I can’t believe that Isan Diaz finally got added to the Giants 40-man roster, and here I am not writing a newsletter about it, like a fucking dilettante.
I know you guys come here for Isan Diaz content. I know I am widely regarded to be America’s number one source for Isan Diaz news, opinions, reactions, and fanfic. And yet, here I am letting you down. I am not writing about Isan Diaz, because today I have a higher calling. Today I have to serve my country.
Today I have to talk shit about Aubrey Huff.
Huff, the onetime Giants first baseman who reinvented himself as a garden variety right-wing shithead, ran to get elected as a school board member in Solana Beach, the San Diego suburb where he lives. Folks, it gives me great pleasure to announce that Aubrey Huff got absolutely crushed in that local election. As of this writing on Wednesday night, Huff’s opponent had 1,505 votes, while Huff was at 362 votes. By the percentages, he’s down 80.6% to 19.4%.
If you’ll allow me to engage in some political analysis here, the reason Aubrey Huff is getting his ass whooped in his local school board election is that he fucking sucks shit.
Since retiring from baseball, Huff has bounced around, working as a morning show guy on 97.5, writing a book, trying to redefine himself as a reformed dirtbag, and eventually settling on making occasional appearances on Newsmax to get out the messages that he would tweet if he hadn’t been banned from Twitter. Twitter never said exactly why they banned him, but it was probably because he was spreading lies about COVID (lies that included COVID not being that serious and the vaccine making you sick), although you can’t discount his history of teaching his kids to shoot Bernie Sanders supporters or wanting to kidnap Iranian women so they could fan him and feed him grapes.
In his persona as Ultra-MAGA guy, he decided to run for school board, trusting in either his own name recognition or his long history of being a Trumper; either way, in a heavily Democratic area, that was an absurdly stupid idea that was never going to work, and hey, would you look at that, it didn’t work.
The reason Aubrey Huff thought it would work is that he’s an idiot. There’s no more to it, no complex calculus, no seven-dimensional chess. He’s simply not a smart man, and, because he has immersed himself in a media environment where the range of political opinions goes all the way from Far Right to Extremely Far Right, he thinks that is all there is. He feels entitled to votes and acclaim even though he is not doing any work to earn those votes and acclaim.
For example, Huff’s opponent, Debra Schade, has been on the school board for 20 years, and she has filled out all sorts of information that you can find on Voters Edge. She discusses her background, her experience, her priorities, her political philosophy, and just about basic biographical information that a voter would want in order to make a decision.
Huff has filled out nothing. He has no relevant experience and there is no reason for anyone to think he'd make an effective school board member. Unless you want to vote for the school board candidate who likes Kyle Rittenhouse the most, there’s not actually any reason to give him your vote. He hasn’t earned it, and any candidate who gave it a half second of thought would know that. He thinks that he should receive votes based entirely on his name, as if school boards do nothing, like a vestigial organ of our political system.
It’s not just in politics where he does that either. A few years ago, Huff did an AMA on Reddit where he talked about how much he’d changed and evolved since his playing days, but it wasn’t hard to see that it was all on the surface. As respected Reddit user [deleted] said:
Honest question: Why should we believe you’re trying to be a better person and you’re having such a tough time not being famous when you openly brag about pissing people off , telling off “liberal candy asses”, while also when you WERE “famous” having a big incident where you essentially rubbed your wealth and fame in peoples faces while they protested a racist Muslim ban. Now that you’ve lost that, why should we care?
Aubrey Huff is nothing. On some level, he’s known he was nothing ever since he retired from baseball, and in that AMA you do see some awareness that he based his identity on being a baseball player for a long time and was adrift afterwards. He is still in that afterwards, still casting about, desperate to find something new that can define him. As part of that desperation, he turned to extremist politics, and as part of that turn to extremist politics, he tried to become a school board member.
It didn’t work. It can’t work. Huff knows that he’s peaked, that the only thing about him that people will ever value is gone, and now he’s stranded, desperately trying to return to the marginal relevance he once had, each attempt more plaintive and pathetic than the last, like a hungry cat who’s not sure anyone is actually there. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for him.
Wait, sorry, no. It would be enough to make you feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t a massive asshole who deserved every bit of his public misery.