Welcome to our inaugural edition of Stupid, Evil, Horny, where we pick 1 stupid, 1 evil, and 1 horny person that each particularly tickled our fancy this week. Since there is no shortage of all three, we’ll put one of these up every Friday until the heat death of the universe.
Stupid: Adam Neumann, Former CEO of WeWork
Awarded by: Carl Wilhoyte
Adam Neumann of WeWork wins our inaugural Stupid for being such a prototypical example of the Smart Dumb Guy. These are people with technical skills, endless charisma, and absolutely nothing else, thrust into the centers of power and proceed to flail chaotically until they implode. Neumann started WeWork, an office space rental company, in 2010 during the initial glut of the Uberconomy data gold rush. The company raked in $12 billion in venture capital to the tune of a potential $47 billion valuation (for what?) without ever posting a dime in profit. Capitalism, baby. He was forced out of the company recently due to a financial tailspin WeWork finds itself in on a rocky path to their IPO.
WeWork’s IPO will probably be the biggest overvaluation in financial history in an industry that burns money in gigantic Dark Knight-sized piles. His purchase (and subsequent sale) of a $60 million private plane and collapse of their “Honesty Markets” (unmanned concession stands) are both amazingly emblematic of a company both too generous and greedy at the same time. WeWork’s overvaluation combined with Neumann’s absurd delusions of grandeur (being the first trillionaire, prime minister of Israel, and immortality) paint a portrait of a man too stupid and infatuated with the concept of vast fortune he forgot to actually, well, make a fortune.
Greatest (s)hits:
- Wife firing people for “not liking their energy”
- Blaring Run DMC and offering tequila shots during a mass layoff in 2016
- Basically reinventing the concept of commercial real estate for no fucking reason
Evil: Greg Gutfeld of Fox News on #ShutdownDC
Awarded by: Carl Wilhoyte
When it comes to the climate denial blackpill, Greg Gutfeld of Fox News has just swallowed handfuls of them, just shovelling blackpills into his mouth using a dog food scoop. What’s especially heinous and genuinely evil about this segment is that Greg Gutfeld doesn’t give a shit about working people, or white privilege, or the UN, or fumes from cars. He doesn’t care about any of that. This is simply an opportunity to smugly smirk at people risking arrest to raise the alarm on the possibly most critical issue we have. The cynical, empty nature of his anger hides the desire to simply pretend nothing is wrong. He shits a lot on “the media” in this bit, but what does he think he is exactly?
His claims of “white privilege” for those who can protest is especially rich coming from a network that pretends that also doesn’t exist. (Notice how they carefully cut around all the people of color present.) His disgust and vicious hatred of Greta Thunberg is both hilarious and sad. His op-ed is written in these clipped, one-sentence bumper stickers, mainly because his audience is too sun-stroked and raging at literal teens to comprehend anything longer than a tweet. “The media elevates these idiots”, trying to attack their youth anger while replacing it with his middle age anger. That’s the evil: pretending their future, which he is dismissing out of hand, isn’t worth saving. Also he looks like a thumb.
Horny: Amber Guyger
Awarded by: Jean Krill
We all know being horny is wrong. Aside from being one of the devil’s favorite ways to lure us into a Faustian blood pact, it leads to all sorts of bad behavior. Normally that’s at least confined to humiliating ourselves and playing an acoustic guitar at inappropriate times (all of them), but in the case of former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger it might have led to the racist murder of Botham Jean.
I know what you’re thinking. Cops are always racist. And horny. Horny for murder. But, in this particular case it was one of Guyger’s few remaining normal human emotions in addition to the usual cop lizard brain that is allegedly responsible.
Guyger and her lawyers have claimed that her entering Botham Jean’s apartment, that she supposedly mistook for her own, before shooting him to death was the result of extraordinary fatigue after a 13 ½ hour shift at the racism factory on the beat. Prosecutors have responded to this pathetic defense by pointing to a series of sexts exchanged between Guyger and her (police) partner that day such as; “super horny today” and a lewd snapchat message labelled with “wanna touch?”
It’s been reported that prosecutors argued Guyger wasn’t in fact so exhausted that she could mistake Jean’s apartment as her own since she was planning on getting piped by her partner’s thin blue line later that evening, and it was in fact her out of control horniness that had her so distracted she ended up racistly murdering Botham Jean in his own home.
While we wait to see if any amount of justice is meted out in this case, two truisms have already been reaffirmed. All cops are bastards, and horny is a crime.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.