Kylie Jenner is an irredeemable moron.

In service of full disclosure I wrote a post this week and have not posted it. Let me just say it was a response to the world, and it veered precipitously into the same political venom you can get anywhere else. As much as I wanted a release, I was not willing to throw away my words.

Anyone who’s interested in a little more ranting, feel free to comment/message me and I will gladly send it. But for the rest of you:

How about that Kylie Jenner!

Apparently this is news now. Forbes and Kylie Jenner (I’m not sure which one she is, I just know she’s not married to Kanye West and she didn’t have a sex change operation) are feuding. Despite giving her two cover stories over the last two years – one a profile and one a puff piece – Forbes has decided to expose itself (hee hee, I said “expose itself!”) and its proprietary ranking methodology to the Jenner family scorn by announcing that they do not believe Kylie is actually a billionaire. And they are dishing about why they do not believe it.

There are any number of things I find interesting about this story, but I would have never read it at all except for having seen an article online with the ab-fab headline, TurnsOut Kylie Jenner Is Not a Billionaire. Who Honestly Gives a Shit?

Kudos to The Daily Beast. If there was ever a headline you couldn’t ignore, that’s the money shot right there.

So I read the article, and it satisfies my inner need to hate some more things. Among them:

•          I hate that I have no clue who Kylie Jenner is.
•          I hate that she might have been a billionaire.
•          I hate that it was so important for her to be a billionaire she may have lied about…stuff.
•          I hate the fact that, at age 22, she apparently is closer to only being worth $900 million, because for the extra $100 million – to quote the headline – why do I even give a shit?
•          I REALLY hate that she’s worth $900 million at all.
•          And I hate that Forbes could be so tone deaf as to pander to billionaires, or even several-hundred-millionaires, and then do a complete 180-degree turn and debunk how friggin’ random the whole process is anyway.

And that’s just the low hanging fruit.

But there is one thing that I hate way more, that I cannot let stand without comment, without condemnation. Strap in, friends.

On May 29, 2020 Forbes posted the article in question, which had an almost-as-good headline: Inside Kylie Jenner’s Web Of Lies, And Why She’sNo Longer A Billionaire. Plus there’s a picture of her, and it doesn’t look like any other picture I’ve seen of her (I’ve seen, like, maybe four pictures of her), which at least makes me feel better that I don’t know who the hell she is.

Almost immediately Kylie, the CEO of Kylie Cosmetics (WHAT??!), took to Twitter and posted the following. I want to be clear that this is an exact representation of what she said, and how she said it, to the letter, to the pixel. She said:

“what am i even waking up to. i thought this was a reputable site.. all i see are a number of inaccurate statements and unproven assumptions lol. i’ve never asked for any title or tried to lie my way there EVER. period.”

This is a lot to unpack. Bear with me.

This is apparently a 22-year-old girl, born into money, who has done some things to capitalize on her pop culture status and make more money. OK, cool. She is the CEO of a cosmetics company, and maybe some other stuff, I don’t know, who has been coronated and, subsequently, defrocked by Forbes Magazine. She is worth somewhere in the vicinity of $900 million.

And she’s an illiterate moron.

OK, I take words pretty seriously. I mean, I’m not a true grammar Nazi, but I’m way far over in that neighborhood. I like words, and I value people who are articulate. As many of you know, I lament the irreparable damage the internet and laziness have done to writing as an art form.

For that matter, social media is the devil and it makes me insane that ANYTHING posted on Twitter by ANYONE is actually news. That isn’t news. That is a megaphone, made nuclear by technology and allowed into the hands of children. News, back when I was a youngster, was about information and facts. As a fun kind of break in the action, many news outlets had columnists and editorial writers who put the appropriate label on their writing and took a position, and defended it. It was in there in the same general area of the news but it was something different. It was news-adjacent.

Now, every article about the President of the United States, the single most powerful human being on the planet Earth, has something to do with a tweet.

A tweet. But I digress.

What the f*** happened to us? We have truly created a universe where, not only does the loudest voice win, everyone has bullhorns with volume controls set to infinity.

Let’s look at this again:

“what am i even waking up to. i thought this was a reputable site.. all i see are a number of inaccurate statements and unproven assumptions lol. i’ve never asked for any title or tried to lie my way there EVER. period.”

She doesn’t use capital letters. I know one other person in my life who doesn’t use capital letters, and I genuinely like and admire him, but even he has the sense to know it’s not cool and asks for help with writing when it's important. She doesn’t even capitalize “I” when referring to herself, which is particularly amazing considering the esteem in which she holds herself.

She ignores basic punctuation, and does it after ending a sentence (question) in a preposition. Though she ends her missive with the word “period” and remembers to use a period.

There is a racially, culturally insensitive joke regarding prepositions that actually makes fun of pompous grammar Nazis. It goes something like this: A scholarship student from the slums of New York arrives on his first day of classes at Harvard. Walking around campus in awe, he approaches a tweed-covered, professorial type and asks, “Excuse me, Professor. Could you please tell me where the library’s at?” And the faculty member looks down his long nose at the boy and replies, “Young man, you are at Harvard. The home of higher learning in the Western hemisphere. Here at Harvard, we do not end our sentences in a preposition.” So the kid thinks about this a moment, then nods, appreciating the weight of the mistake and says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you’re right. Could you please tell me where the library’s at, asshole?”

That is not just an old joke, but a bad one. Only guess what? It was written well, like a human being with a 9^th grade education might write it. And it was written by someone who’s the CEO of diddly-squat. Someone who cares enough about himself to be at least a little interested in how people perceive him. Someone who knows that how you speak and – God help us – how you write reflect who you are, and what you hold important. 

People from humble beginnings who rose to great heights are not uncommon. But in my experience those people worked hard to get there, and work hard to stay there, and work to justify the news stories and water cooler banter and jealous eye rolls. They at least know enough to present themselves as someone worthy of being talked about.

Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they just have a little something called self-respect. Or self-awareness.

This is now my favorite “Would You Rather?” mind game: Would you rather cash a check for $900 million but be an unspeakable moron for the rest of your life; or be intelligent and articulate but never have more than $5,000 in the bank at one time?

I would like to think I could decline the millions and still be happy writing this blog.

But in the event you have a few hundred million burning a hole in your pocket, let it be known: I’m flexible.