Dingus Madness Championship Winner

If you see this, 👊🇺🇸🔥, you are f***ed

Some men are born dinguses; some men achieve dingusry through their words and deeds; and some men have dingusry thrust upon them. All of those men are now running our country.

And this week brought on a swarm of dinguses. A fleet of dinguses. A gaggle, a horde, an embarrassment of dinguses, and I do mean embarrassment. Living in America is truly very embarrassing.

Oh did a senator swing a dead salmon around in your Parliament? Here in America, the men running the joint would rather share war plans in a group chat than go to therapy.

What about her emails?

Bitch, what about those emoji?

I actually looked up world news headlines to see what was happening elsewhere and half of them are like, “Donald Trump destroys world order.”

“Yanks are why we can’t have nice things… or trade.”

“PMs of European countries gather together to sit in a circle and say ‘WTF’ about America but in different languages.”

I would say we’ve reached peak dingularity. But it’s still only March. And while good sense is being sucked into the black hole of idiocy, I am not sure we’ve reached dingus zenith.

If I were to calculate how many dinguses there are this week, in mathematical terms. I’d write the problem as:

What’s the limit? Well, let’s let Lindsay Lohan answer that one for us.¹

The limit for dinguses does not exist.

But for the sake of brevity, let’s cap it at three.

But first, we need to thank the commissioner and inventor of the dingus madness tournament, the man that people refer to when they say “NotAllMen,” the only guy allowed to be on a podcast, the creator of group chats that don’t plan bombings, the one and only: Beau Anderson.²

Dingus Madness Champion: Elon Musk

The winner of our second annual Dingus Madness championship is Elon Musk. Musk made it through six rounds of the highly competitive Dingus Madness championship. He faced off against tough competitors like Ted Cruz, Everyone Banning Books, and Mitch McConnell to battle JD Vance in the final round. And he won handily, earning 631 votes to Vance’s 137.

Elon Musk is a bit of a powerhouse in the dingus arena. He won dingus of the year in 2022 for the crime of wrecking the internet.

That's right: This website was an early adopter of anti-Muskian rhetoric, which is why I am not impressed with your little "I bought a Tesla before I knew Elon was bad” stickers. Musk has been up to some shit for years.

Those were the good old days, a more innocent time, back when he was mostly only fucking up labor law and ketamine. Now, he’s looking to ruin Social Security, Medicaid and national parks, and everyone is so mad.

The Edgelord of Idiocy had to make everyone think he was a special boy, so reigning over a few little companies here and there wasn’t enough. He’s the opposite of Midas— everything he touches turns into a human rights violation.

Musk bought his inventions and steals his jokes from Reddit. His only unique creations are a whole bunch of babies he has no intention of raising.

This is the lesson Americans keep learning and forgetting: Just because a person has money doesn’t mean they are smart. It doesn’t even mean they have that much money. Rich people are just like us. Their sons can be real duds too!

But while Musk is a crap dad, he has inspired dads everywhere to change their stance on Musk from, “He’s a smart man! Let’s see you become a billionaire, you are just a mid-tier newsletter writer!” to “Okay, uh, maybe he should send himself to colonize Mars and never return.”

Dingus of the Week: 👊🇺🇸🔥

The “dingularity” describes a naturally occurring phenomenon that occurs when too many dinguses get together and the time-space continuum collapses, creating a black hole of idiocy that sucks life and meaning and irony from the world.

But I think we need a new term for this phenomenon. Let’s call it the Houthi PC small group.

By now you know the story. White House national security adviser Mike Waltz just wanted to hang with the bros, combat male loneliness, and plan to bomb Yemen. So he put together a chat on the encrypted app Signal and invited Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg into it. There, White House natsec officials planned to bomb Yemen and also, without planning to, probably violated a few laws in the process.

It’s truly a sign of the times that Jeff “Saudi Arabia definitely has weapons of mass destruction” Goldberg got the win on this one. I suppose each stupid era gets the stupid heroes it deserves.

Not since the Bay of Pigs has a group of guys gotten together to fuck so much up. It makes Iran-Contra seem like a reasonably lil oopsy. Compared with the Pentagon Papers, I would say it is more stupid and also has more emoji.

And it’s such an incredible tell that people *cough* Chuck Grassley *cough* who made such a righteous show of grabbing for their smelling salts over Hillary’s Emails are like, “No, no, planning a little light war on a Signal chat seems reasonable.” Simple little mistake. Anyone could plan to bomb Yemen over a group chat on an unsecured app. Boys will be boys and all that.

No one will resign. No one will learn any lessons. But for a brief moment, before all is lost, the memes will have been good.

Runner-up (belated): Chuck Schumer

Sorry, Chuck, I bet you thought you got away with it. Perhaps you thought that in a time of real dingus madness, you might slip under the radar.

But the reality is, my guy, you have one job, try to stop this mess. And when you could have done literally one thing — stopping the president’s agenda and shutting down the government — you chose to do nothing, saying, “A shutdown would be worse.” Worse than what?

*Looks at the flaming wreck of the country*

Oh yes, you really helped us here, buddy. Thanks.

No one was helped by your lukewarm Hot Pocket-ass approach to politics. Hot on the outside, frozen on the inside, hated by all. Eventually, there will be a recall.

Schumer’s leadership so far has felt like cutting open a chicken at dinner and finding the insides raw, pink, and wet. And yeah, we ate a few bites before we noticed.

And now for something good:

No one likes JD Vance. And listen, we might be going down, but this is very funny.

Target went namby-pamby on DEI and people boycotted and now its sales have declined 3 percent. You simply love to see it.

There are some huge hyper-local wins: This one is out of Lancaster County.

I got to hear John Green talk about his new book Everything is Tuberculosis. Like so much these days, it is depressing to hear about a problem that could be solved, but isn’t being solved. But it was clarifying to hear him talk about how tuberculosis can be solved easily and all it takes is the will to change. It reminded me that in this era of intersecting apocalypses, we can effect change; we have the power. And we do not have to wait for saviors.

Happy baseball to all who observe!

Something I am enjoying:

I have been traveling a lot over the past couple of weeks. I had the opportunity to go speak to some colleges and universities. I normally give a speech about telling your story, the importance of stories in a world that wants to erase them, and how to fight despair. But at the last minute, I wrote a speech about being fired from the newspaper, about the fear of speaking out, and how we overcome those fears, to do the work we have to do. (Chuck Schumer, you’d love to hear it. But you still have to pay me.) In the speech I also talked about the real threats in America, and spoiler: It’s not trans people. And I tried to make sure; I said “TRANS RIGHTS” at every opportunity. It’s not much. But it is something I think needs to be said and it is something I can say. Because what are people going to do? Fire me? I am employed by you all. And this independence that you give me is something I hope to use loudly, boldly, and always in the service of others.

If this newsletter fails, my backup plan was always to become a realtor, but the market seems terrible right now. Maybe I’ll start an MLM? I’ll work on it.

And I am finally home for a bit. But I just want to say, through all the plane rides and long car trips, the one who has stuck by my side through it all, my one ride or die, the meaning in my life and the softest most flattering pants ever is: the Lululemon Palazzo Pants.

1. I am not a math genius, I just watch a lot of Mean Girls.

2. Everyone say, “Thank you, Beau” in the comments. Beau is also the team captain for Relay Iowa, which we are doing again this year.