In case you missed it this week—and if you did, you are wiser and healthier than anyone here—Twitter CEO and worst date ever Elon Musk just engaged in another one of his signature public displays of quality control. This time, the target of his supernaturally off-putting antics was now-former senior director of product design Halli Thorleifsson, who was so in the dark as to his job status at the company that he felt no choice but to tweet at Musk directly in an attempt to get some clarity. This is what Thorleifsson got for his trouble:
Oh, and he was indeed fired by Musk, who then accused Thorleifsson of never having been an official employee of the company (this is not true) and of using his disability as a cheap excuse to not do any actual work. This morning, Thorleifsson revealed, though he certainly shouldn't have needed to, that the disability in question was muscular dystrophy, and that he has had it for decades.
This public dismissal happened the same day that Twitter, which is operating with a skeleton crew after Musk fired over 7,500 people at the company, had its image capabilities go on the fritz for hours on end. It was also the same day the BBC reported that abuse and hate speech have skyrocketed on that platform ever since Musk, who now requires bodyguards flanking him anytime he’s at Twitter HQ, took over. Here’s how Musk responded to THAT report:
He also tweeted a bunch of memes. Now, what do you call this sort of person? What do you call people so utterly lacking in charm and grace; people in such constant need of validation despite meriting none of it; people so DYING to be popular and enraged that they aren’t?
I’ll tell you what you call them: Dorks. Fucking dorks.
Right around the turn of this century, the meaning of dork got distorted to the point where dorks were defined more by what they liked (comic books, Star Wars, yada yada) than who they actually were. That gave anyone, including hugely successful and popular people like Taylor Swift, license to brand themselves as dorks so that they could claim a bit of retroactive outcast cred for themselves. OMG I WAS SUCH A DORK IN HIGH SCHOOL! they all cried in unison, letting you know that life wasn’t always this easy for them. They were shunned once, just like you! They had it rough! People made fun of their hair and everything! There’s no easier way for a person—especially a well-to-do white person—to fashion themselves oppressed than by claiming they were once unpopular dorks who bravely managed to rise above their station. And they have no shortage of help from movies and TV shows that, throughout my lifetime, have portrayed every dork on screen as being unworthy of derision. Peter Parker, McLovin, Eleven from Stranger Things: all “dorks” in the story, but all inherently lovable.
That’s fiction. Real dorks are not all lovable people. They’re not all precious secrets waiting to be discovered. They are not all quiet and sensitive and awkward. In fact, many are not. Many of them are hostile, arrogant, and unpleasant. It's why they're cast out to begin with. Elon Musk is one such dork, and apparently has been his whole rotten life: an insufferable dickbag who fancies himself unfairly ostracized (cancelled) by all the cool (woke) kids.
I know the type because, and here's where I become the insufferable one, I was one of them. I was unpopular in school, and both enraged and baffled as to why. After all, I wore a New Kids On The Chopping Block t-shirt, I loudly said things like “I feel like someone just shit in my mouth!” on the bus because that was comedy gold to me, and I said rude shit to girls in the hall. So why didn’t anyone like me? The fuck was THEIR problem? Why didn't they get me? These motherfuckers didn’t know what they were missing. I watched Revenge of the Nerds, a movie that has aged quite poorly, 100 times when I was a kid, and came away convinced that I was an oppressed minority—that I too deserved my moment of public vindication.
That’s a dork. That’s someone cosplaying marginalization as a sorry excuse to overlook their own shortcomings. That’s Elon Musk. That’s Scott Adams, who said a bunch of racist shit last week and then cried that everyone who was dragging him for it was beneath his intelligence. That’s Aaron Rodgers, a multimillionaire Hall of Fame quarterback who earnestly tried to portray himself as under attack from all the mean kids because he misled the world as to his vaccination status. That’s Bill Maher, who can only make friends by inviting them onto one of his panels. That’s Ron DeSantis, a legislative and personal sadist who hates to fuck. That’s Matt Yglesias and his coterie of fake online intellectuals who expect everyone else to debate them at all times, and to have fucking index cards ready on their person for that debate.
These are people who very much deserve to be mocked, cast out, and ultimately ignored. They will never have real friends, and they deserve to get their shit ruined, by better people, repeatedly. They are not worth your time, and they’re all cancelled for a good reason: because they fucking suck, and are utterly oblivious to it. Like teenage me, they have no fucking idea what it REALLY means to be shunned. If they did, they’d be tolerable. Instead, they’re all like this:
Maybe Elon does need those bodyguard, because the rest of the world has earned the right to stuff him into a locker.
