Idiot of the Year #4: Curt Schilling, utterly incapable of rational thought

Welcome to Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE YEAR Top 10! Our expert team has worked tirelessly to bring you this annual list of the sports and sports-adjacent figures who most intensely made us wish we had been shaken as infants. Here are our first 40 picks:

Do we really need to do this one? Does anyone out there not know why Curt Schilling is an idiot at this point? If you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years, our Jesse Spector summed up the reasons why no one should even consider voting for Schilling for the Hall of Fame here:

For non-baseball reasons, though… we don’t have to go through the whole laundry list, but it’s generally bad when “defrauding Rhode Island for $75 million” is just scratching the surface. More recently, Schilling has encouraged people to give to a GoFundMe to build a border wall that — surprise! — also turned out to be a massive fraud and resulted in Steve Bannon’s arrest on a boat. And, of course, there’s the “so much awesome here” comment about a shirt suggesting the lynching of journalists. That last one is particularly germane to the discussion of Schilling’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame, where the vote is conducted among the very people Schilling thought it would be “awesome” to see murdered.

Of course, we haven’t yet gotten to his collection of “WWII memorabilia,” which consists of enough swastikas and SS gear to prompt one historian to declare that Schilling has “some kind of fetish with Nazi uniforms,” a fetish Schilling might have been more successful in denying if his views didn’t so closely align with the former Third Reich. In an email to the Arizona Republic in 2019, Schilling announced to shrugs and eye rolls that he was “considering” running for Congress, writing:

“The state is not the state I grew up in. Making Arizona citizens of EVERY Race, religion and sexual orientation 2nd class citizens to illegal immigrants is about as anti-American as it gets. When you have homeless veterans, children, and you’re spending tax dollars on people smuggling drugs and children across our border someone in charge needs their ass kicked.”

Curt apparently saw this tapestry of suck for the masterpiece it was, because two months later, Schilling put out the word that he was interested in working as an MLB manager, an organization that definitely doesn’t have any immigrants in it.

Alas, this is not a body of work award. Actually, it’s not an award at all, but we digress. The Idiot of the Year finalists must have been idiots in 2020 to qualify. Luckily for us, Schilling just keeps tweeting.

As mentioned above, Schilling kicked off 2020 serving on the board of Steve Bannon’s “We Build The Wall” fundraising group for a border wall that Mexico is definitely still going to pay for, alongside such conservative luminaries as Erik Prince and former Milwaukee county sheriff David Clarke Jr. Bannon and three other men were indicted by a federal grand jury for defrauding donors to the tune of $25 million, and there was hope for a few days that we might see Schilling frog marched into federal court. But it was not to be.

Now that he no longer has fake border wall meetings taking up his free time, Curt is free, as the kids say, to tweet through it. And boy, is he ever trying to tweet through it.

Here, we see young Curtis Montague (seriously, that’s his middle name) being an absolute creep about the death of actress Dawn Wells:

Because what woman doesn’t want to be remembered for whether or not Curt Schilling imagines she “brought it” every time, as opposed to just some of the time?

Here’s Curt spelling “Democrats” wrong and definitely not knowing who Mitch McConnell is:

Who owns the Nazi gear again? Just sayin’.

But to be fair, Curt spends most of his time trying to convince people with the IQ of a potato that the election was rigged:

And that the news COVID vaccines are ineffective and also will be mandatory or something.

So if they don’t work why do you care if they’re mandatory, Curt?!

Curt, having apparently given up any pretense of being a respectable person, also spends a fair amount of time RTing people like Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk, and @ing Vice President Mike Pence.

But what truly qualifies Curt for this vaunted ranking in our 2020 Idiot of the Year class is that he’s just so dumb. Everything that comes out of his mouth is some galaxy-brained ayahuasca 6th grade take that anyone who took 8th grade civics can debunk. We’d actually be embarrassed for him if he wasn’t so damn malignant.

Curt, here’s to reaching the top in 2021.