The right is hoppin' mad about Vice President Kamala Harris being the presumptive Democratic nominee for President now that Joe Biden has stepped down.
And in far-right influencer and comedian Russell Brand's case, it had him so upset he forgot how to do words.
Brand took to X, formerly Twitter, to rail against Harris in a rambling diatribe full of fancy-sounding words, the kind of screed people write when they're trying to sound really, REALLY smart and sophisticated.
@rustyrockets/X
Except he mixed up one of the key words in the dumbest, most hilarious way possible.
Brand tweeted:
"If Kamala Harris is to be the new pick in the 'bait n' switch', 'find the lady' cup n' ball trick that we are being offered in lieu of democracy, we already know she's a socially inept and empty instrument of intransigent, institutional power, solely offering cutaneous and genetic novelty to a famished pack of secularist devotees so bewildered that melatonin and an 'X chromosome' could represent to them some kind of pyrrhic victory."
Okay first of all, this is precisely the kind of paragraph your ninth-grade English teacher would have sent back to you with "REVISE" written in the margin and every single one of those ten-dollar words circled with question marks beside them.
Like, he obviously entered the word "skin" into a thesaurus app and got "cutaneous" and was like "ho, ho, THIS will show all the dumb libs!"
He also very clearly doesn't know what "pyrrhic victory" actually means, because the phrase makes absolutely no sense in this context in the most hilarious way possible, but we'll get to that in a minute.
The meaning of Brand's rant is, of course, nonetheless clear—he thinks liberals are dumb for thinking that a Black woman being the Democratic nominee actually means anything. Yawn.
Far more interesting than this incredibly banal take, however, is that Brand, in all his purple-prose intellectual fortitude about race, has confused melanin, the substance in human skin that produces its tone, with melatonin, the sleep hormone you buy at the drug store.
Oh, and just for extra fun he also doesn't appear to know how chromosomes work, since all humans have at least one X chromosome, not just women.
Naturally, Twitter had a field day with this incredibly dunderheaded tweet of Brand's.
But as bad as mixing up melanin and melatonin truly is, it really doesn't hold a candle to Brand's misunderstanding of "pyrrhic victory."
He seems to think it means "an empty or meaningless victory," but what it actually means is an unintended consequence of an effort that basically ensures your destruction.
Such as, for instance, bullying Joe Biden about his age so much that he leaves the race and replaces himself with a candidate who has inspired a level of enthusiasm in the centrist and left-wing electorate we haven't seen since Barack Obama 16 years ago.
Keep that thesaurus handy, Russell—but next time you might want to grab a dictionary to go with it.
@jaketapoer/Bluesky
