Stephen King, Dan Bongino and the Stupidest Twitter Exchange of All Time
Life is hard. Troubles are many. Sometimes it takes all you’ve got just to keep going. That’s why you need to steal as many moments of joy and levity as you can from this miserable long con known as existence.
You’ve got to laugh to stay sane. It’s not just important: it’s essential. It’s how you survive.
I laughed long and hard this morning at a Twitter exchange that epitomizes everything that is wonderful and horrible and insane and preposterous about the failing, increasingly Alt-Right social media site.
Right-wing maroon and Donald Trump super-fan Dan Bongino tweeted, “Biden is a disgrace to humankind. An embarrassment to the human race in every respect.”
Bongino was pointing an accusatory finger in Biden’s direction and screeching, “Non-orange man bad!” He was lazily tossing out red meat to his following of Trump cultists and Biden haters.
But Bongino’s tweet and the trite sentiment behind it attracted the attention of someone on the other side of the political spectrum as well.
Because the world is a very stupid place in a way that sometimes makes you laugh and sometimes makes you cry THE Stephen King responded to Bongino’s Biden-bashing with a terse, indignant, “Yes. But he’s got a real job, not a podcast.”
This, dear reader, was not Stephen King’s finest moment. No, that would be the motion picture Maximum Overdrive. It’s strange that King’s tweet would begin with “Yes” because that would seem to imply that he was agreeing with him about Biden being a “disgrace to humankind” as well as “an embarrassment to the human race in every respect.”
It’s entirely possible that King is a little disappointed in Biden, as I am, but calling him a disgrace to humankind and an embarrassment to the human race in every respect seems a little hyperbolic. I mean, sure, I will happily concede that Biden is an embarrassment to the human race in MANY respects. I will even confess that Biden is an embarrassment to the human race in MOST respects. But every respect? That seems harsh.
As a podcast fan as well as a podcaster myself I object to the idea that podcasting isn’t a real job and that, by extension, podcasters don’t make a real contribution to society.
Also, Stephen King is seventy-five years old. He’s been cranking out best-sellers since before I was born. I’m not sure why he’s engaging in childish taunts on Elon Musk’s smoldering hell site except that that’s what you do on Twitter: get disproportionately angry at some MAGA tool and waste way too much time and energy trying to shame and embarrass cultists incapable of shame or embarrassment.
That’s still not the funny part. No, the part that made me chortle out loud for a good minute this morning was Bongino’s response to King’s words.
Bongino tweeted obliviously and hilariously, “Yeah, you’re right. Millions of listeners a day on a podcast while you’re watching porn in your momma’s basement yearning for the days that people actually gave a shit about your dumb ass. Nice comeback dipshit. Get a job loser.”
This is objectively the funniest fucking thing I’ve seen today or any other day. Everything about it is unintentionally hilarious, beginning with the image of seventy-five year old Stephen King whacking the weasel to MILF porn in his mommy’s basement while his 103 year old mother putters about the house obliviously.
But what really makes me chuckle is Bongino literally calling out THE SINGLE MOST COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFUL WRITER OF THE PAST FIFTY YEARS, with the possible exception of J.K. Rowling for being unsuccessful, irrelevant and a loser.
It reminded me of an equally insane Twitter exchange a while back where King complained about the lunacy of Twitter Blue and a Musk worshipper insisted that King needs Twitter way more than Twitter needs King and that being active on a social media site popular with some of the worst people in the world is the only thing keeping King from total irrelevance and complete commercial failure.
I cannot imagine any criteria by which STEPHEN KING could be considered an unemployed, irrelevant loser other than Bongino’s but I am, objectively, a bit of a loser myself.
I even lived in my in-laws basement for a year. I would have lived in my own mother’s basement but she abandoned me as a baby and died alone and unloved. Also, I take great pride in this website, my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, my books and my podcast Travolta/Cage but I don’t know if any of them actually constitutes a proper job the way SELLING HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF BOOKS ALL OVER THE WORLD does.
I learned of this exchange second hand when it was screen-shotted by someone marveling that this exchange represented only a recent salvo in a Twitter war that has gone on for days.
I am very down on Twitter these days and might leave for good if, say, Tucker Carlson sets up shop there but these tweets legitimately brought me joy and made me happy. They’re just so fucking stupid that they’re great.
For the record, King is quite possibly THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PERSON IN THE WORLD AT HIS JOB, podcasting is a real job and Bongino is a real dipshit who should have thought twice before entering a war of words with a man who is considerably better at putting them together than he is.
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