Yung Oettinger

Günther Oettinger was an EU Commissioner who spoke English like it was being routed through corrupted audio files. I remember encountering clips of him talking and waiting for my brain to catch up to what was actually being said—words just getting destroyed as they came out of his mouth.

And then there was the small fact that he’d called Asians a racial slur. That he said it didn’t seem to matter much professionally.

Someone remixed one of his speeches into a parody rap song, gave him a stage name—Yung Oettinger—and it circulated like actual music. I watched people share it seriously, treating it as entertainment. The absurdity was so complete that comedy was the only sane response, the only way to acknowledge that yes, this is what we’re working with here.

The weird part is how the remix became what I actually remember. Not the incompetence, not the racism—just the funny song everyone laughed about. The absurdity gets packaged up, turned into shareable content, consumed and forgotten, and by the time you realize nothing’s actually changed, you’re already scrolling past the next thing.