A new study published in the  North American Pediatric Psychology Review seems to indicate something new and perhaps startling for some parents: it’s impossible to keep your kids from becoming assholes.

“And there’s even a better than even chance they’ll wind up being massive assholes, to boot,” Dr. Susan Scott, Chief Researcher in Clark University’s psychology department, told reporters as she announced the results of the exhaustive, 15 year study she helped oversee. “The simple facts are that if you have a kid, and you raise them on Earth around other humans, someone somewhere at some point is going to think they’re an asshole.”

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Dr. Scott says she and her team isolated the “asshole gene” almost right away, but it took years of diligent, “scientific sciencery” for them to complete the study and confirm its results.

“It turns out the asshole gene isn’t that hard to find; it’s in every human’s DNA,” Dr. Scott said. “But what we had to determine is whether it was a dominant or recessive gene. Anyone who has interacted with a human can tell you — it’s a dominant gene.”

Dr. Scott took a moment to think.

“In fact, the asshole gene might be THE dominant human gene, actually,” Scott mused. 

Assholes walk among us every day, Scott said, and you might be surprised to find one sitting next to you on the bus, or giving you their asshole opinions on TV.

“Everyone from your local milk man to the guy telling you to buy gold and not trust the government because people who think differently than you do voted for it,” Scott said, “are all probably assholes.”

Scott says parents can try all they want to, but they will “prolly” fail at keeping their kids from being a-holes.

“Look around you. How many assholes you see every day? Well guess what? They all had parents too,” Scott said. “And none of them WANTED their kids to be assholes. But here we are, face to face, seven billion assholes.”

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Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook, Spotify, and Instagram, but not Twitter because Twitter is a cesspool.