Within the Trump administration’s grand menagerie of oil-blooded lizard people, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai stands tall as one of the most truly loathsome figures. On April 23, he will complete the task he was put in place for, killing net neutrality finally. At that point he will rest easy knowing that the dream of the internet as a truly egalitarian agent for cultural transformation will be pretty much over, and that Comcast and Facebook will be even richer.
This alone would make him worthy of contempt. But what makes him truly insufferable is his insistence that he is actually a cool guy—someone who loves all the same memes you do, kids! It’s a perfectly pandering assumption of the idiocy of the populace, as if the only thing people ever came to the internet for in the first place was Can Haz Cheezburger. In this way he is perfectly in sync with the rest of the modern Republican party, which seethes with contempt for the very people it purports to help. Just as Ted Cruz attempts to leaven his disdain for all sentient life with ham-fisted references to pop culture, Pai thinks he can evince some respect for the internet by display a base-level fluency in normie internet culture. He is best described as “moderately online.”
Occasionally, Pai shifts to pop culture, though, and it is always the same goddamn thing: The Big Lebowski. He has repeatedly tweeted references to the dude abiding and the rug tying things together and the sweater and it is, just, fucking awful. Today he took a break from retweeting @baseballcrank takes to commemorate the film’s twentieth anniversary by firing off what is unquestionably his worst Lebowski-inspired tweet ever:
The Big Lebowski does not deserve this. If you’d like to feel slightly better, hop into the replies of that tweet, none of which Pai will presumably be reading in a future self-aware video.