How Not to Be an Online Intellectual

This might seem like an unusually frivolous post from incorrigibly high-minded me. But hey, it’s mid-August; if I lived in Europe, I’d be off all month. I also remain deep into book-writing, and am now being forced by the calendar to devote time and attention I really don’t have to preparing for the fall semester. (Thankfully, I’m only teaching one class this upcoming term, and it’s my third time through “Conservatism in Theory and Practice,” a first-year seminar with just 15 students.)

Put it all together, and I guess you could say I’m in the mood for something a little fun, a little playful, a little light, but also, I hope, something nonetheless illuminating—about how I think about ideas and my role as an intellectual, about our political culture, and about our social-media-shaped and -saturated reality.

I’m going to try exploring these themes by giving readers a listicle of sorts. What follows are the five Twitter/X accounts that trigger/irritate/provoke me more consistently than any others.

But first, a couple of caveats.

To begin with, I’m not including Elon Musk in my list because it would be too obvious. The richest man on the planet; the world’s first trillionaire; the owner of the very platform I’m talking about; the guy who landed a top job in the second Trump administration by donating hundreds of millions of dollars to the president’s campaign and used that power to gut USAID simply because he wanted to and could; the scumbag who regularly insists Adolf Hitler was a leftist and retweets and endorses the hateful and ignorant conspiracies of neo-Nazis, racists, and xenophobes to his 241.2 million (!!!) followers—of course I can’t stand that guy. But he’s not an intellectual of any sort. He’s the most influential troll in the world. To treat him as anything other than that would be a distortion of reality. So I’ll leave it at that.

Second, my list is pretty quirky. As is my mind, I suppose. In addition to its suitability to the summer doldrums, one motive for writing this post is to try and figure out why these specific people are the ones who drive me battier than any others. I’m not entirely sure, to be honest, and I’m hoping the process of writing about the topic will help me to understand. But I should also admit that there’s some selection bias at work here—because I’ve blocked a lot of people on Twitter/X down through the years, and many others who used to drive me up the wall have fled for Bluesky. Surely some of those accounts would have made my list had they not vanished from my view! So the five people listed below are, truth be told, merely the worst of those I see regularly on the platform these days.

With that out of the way, here are (in no particular order) what I consider to be the five most annoying accounts on Twitter/X (that I haven’t (yet!) been moved to block).