In 2018 California comedian and T.V.-writer Jamie Loftus paid $40 and, after getting drunk on shandies, took the written exam for entrance into Mensa, the world’s biggest organization for people with high I.Q.s.

She scored in the 98th percentile. She was in Mensa.

One result, two years later, is the hilarious and chilling four-part podcast My Year in Mensa.

In her simply-produced, first-person tale, the 27-year-old Loftus describes her conflict with the members of a vitriolic and occasionally sinister Mensa Facebook group and her subsequent visit to the high-I.Q.-society’s annual gathering. A kind of boozy confab for self-described nerds.

Loftus’s story is eye-opening. She reveals, through sometimes cringe-inducing lived experience, the fraud at the heart of the famous organization for supposed smart people.

Mensa bills itself as “a forum for intellectual exchange among its members.”

“Activities include the exchange of ideas through lectures, discussions, journals, special-interest groups and local, regional, national and international gatherings; the investigations of members' opinions and attitudes; and assistance to researchers, inside and outside Mensa, in projects dealing with intelligence or Mensa.”

That’s the claim. In fact, according to Loftus, Mensa is a club for people who have $40 to blow, are good at taking tests and might have something to prove. That certainly describes Loftus.

“Good news, they let dumb sluts into Mensa now,” she announced in a blog post shortly after passing the entrance exam. “I am going to ruin the Los Angeles Mensa chapter by dragging my dumb little ass around on their boring, elitist carpet if it’s the last thing I do.”

To understand Loftus’s mocking tone, you have to understand what kind of comedian she is. The stunt kind. Perhaps most famously, Loftus back in 2015 opened an Etsy store selling “the nation’s finest framed Shrek nudes.” For charity, of course.

“A Shrek nude, to be clear, is a nude photograph of Loftus covered in green paint, not a drawing of the actual big, green two-eyed monster and his big, green one-eyed monster,” Intelligencer explained.

Also in 2015, Loftus ate a copy of David Foster Wallace’s thousand-page novel Infinite Jest.

Her agenda in “infiltrating” Mensa was, she wrote, to reveal its silliness. “Now is, quite possibly, the stupidest time for Mensa to exist,” she wrote. “The world is both big and small and full of problems that get worse all the time.” People who are good at taking SAT-style tests, and want everyone else to know it, aren’t really helping us solve those problems.

As she recounts in My Year in Mensa, Loftus first engages with the group in one of its un-moderated Facebook groups. In the group, she discovers the same nastiness that’s evident in many social-media circles. Sexism, racism, classism, even fascism.

And when she tweeted about it, revealing the names of some of the crueler members, the group lashed out. Members mocked Loftus, threatened her then banned her.

Undeterred, she flew to Arizona in the sweltering heat of high summer to attend Mensa’s 2019 annual convention. What happened next should surprise no one. But I won’t spoil it here. Needless to say, Loftus endured an intensity of nerd-rage that has ruined lesser people.

The group, she explains, is guilty of “inciting politicized hate.”

“I think Mensa could possibly be salvaged as an organization,” Loftus admitted. But if in time it evolves and improves, it will do so without her. Two years after passing her $40 genius test, Loftus has left Mensa.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.