that amount of money to that person, whoever they are, and wipe out that debt. But the need is overwhelming. Studies show that people who'd been denied abortion experienced worse economic and mental health outcomes than people who had them. Planned Parenthood continues to close clinics and the cost of health care is formidable. Maternity wards are closing. Doctors are leaving the state. Even people with wanted pregnancies have trouble accessing care. As our executive director told Iowa Starting Line, “Costs are increasing with not only the actual care being provided, but costs now includes travel costs, gas—[and] with Iowa’s 24-hour waiting period, you have to make two trips and that right there is double if you have to have child care.”

The IAAF has seen requests for help increase by over 20 percent this year.

Please give to the IAAF. You want to help people access reproductive care? It’s not hard. Give to Iowa Abortion Access Fund.

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And now…In a year marked with dingii great and small, it takes a real dingus to stand out from the crowd. To be dingus of the year in 2023 takes focus; determination; a petty, mean little heart; flagrant disregard for human life; and just enough corruption to approach a singular dingus event, better known as the dingularity.

The dingularity is a term describing the epic dingusry of a person or event that sucks so much life and meaning from the world that it becomes a black hole of idiocy.

And that’s what we are dealing with in this year’s pick — a super dingus, an uberdingus, a demidingus. A person so powerfully dingusy that even his own party — the party of Donald Trump and George Santos — said, “Whoa buddy, that’s a little too much corruption for our taste.”

Friends and newsletter readers, may I present to you the 2023 Dingus of the Year Award Winner: Ken Paxton, attorney general of Texas.

Texas Monthly statehouse reporter Christopher Hooks wrote of Paxton’s allegedly corrupt activities, noting, “What sets Paxton apart from his predecessors is the sheer width and breadth of his scoundrelhood. One of the problems of writing about Paxton is that there’s never quite enough space to lay out all the things he’s alleged to have done wrong. (The word ‘allegedly’ is going to get a workout in this article.) That has helped him enormously. This stuff can be difficult to keep track of. It’s the scandal version of Montgomery Burns’s disease door: There’s so much that none of it seems to break through.”

But let me just briefly define some of the problems with this man. Paxton once stole a very expensive pen from another lawyer and only returned it after he was caught on security cameras. He’s accused of skimming off the top of a deceased client’s estate. He’s also accused of advising clients to invest in the companies of other clients without disclosing the conflict of interest. He is the guy who brought bogus voter fraud lawsuits before the Supreme Court in order to undermine the very fabric of our democracy. Paxton also allegedly used the power of his office to help a corrupt former real estate developer who was being investigated by the FBI. When people in Paxton’s own office sounded the alarm about Paxton’s criming, they were either fired or encouraged to resign. When these same employees sued, Paxton tried to settle the case using taxpayer money. That’s when Texas Republicans, who are not exactly known for their strict moral scrutiny of money — they prefer to use that adjudicating eye on people with uteruses and banning books — had enough and tried to impeach Paxton.

Paxton was acquitted, but his troubles aren’t exactly over. The lawsuit continues. And Paxton is being indicted for alleged securities fraud.

In sum, Ken Paxton is so corrupt he makes Richard Nixon look like Bernie Sanders.

But that’s not all Paxton has done to set himself apart from the hordes of the petty, the criminal, the huddled masses yearning to crime free.

In a year marked by states restricting access to reproductive care, under Paxton’s leadership, Texas has not only restricted abortion access but done it in a way that encourages people to rat out friends and family members for seeking abortions.

It’s like Ken Paxton looked at the Salem Witch Trials and thought “That was a great time in American history. We should do it again.” Ken Paxton is so evil even Karl Rove has had enough.

Yet, never one to rest on his laurels, Paxton has been going after children receiving gender-affirming care.

What’s next for a man who has been under indictment for years and who is hated by his own party, a man who has done so much harm to America that he has to sue hospitals just to feel something? Is it kicking kittens? Will he finally make it legal for men to tie women to the railroad tracks while laughing maniacally and rubbing their evil hands together in glee?

Runners Up

The Man Who Has an Opinion About Something He Didn’t Read by Laura Lippman

My dingus of the year is the random dude on Twitter who got upset about the new translation of The Iliad by Emily Wilson. You can find his name easily — I did it by Googling "emily wilson iliad random dude" — but all you need to know is that he studied Greek for a year and he has a blue checkmark. To be fair, he hadn't actually read Wilson's The Iliad, which was a month away from publication, but he had read her translation of The Odyssey. He believes that calling Odysseus "complicated," which is how Wilson begins her translation, is an insult; I doubt he will ever be insulted that way. Anyway, he is our Everyman, our Everydingus, the man who is pretty sure he could fly the plane if the pilot falls ill, the man who knows he could make a better omelet than Julia Child because he knows (theoretically) how to boil an egg. 

–Laura Lippman, best-selling author of every great mystery you’ve ever read.

Bill Ackman by

Sarah Weinman

It’s been a difficult year to be an American Jew, and that’s not even getting into opinions about the war in Gaza (apparently being pro-humanity and anti-dead-children is radical, who knew?). There’s Stephen Miller, an architect of Project 2025, which would catapult the country into outright authoritarianism if implemented. There’s Jonathan Greenblatt, singlehandedly turning the Anti-Defamation League into an Elon Musk lickspittle Twitter (oops, I mean X) account. It’s too depressing to think about all these shandes far di goyim.

So instead I’ll turn my ire to a still-incendiary but also more dingus-y candidate: Bill Ackman.

This is the hedge-funder who decided, for the hell of it, to destroy Borders. He’s also the same dude who lost his shirt on shorting Herbalife and then got much of his money back by betting the stock market would tank during early Covid — which means he made money off people dying, extra cool. 

But there’s something about Harvard, his alma mater, that makes Ackman really act out, maybe because he’s still mad people keep pointing out his current wife got money from Jeffrey Epstein. Ackman was so incensed at undergrads signing a pro-Palestine letter that he wanted their names, to make sure they never got hired at his hedge fund. (When even Larry Summers accuses you of McCarthyism, you know you’re doing something very wrong.) Then Ackman went on a vendetta against president Claudine Gay after her overlawyered congressional testimony, threatening to pull a hefty donation — but the trustees stepped in and she’s staying on.

He’s another buffoon billionaire that I wish I could laugh at without reservation, but Ackman’s current behavior is a reminder that true American speech is money, with the power to elevate and squelch people according to whim and caprice.

—Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita and Scoundrel.

92nd Street Y

“The deliberate killing of civilians is always an atrocity. It is a violation of international law and an outrage against the sanctity of human life,” read the open letter. “Neither Israel, the occupying power, nor the armed groups of the people under occupation, the Palestinians, can ever be justified in targeting defenceless people.”

The letter was published on October 18, eleven days after the paramilitary wings of Hamas killed more than a thousand people and took hundreds hostage. Most of the victims—the large majority—were Israeli. No mention was made specifically of Hamas, but “armed groups of the people under occupation” is an apt description of the military organization.

Signatories of the letter, published in the London Review of Books, included Jonathan Lethem, James Schamus, and Naomi Klein.

Within days, the 92nd Street Y, long and rightfully considered New York City’s most vital literary institution, canceled an event with one signer: Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. The CEO of the 92nd Street Y, Seth Pinsky, suggested to New York magazine that the decision had been made out of respect for patrons (some of whom knew people killed in the attack), the board, and donors. “Well, if you’re Jewish,” said a board member, summarizing the quandary, “this is the Israeli 9/11 for many of us.”

I’m not terribly interested in the merits of the letter (flawed) or the deeper meaning of using September 11, 2001, as a historical analog (concerning), so much as what these decisions say about the 92nd Street Y itself.

It’s an institution I happen to love. Over the years, I have gone there to see people I adore (Judy Blume) and despise (William Safire and David Petraeus), and others who provoke every emotion in between. Once, I sat behind Kurt Vonnegut. This place, I’d think, has such a wonderfully catholic bent for a very Jewish institution.

Without belaboring the point: It’s heartbreaking that the Y drew the line with Viet Thanh Nguyen. The decision was, charitably, a knee-jerk cultural overreaction, not uncommon in the wake of tragedy. Understandable, sure. But it also betrayed weakness. What a lack of confidence in the mostly liberal patrons, who, as a group, saw little issue with welcoming the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger, repeatedly. Either this is an institution willing to engage with occasionally uncomfortable — even uncomfortably timed! — ideas, or it’s not. For the sake of our increasingly diminished cultural landscape, I root for the former.

– Elon Green, author of Last Call.

People’s Choice:

The People’s Choice for DOTY was, once again, Donald Trump. And I don’t know what to do with you people because, like, I’m not going to pick him every year until morale improves or Mar-a-Lago falls off into the ocean. A guy tries to do an insurrection ONE TIME and y’all cannot let it go, can you?

There were also a lot of votes for last year’s winner, Elon Musk. Much like a Nobel Peace Prize, I think once is enough for this honor. But I will include the words of newsletter reader Steve Nuzum, who wrote that Musk “set out to be Lex Luthor; became a character in a low-budget Ayn Rand adaptation.”

Some other notable entries include “my ex-husband” and the “28 yo guy in my ethics 107 class” who apparently said women should just carry guns if they don’t want to be raped.

A lot of you picked both Joe Biden for dingus and there were the other people who nominated “people who don’t like Joe Biden.” A true Civil War situation. And as we all know, according to Nikki Haley, the Civil War was fought over Joe Biden running up inflation and not, you know, about *whispers* slavery.

This situation reminds me of the satire site, Hard Times News, which wrote a story titled, “Punk wishes he and his dad hated Joe Biden for the same reason.”

My personal favorite nomination from the People’s Choice poll was “Hands down, any & every Republican State Legislature pushing hateful, genocidal, ridiculous anti-trans legislation” because as Bethany Beeler so succinctly put it, “We make up, at best, 1.4% of the population, and we just wanna live our lives without being the subject of the dinguses' next planned holocaust.”