This guy went to grad school with me. He was OK for the first few years I knew him, but then began listening to conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. This made the worst aspects of his personality come out.

  • Kevin is a hardcore misogynist. On one occasion, he was arguing with a female friend in my Facebook comments about how women don’t have any actual medical need for for birth control pills. When my friend saiid that women sometimes need to take birth control for other medical reasons, he told her she was a silly girl and didn’t know what she was talking about. When she (correctly) began tearing him a new one, he blocked her and messaged me about how irrational she was being.

  • Kevin decided Alex Jones wasn’t enough and began following a Catholic fortune teller. This fortune teller made a prophecy that Barack Obama wouldn’t peacefully transition power to Trump in 2016. When it became apparent that the fortune teller’s prophecy was incorrect, Kevin refused to admit this was the case and sent us videos of people protesting several blocks away from the inauguration.

  • I am an immigrant. One day, me and some friends had an extra ticket to a baseball game and invited Kevin. At the end of the national anthem, Kevin yelled “Build the Wall!” as he stood next to me. When I confronted him, Kevin said he was just play acting as a jingoistic American.

  • Kevin claimed that he had proof that the Sun revolves around the Earth and that there’s no way the Theory of Relativity is possible. When I sent him scientific papers proving him wrong, he said that only “high priests of science” could understand that stuff.

  • Kevin claimed that ventilators were what killed people who were diagnosed with Covid. He said that when we stopped putting so many people on ventilators, Covid deaths went way down.

  • My cousin’s wife died of Covid. I told Kevin I didn’t want to hear anything about his conspiracy theories regarding Covid at the same time I told him my cousin’s wife had passed away. He sent me a conspiracy theory article 2 hours later. When I called him out on it, he refused to apologize, going only so far as saying that he might not have chosen the best time to send the article.

  • Kevin was in a fantasy sports league with me and my friends. We’d bust each other’s chops and make funny about each other. He’d say all types of crazy things to all of us, but if someone said anything even remotely negative about him, he’d throw a literal tantrum. This is a man who is 48.

  • Finally, we all decided to cut ties with Kevin on January 6, 2021. As we watched the riot, one of our friends decided to ask Kevin whether he thought the rioters were acting in a way consistent with democracy. He then sent us a YouTube video of one of the Easter Island statues with a voice over saying we shouldn’t believe everything in the media.

  • Kevin thinks people who live in the hood like it there, so that’s why they don’t move.

  • Kevin always needs a far right hero to worship. When he got into Jordan Peterson, everything he didn’t like was suddenly “post-modernist” or “Marxist”. When I unwisely asked him if he believed in QAnon, he said he didn’t know anything about it. A few days later, he started talking about globalists in every communication.

  • Kevin claims that pasteurization is fake and was just Louis Pasteur seeking glory and prestige.

  • Kevin wanted to go to a coding bootcamp. He asked me if he would be guaranteed to get a job that paid over $100,000 within 7 days of graduating. When I said no, he said he knew it sounded like a scam.

  • Kevin asked me if there were any openings at the firm I worked at at the time. He said he was looking for a job where he could get his own clients and keep 100% of the money, but also needed to be paid a base salary in case he wasn’t able to get the level of clientele he needed to maintain his desired lifestyle.

  • Kevin said that he was going to buy a rental property in the college town where his oldest goes to school. Kevin and his wife’s shopping addiction take up all his money, so I had no idea how he could afford a down payment on a rental property. Kevin said he was going to get a loan with no down payment. When I asked how he was going to pay to fix things when they broke or get the property ready for rental, he said that his daughter and his friends could live there and fix it up for him for free.

  • Kevin claims to be a free thinker who “reads all sources”. I found the site where he gets all his news and was able to anticipate what topics he would try to use to stir the pot in the group chat. He said he “looks at that site from time to time”, while he talked about everything on their front page in great detail every day. One day, when he decided to start trying to talk in the group chat, I figured out that he was just going down the list of links on the front page. I began calling out the next topic he was going to bring up. He said I was pissing him off.

  • Kevin likes to jump from topic to topic rapidly when talking to people so it’s hard to keep up with which conspiracy theory he’s talking about. I began using the Reply feature in WhatsApp to specifically reply to his points. Kevin said I was pissing him off because I was giving him specific responses debunking his points.

It’s been great having Kevin out of my life. I never realized what a toxic drain he was. I highly recommend that you get rid of the Kevin in your life ASAP.

Written on January 20, 2022