The Least Influential People of the 2010s
By: Drew Magary
Tags: Culture, Politics, Media, The Whiplash Decade

This piece is part of The Whiplash Decade, a package on the wild ride that was the 2010s.

Congratulations, America! You’ve survived the Twitter decade! How does it feel? Pretty shitty, right? We opened this decade with the first black president passing comprehensive health care reform. We end it with Donald fucking Trump as president: Jailing kids and clumsily attempting to blackmail half of Eastern Europe and handing war criminals his finest participation trophies. It’s been a real ride! A horrible, horrible ride.

There are so many people to hold responsible for America’s coming death. I can blame Trump, naturally. I can blame Barack Obama, whose misplaced faith in norms proved both contagious and fatal to democracy in its own right. And he still has that faith! You asshole!

I can blame Hillary for blowing 2016. I can blame all of the social media titans who let white supremacists run amok online, apologized for it, and then quietly came around to embracing alt-Nazi hate speech as an optimized business model.

I can blame you. Look at you now. You could be figuring out a way to genetically engineer humans that can breathe underwater. Instead, you’re reading a post on MEDIUM. Medium: Where People Go To Tell You They Didn’t Do It.™

I can blame all those people. Instead, I wanna concentrate on all of the major figures who distinguished themselves over the past 10 years by being aggressively useless, whose utter lack of proactivity and/or backbone indirectly assisted America in revealing itself as a lethal blight upon the world. These are the uninfluencers: our least essential people. Join me today as I take you through a living memorial to them and to the collateral damage they leave in their pointless, feeble wake.

Robert Mueller

You thought he was gonna emerge from his law cave and slap a pair of cuffs on Trump, didn’t you? I know I did. I put a whole lot of eggs into that particular basket. Bob Mueller was gonna investigate the president the RIGHT way: exhaustively and discreetly and without a scintilla of partisan rancor clouding his mind. Of course, doing it the right way ALSO meant delivering his findings to Bill Barr, a man who has proven to be the most corrupt attorney general of my lifetime (and I lived through John Ashcroft). It also meant giving that same AG the opportunity to summarize those findings, to dictate that skewed topline to a waiting press, and to redact Mueller’s comprehensive report any way he saw fit.

Oh, and Mueller all but said the president obstructed justice, but couldn’t bring himself to say it outright because that would have been overstepping his bounds. You want proof that the system we have in place is hilariously mangled beyond salvation? Don’t point your finger at Trump. Point it at the guy who held Trump’s fate in his hands and punted the chance away out of deference to a set of customs that had already been proven to be illusory.

James Comey

Same guy, only this one thinks he’s Tom Hanks standing at the intersection at the end of Cast Away.

Sheryl Sandberg

The Lean In lady! So empowering! Say, you know what’s also empowering? Ordering lackeys to dig up dirt on George Soros; deliberately ignoring propagandists at home and abroad who were exploiting Facebook to spread wildly damaging misinformation couched as news; hiring a Republican messaging group to help concoct MORE propaganda on Facebook’s own behalf in order to discredit its critics; and keeping users in the dark about all the ways their private information has been collected, commoditized, and, finally, weaponized.

Mark Zuckerberg is probably the most influential person of this decade, and not in a good way. He presides over what has become the most effective communication tool for modern fascism, and it keeps getting more powerful. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, you now know which of your fellow citizens yearns to be a deranged hobo spewing nonsense from atop a park bench. Turns out there are millions of them, and they all want to eat each other. Sandberg, during this same time span, has proven to be not a model of female advancement, but rather Zuck’s most trusted spin doctor and C-suite bulldog—there to stamp all of Facebook’s evil with a corporate feminist seal of approval. Imagine if Ivanka was good at being a phony. That’s Sheryl Sandberg. Speaking of leaning in…

James Harden

Roll the tape!

You’re not alone, sir. If you had told me that an NBA player would come around who would, in the 2019 season, average more points per game than Michael Jordan did in any season of his entire career, I would be SHAKING with delight. I am not so delighted when that player turns out to be a man who runs down the entire play clock in a desperate thirst for whistles. Watching James Harden play basketball is like being put on hold by an insurance company.

And even though Harden has an MVP to his name and has made the Rockets a perennial contender—that chokes—no one else in the league wants to pull the kind of shit he routinely pulls on the court. His style of play works, but it sucks so much that everyone else REFUSES its influence out of sheer principle.

Sarah Palin

Think of the parade of racists, buffoons, failkids, and open swindlers who have seen their profiles rise dramatically thanks to the Trump presidency: Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, that Wohl guy, Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Diamond and Silk, Joe Arpaio, Scott Baio, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Ben Carson, Meghan McCain, the entire extended Trump family, and on and on they go. So it’s genuinely stunning that Palin, whose particular brand of cheerful wing-nuttery provided all of those other people a blueprint for prospering in an age of criminal idiocy, somehow hasn’t been able to take advantage of any of it. She couldn’t even get a regular gig on FOX! She started her own channel instead and it didn’t even last a year! Her husband left her! Her kid was arrested for domestic violence! I almost feel bad for her, man…

…but I don’t. Sarah Palin sucks.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Did you know Green Book won Best Picture this year? No one else did, either. There’s a glaring irony in the Academy, right before the turn of the decade, expanding the Best Picture category to a potential 57 nominees just as the movie industry itself consolidated into a handful of studios that produce roughly five movies a year. Remember the Academy’s aborted effort to create a stand-alone Best Popular Film category? That effort was swiftly quashed because it was cheap fanboy pandering, but also because what other kind of movies ARE there anymore? Join us in 2022 when Best Picture goes to the reboot of Blade. Starring Eddie Redmayne.

George Lucas

Lucas’ foremost legacy will always be as the guy who created Star Wars. But this decade proved that, in order for Star Wars to remain a beloved and relevant part of the cultural firmament, Lucas had to sell away his baby to a sprawling entertainment conglomerate that, unlike him, actually knew what to fucking do with it. All Lucas could do with Star Wars in the latter stages of his stewardship was make shoddy prequels and recut the original trilogy over and over, until no one remembered exactly which version of The Empire Strikes Back they saw last.

I am of the mind that once you put out a movie or a book or a TV show, it’s no longer your story. It’s shared between you and your audience. So when you keep changing the story — even slightly — after that connection has been made, you’re undermining that dynamic, if not destroying it outright. Lucas never got that, and never cared to. I can’t believe Bob Iger stands as a model of haute taste by comparison.

Joe Paterno

Paterno broke his own heart. That sounds overly dramatic, but it isn’t when you consider that the Penn State legend failed to report former assistant Jerry Sandusky’s child molestation to the police (he kicked it upstairs to university officials instead), absolved himself of that negligence by telling columnist Sally Jenkins that he had never heard of “rape and a man,” got himself fired, and then died shortly thereafter. The official cause of death was lung cancer, but those left to futilely defend his trashed legacy will tell you that he died out of grief, left mortally broken by the tragic injustice done to him. If that’s the case, then what really killed Paterno was his own stubborn ignorance. But hey, at least he got to see his team lose the Ticket City Bowl right before he died.

Gordon Ramsay

Anthony Bourdain died last year. Thankfully, Gordon Ramsay is still with us to carry the torch by yelling at people, starring in boilerplate AT&T ads, and producing a Parts Unknown knockoff reimagined as a 578th televised cooking showdown. The greater food culture hasn’t missed a beat!

Pope Francis

Everyone loves the Cool Pope, am I right? He does kickass tweets! He doesn’t like Trump! He’ll wash your feet! You talk about cool popes… this is one cool pope! UNLESS… you happen to have been victimized by the scores of abusive priests who have operated at large within the Catholic Church for decades now. Pope Francis has been more visibly penitent about, not to mention openly cognizant of, these abuses than his predecessors ever were. But his solution to the problem was to institute reforms that still leave the Catholic Church in charge of policing itself. Because who better to expose serial predators than their FELLOW serial predators, I ask you?

In other words, the same church that spread pederasty like a contagion thanks to its aggressive insularity has doubled down on that insularity, eschewing the helping hand of actual law enforcement and keeping all of its atrocities tastefully in house. Tear the whole fucking thing down.

Mitt Romney

I’m gonna use Mitt as a stand-in for every other supposed Never Trump Republican who has publicly denounced the President and then fallen right in line like the brainless lapdogs they all are. That goes for Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Jeff Flake, the late John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Erick Erickson, Bret Stephens, Glenn Beck, your dad, and, of course, poor, hapless Mitt.

Guy Smiley stands out in this kennel of border-wall collies because he, himself, ran for President in 2012 and was easily dispatched. Ever since then, he has refashioned himself into a bogus ombudsman for a Republican party that has had a hopelessly corrupted soul for over half a century now. Every time Trump does something plainly evil, you can bet that Mitt will slide down his Jesus pole, run to the nearest microphone, and loudly declare SIR, THIS IS NOT US, SIR. And then, an hour later, he’ll vote to abolish the Fourth Amendment.

Mitt is the face of modern cowardice. He is the foremost exemplar of Americans who have proven willing to tolerate things that they themselves couldn’t have imagined tolerating, until they got just the faintest glimpse of what a truly integrated and equal society might actually look like.

Kanye West

He opened up this decade by making arguably its finest album (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy). He ends it as a fringe artist whose music inevitably takes a back seat to his increasingly strained efforts to both sell that music and to fawn over his own conception of said music. Also, he met with Donald Trump and did NOT plant his Yeezys up the president’s ass. At least Kim Kardashian parlayed her time with Trump into A$AP Rocky’s freedom. By comparison, Kanye did jack shit.

This is all a shame because Kanye STILL makes good music, and yet he actively sabotages any chance that music has of exercising broad influence on its own merits. He could also get help for the mental illnesses that so clearly plague him and drive him to distraction. That alone would prove even more influential than The College Dropout was. I’m gonna hope he searches for a cure to his demons, but I ain’t gonna count on it. He loves those demons too much.

Jake Paul

Logan Paul posted a YouTube video featuring a suicide victim hanging from a tree in a Japanese forest, and somehow he’s the GOOD Paul brother.

Rudy Giuliani

I lived in New York during Rudy’s tenure as mayor of New York and I loved him. No lie. I thought he was great. He cleaned up the subway windows! He got all the pesky homeless people off the street! He attended every cop funeral! I, being a hapless rube, genuinely admired all of those efforts. I was one of the people living in the city who wanted Rudy to get a third term after the way he, with a grace that would later prove WAY out of character, handled 9/11 (“The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.”)

I was wrong to think highly of Rudy. More important, RUDY was wrong to think highly of Rudy. What is he now but a slurring pair of dentures hired by the president to chase Hunter Biden’s ambulance? I’m ashamed of myself. I don’t think Rudy Giuliani has ever been capable of similar regret.

Roger Goodell

At some point in the new decade — hopefully, one not very far off — Roger Goodell will be quietly liquidated and consigned to an emeritus role within the NFL where he can spend eight hours a day giving firm handshakes to friends of the owners while wearing a cheap U.S. Navy baseball cap. There are now clear signs that his time as the face of the Shield is already waning, as he operates in the shadows and makes clumsy gestures to put a little shine on his ginger legacy.

And what will that legacy be? What will Goodell have accomplished in his time as steward of the most popular sport in American history? Here’s the answer: nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. Pete Rozelle helped usher in the era of football as an optimized television product. Paul Tagliabue brought about a period of labor peace and forged a close relationship with then-players union chief Gene Upshaw (too close, if you asked a lot of players at the time). By contrast, what the fuck has Roger Goodell REALLY done? He muddled the rules of the game and then muddled them even further in ongoing attempts to find clarity. He locked out the players. He locked out the refs. He suspended his very best players and decided their sentencing by throwing fucking darts at his office wall. He let Cowboys owner Jerry Jones — the actual commissioner — broker a deal that has planted two unwanted teams in Los Angeles. He tried to brush off a concussion epidemic that, to this day, has rendered football a clear and present danger to those who play it. He is a comically servile loser. Anyone could have made NFL owners money this decade. Few could have done it with such perpetual gracelessness. Speaking of Goodell…

Beyonce’s husband

Whatshisname teamed up with Goodell on a social justice initiative that was really just a marketing deal the league inked to help wash away the lingering stain of Colin Kaepernick’s exile. We just watched one of the foremost artists of this century turn into a businessman who occasionally cuts tracks about what a fabulous businessman he is.

Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan

Hulk Hogan’s court defeat of Gawker Media represents the one time in history that man actually engaged in some capable ringwork. As for Hogan’s billionaire puppetmaster, Peter Thiel now spends the bulk of his days nursing his petty grudges, drinking young blood, feting celebrity buddies, and using software originally designed to target designated terror groups to target YOU instead. Oh, and he’s still on the board of directors at Facebook! FANCY THAT.

Again, we live in an economic age where men like Thiel have derived more profit, not to mention joy, from taking good things away from people than by offering good things to them. Thiel is a vampire in both the literal and metaphorical sense; the latter having a lasting, desiccating effect on the entire world. Quite the visionary.

Ed Sheeran

WHY?

Jonathan Safran Foer

I know a lot of crazy shit has happened since, but the most entertaining story of this decade remains the time JSF left his wife because he was in love with Natalie Portman and thought that she felt likewise. She, uh, did not. THAT’S AMAZING! That’s the kind of rejection that happens to you when you’re in MIDDLE SCHOOL, not when you’re a grown-ass adult! Meanwhile, he also wrote a novel called Here I Am that elicited no shortage of rapturously scathing reviews. Like this one!

“Foer’s latest novel, ‘Here I Am,’ is his third, and it was as wrenching to read as his first, only in ways the author could not have intended. At 592 pages of upper-middle class realism, it is an utterly enervating read, an interminable dinner at the house of a couple given to lengthy quotation from ‘The New York Review of Books.’”

I am leaving my wife for that review. That review and I are in love now. We’re going to make babies together.

Tim Kaine

It would be easy to stick Hillary Clinton on this list, given that Trump bested her in 2016 despite having no campaign infrastructure, no ground game to get out the vote, no polling advantage of any sort, and not even a desire to fucking WIN the thing. However, bitter as I may be about all of that, I’m not gonna blindly wave off the influence Hillary amassed over the years as both Secretary of State and as the first female major-party candidate for president in U.S. history. What I’d rather do is zero in on the grinning pud she chose as a running mate.

Because Hillary could have picked Elizabeth Warren, or Julián Castro, or Cory Booker, or Sherrod Brown, or even Joe Biden for a third go-round. Instead, she chose Tim Kaine to help give her a boost in Virginia, which she ended up winning by a hair. She just also happened to lose Florida, and Ohio, and Michigan, and Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Hillary has since retired to a life of occasional tweeting. But Kaine rejoined the Senate and, in that time, has proved himself to be an eternally useless centrist: helping to deregulate banks and changing his mind about keeping the same filibuster that Mitch McConnell has used to effectively stymie any progressive governing by the majority. Can’t wait for Joe Biden to make Kaine HIS running mate!

Marco Rubio

Rubio only exists to get dunked on by the rest of the universe, including this Parkland victim’s father.

That video should run on a loop inside the Capitol rotunda.

Bill Cosby and Matt Lauer

It’s not merely that these men were exposed as sexual predators. It’s that they were able to operate with impunity for the bulk of this century and were protected by many of their friends and superiors not simply out of neglect but, much more bafflingly, out of admiration for their work.

A lot of profoundly worthless men got exposed by the #MeToo movement, but these two stand out just a bit more in that regard. Do you remember a single fucking thing Matt Lauer did on television that was worth a shit? Do you miss his phony-ass presence gracing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade every holiday season? And what about Cosby? Cosby was once one of the greatest comedians in history. But in his twilight he became, like Lauer, yet another unremarkable shitbag protected by an industry designed to empower unremarkable shitbags.

Speaking of unremarkable…

Donald Trump Jr.

You could make a case for every Trump child to be included here. Ivanka is a tastefully accessorized sewer lady who refuses to let her blatant hypocrisy interrupt her pathological social climbing. Eric is the pasty one. Barron is so distant from his father that his father may not even remember that they’re related. Tiffany is drunk on a boat somewhere.

But Junior… ah, Junior occupies his own special rung of failsonhood. It’s the only way he’s special, really. The president’s eternally desperate namesake is certainly the loudest Trump child, retweeting only the choicest race theories, being EXTREMELY divorced, wearing camouflage gear in places where it has no chance of actually hiding him, parading his mistress around to let you know that he fucks, and triggering those sensitive libflakes by screaming RIGHT ON DAD! every time an immigrant turns up dead in a ditch. He’s a horrible, horrible person. I wish he’d never been born. His dad almost certainly feels likewise.

Elon Musk

The only thing dumber than me believing in Rudy Giuliani was me believing that the hyperloop conceived by Silicon Valley Good Doctor here could really be a thing.

Derek Jeter

Jeter retired in 2014 after spending two decades as the most overrated player in baseball. Since then, he has busied himself by being the 87th rich asshole to gut the Miami Marlins for seemingly no reason, walled himself inside a Tampa mansion (of ALL the places you could choose to live…) that looks like a discount Sandals resort, and launched an online repository of spiffed-up press releases for pro athletes that, just this year, was sold to the kind of holding company that loves to acquire brands without actually giving a shit about WHY those brands are valuable. He also likes to sit in his office and look at iPads.

Chuck Schumer

I could put Nancy Pelosi on this list, given Nancy’s penchant for adopting the right position on certain issues only after spitting on that position at first and then spending the next five years slowly coming around to it. But at least Pelosi occasionally comes around. By contrast, Schumer will go down in history — if history deigns to remember him at all — as a legendary toad who could hardly bother to push back against some of the most egregious political crimes committed in America this century.

This is the guy Democrats have playing quarterback against Mitch McConnell. This fucking chump. All I have to do is think about Chuck Schumer and I wanna die. He cares more about imaginary constituents than the ones he actually serves. He lauded outgoing white supremacist Representative Peter King on Twitter like he was praising his own brother. His strategy to blockade the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was… well, he deliberately had no strategy of any kind. In fact, Schumer convinced himself that letting Republicans win on Kavanaugh was, in fact, a masterstroke of political maneuvering on HIS part:

“We’ll see how much of a victory Kavanaugh was really for them,” he said.

It was the biggest victory the GOP has ever had in my lifetime: One for which they spent literal decades laying the groundwork. Brett Kavanaugh is a 54-year-old unrepentant, drunken, sexual predator who will strive, for the rest of his time on Earth, to thwart progress from his pivotal seat on the highest court in the land. He’ll also act as a sturdy firewall to prevent the implementation of ANY humane legislation that could get passed years from now. And he could strike down any tangible impeachment rulings levied against the man who hired him. Kavanaugh will ruin millions of lives, and without apology. He will hardly be alone. He’ll be joined by an entire battalion of Federalist Society goons who have metastasized across the judicial system. And Chuck Schumer helped make it happen. He’s a fucking disgrace. The only thing the Senate has done this century is prove that the Senate ought to be abolished, and beat-ass Chuck along with it.

Merrick Garland

:(

Chuck Todd

Another Chuck! NO MORE CHUCKS! We need a total and complete shutdown of Chucks entering the United States until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell has replaced New York Times columnist and faulty wind gauge Tom Friedman as America’s foremost counterfeit thinker. This is the part where I tell you that I paid money for The Tipping Point and for Blink and found both books enormously entertaining. I also took them as grounded in sound logic. They were not. Thankfully, Gladwell has spent the entirety of this decade thoroughly discrediting himself, to the point where no one with a working brain can assume that it’s sound logic — and not titanic speaking fees — backing up all of his pseudo-intellectual catchphrasing. He is now a Penn State truther. Parents of the survivors of predatory Michigan State doctor Larry Nassar also accused Gladwell of using, without their knowledge and without proper context, audio of their interviews with public radio in his own audiobook. Oh, and in that book, he blames those same parents for their children getting molested. He believes Steve Nash counts as Nigerian. He is a tool, in every figurative sense of the word.

Arianna Huffington

Oh, were we talking fake thinkers? Well then let’s use that moment to (not) celebrate a woman who deftly ingratiated herself into the political and business elite so she could freely hobnob within both spheres and then reap the profits. Thus, Arianna has spent the past 10 years failing upward in obscene comfort. She sold her namesake website, which never turned a profit under her reportedly vicious care, for $315 million. She joined the board of Uber — oh look, another company that freely represses employee wages! She then fled Uber, but not before denying the company had a sexual assault problem, which it very much does. She also started a wellness company called Thrive which sells phone “beds” for $100.

This decade has gone a long way in proving that the majority of our industrial titans, the president included, are shameless grifters. Arianna Huffington is one such grifter: a living indictment of modern capitalism. I bet she, and her stupid phone, sleep like a baby.

George Conway

No one is gonna believe a goddamn thing you say until you leave your wife, kid.

The New York Times

Again, this decade has revealed a host of systemic, hopelessly entrenched problems all across America. Here’s a final one: Every local newspaper is dying off or getting corrupted by right-wing zealots. That has left the Washington Post and the august New York Times (it must always be referred to as “august”) with a virtual monopoly on reputable printed news.

And what has the Times done with that bit of good fortune? Well, they fucked Hillary Clinton in 2016 by blowing her email “scandal” insanely out of proportion. They hired Bret Stephens. They declared Bill Barr’s clearly doctored summation of the Mueller Report “the best day of (Trump’s) tenure so far.” And, to this day, they still refuse to call the President a racist. They won’t call ANY racist a racist! That’s policy. That’s always been the policy.

The Times’ way is to diligently report the news, and then strip that news of anything resembling an assertive journalistic voice. Instead, the Times, which posits itself as the last bastion of Truth in this country, would rather leave everyone to interpret events which need no interpretation. They are a bad faith practitioner’s wet dream of a newspaper. Rather than exert influence, they deliberately withhold it. And this America, which is fucked to its core, is the end result.