It’s worth mentioning these are not the only times Ritchie drops the n-word during my visit. It’d be easy to label this as the rantings of a drunk racist, but as with everything that Ritchie does, it’s hard to know how calculated it all is. Is he just trying to get a reaction? Is he begging to be pilloried when this story comes out so he can launch into a very public tirade against “cancel culture”? Is this all just a play for more attention? Would any of that make it less shitty?

The strange thing is, despite his rhetoric, Ritchie’s politics aren’t uniformly regressive. He considers himself socially liberal. And the longer we argue, the more I can see the faint outlines of reasonable stances on things like immigration, government regulation of corporations, and tax policy. But here’s the thing: Nobody will ever hear any of that over the shouting, the name-calling, and all of his other attention-grabbing bullshit. I don’t think he really cares because the shouting, the name-calling, and the attention-grabbing bullshit are who he is now. It’s as if the blurry line between Kid Rock and Bob Ritchie has disappeared entirely.

It’s textbook alcoholism. Super simple.