Bill Kristol

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Writing this on New Year’s Eve and staring at the past annum in the rearview mirror, you can bet every last hair on your ass that I’m annoyed. Then again, I’m offended by nothing and bothered by everything.

With the stark and baffling exception of 2015, I’ve done these “Most Annoying” compendiums for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016. In 2012 I listed only 12. With each year, the listicle tacks on yet another annoying individual to the tally, which brings us to 17 walking annoyances for this past year. It is my belief that over the past five years, the world has gotten progressively more irritating, emphasis on the “progressively.”

Keep in mind that “annoying” is not the same as “most vile.” That’s why neither the Chicago kidnappers of a mentally challenged white teen nor James Hodgkinson, the pig-headed Resistance loser who attempted to gun down Republican congressmen who’d just finished playing baseball, weren’t included. There’s a line where annoying crosses over into infuriating.

It shouldn’t need explaining, but this list is not scientific. I’m just going with seventeen people, both famous and obscure, whose very existence on this planet gave me a skin rash in 2017. And they didn’t need to be annoying in terms of their personality so much as they embodied a highly annoying social trend.

Yes, I am fully aware there are people who may have annoyed you more. It’s highly likely that if you and I were placed in the same room together, we’d quickly annoy one another. There are no “right” and “wrong” answers here.

Annoying people are ranked in ascending order. In other words, while I wouldn’t mind if Juan Thompson were to get a mild tummy ache from prison food one night, I might actually feel warm inside if Bill Kristol were to spontaneously combust.

17. JUAN THOMPSON
Not too long ago, Juan Thompson had it all: Born a poor black child, this mentally underqualified journalist was given a gig at Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept website, where he wrote about black issues from a black perspective for what was likely a 99% white audience. But he soon fell from grace when it was revealed he’d fabricated a story about how Charleston shooter Dylann Roof’s nonexistent cousin told him that Roof went on his rampage after his white girlfriend dumped him for a black guy. Then he went “totes cuckoo” after his white communist girlfriend dumped him. He sent emails and faxes to her employer accusing her of possessing child porn and intentionally spreading herpes. Then melanin-addled reject took it up a notch by emailing the ADL, warning them that his girlfriend planned to make anti-Jewish bomb threats the following day. As it stands, Thompson and the Israeli teen arrested in March for making dozens of anti-Semitic bomb threats appear to be the primary perps of the Anti-Jew Bomb Threat Wave that terrorized America’s Semites and their dutiful enablers earlier this year. Thompson was sentenced to five years in federal prison late in December.

16. YVONNE NGUYEN
The first of three Asians on this list—no one can accuse me of not being ecumenical in who annoys me—Nguyen is a student at Villanova University who shaved her head to show solidarity with cancer patients. She even wrote a cute little essay for the school paper called “Shaving My Head: Oppression, Privilege and Power” in which she boasts about how the experience made her feel good about feeling bad about herself:

Shaving my head permitted me to focus and recognize not just my oppression and privilege, but also my power to change the circumstances for me and others….However, using one’s power comes with a caveat. One must forgo some of their undeserved privileges to provide justice for others. Are you willing to shave?

What I find very interesting is the fact that Nguyen wasn’t quite brave enough to go whole-hog and, say, expose herself to a brick of uranium and actually get cancer. Until she does that—meaning, until I see verifiable medical documentation that she has cancer—I will insist on calling her a poseur.

15. KELVIN HOLDSWORTH
A certified Anglican minister—a reliable source tells me he’s been dewormed and has his vaccination papers and everything—Kelvin Holdsworth takes the innately annoying name “Kevin” and amplifies the annoyance factor by tossing in an absolutely unnecessary “l,” which wastes tons of ink and probably has forced him throughout his life to explain that his first name isn’t Kevin.

Even though The Holy Bible makes quite clear that God hates rump-wranglers, Holdsworth recently pecked out a blog post called “How to change the Church of England,” he expresses his wish that England’s four-year-old Prince George will, shortly after reaching maturity, marry a dude.

From his grave, King Henry VIII can be heard muttering, “What a fag.”

14. GEORGE TAKEI
George Takei is so gay, flowers grow wherever he walks. But if you want to be gay and have a career in Hollywood—or, in Takei’s case, if your career is that you used to have a career in Hollywood—you have to toe the political line or risk being sent to the death camps. Because Takei was humiliated after the much manlier Donald Trump fired him from The Apprentice, he joins Tinseltown’s other Marching Morons in their nonstop pre-programmed Trump-bashing. In late 2016, Takei accused Trump of “defending the very culture that normalizes sexual assaults on women.” To his credit, Takei has never been accused of sexually assaulting a woman. But he has previously admitted to sexually assaulting men. And just like Dorothy Gale in a Kansas hurricane, Takei was swept up in this autumn’s #MeToo hoopla when a former male model—to clarify, he’s still a male to my knowledge, but he no longer does modeling—Scott Brunton claimed that in 1981, Takei drugged him unconscious and orally sodomized him. Never should have drugged and blown him, George. Never should have drugged and blown him.

13. LIZ PHIPPS SOEIRO
A lowly librarian with an inflated sense of moral purpose, Soeiro rebuffed First Lady Melania Trump’s gift to her library in Cambridge, MA of ten Dr. Seuss books. She sent the books back along with the following uppity message:

Thank you for the ten Dr. Seuss titles that you sent my school library in recognition of this year’s National Read a Book Day. (Sent second-day air, no less! That must have been expensive.)…we still struggle to close the achievement gap, retain teachers of color, and dismantle the systemic white supremacy in our institution….Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.

What makes this annoying is that I wish Dr. Seuss books were all that she claims they are.

12. JOSHUA STUART “PEPPER BALLS” CORBIN
This was the year when the media popularized and even lionized the loosely organized gaggle of mostly white and Jewish kids known as Antifa.” You may have heard of them—they refer to everything they don’t like as “fascist,” which magically enables them to justify committing violence against anyone they, in their historical illiteracy and emotional instability, choose to rubber-stamp as a “Nazi.” These AntiFarts made fools of themselves in several meaningful ways during 2017, most hilariously epitomized by the sight of Phoenix anti-Trump protester Joshua Stuart Corbin getting hit smack-dab in the groin with a riot policeman’s tear-gas canister. The canister was originally mistaken for pepper balls, which saddled Corbin with the unwanted moniker “Pepper Balls” for the rest of his life. While his balls were recovering, Corbin was arrested and charged with three felony counts of assault against a police officer and one misdemeanor count of unlawful assembly. Thank you, Mr. Pepper Balls—you provided us with the most Mike Judge moment in political protest all year.

11. SHIA LABOEUF
In many respects, 2017 was The Year of the Leftist Tantrum, and few looked as idiotic throwing their post-Trump Election diaper-fit as one-time Hollywood film star Shia Labeouf, who once made headlines for getting accidentally raped by a female attendee at his performance installation. In January he launched an art installation in Queens called “He Will Not Divide Us,” which consisted of little more than a camera that would film people brainlessly chanting “He Will Not Divide Us” until, presumably, Donald Trump was dead and we were no longer divided. But the whole mess quickly fell apart as Labeouf was arrested for assaulting a Trump supporter at the installation and multiple other Trump supporters gleefully sabotaged the event. Labeouf then moved “He Will Not Divide Us” To Albuquerque, where it was quickly shut down after shots were fired nearby. He then moved it to Tennessee, then the UK, each time getting thoroughly routed by 4channers and other Trumpkins. I predict that 2018 holds a lot more mental illness for him.

10. MAXINE WATERS
Congresswoman Maxine Waters has represented the same South LA district since Reconstruction. She lives in a white neighborhood and has never gone for more than five consecutive minutes without reminding everyone that she’s black. As unintelligent as she is self-righteous, she claimed in 2017 that Vladimir Putin invaded Korea, referred to Trump and his associates as “scumbags,” called the White House “the White Supremacists’ House,” and has repeatedly demanded for Trump’s impeachment based on little more than the fact that he has thin lips and almost invisible eyebrows. It is my sincere belief that Maxine Waters is a racist, and as everyone knows, I disavow racism not only because it is evil, but because it is unpopular.