The Personal Is Political. And the Political? Oh, It's Personal.
The issues have issues.
WELCOME to my new subscribers who found me through the fabulous
, who has been serializing her latest book via her newsletter, This is Precious, and recently shared that it has found a publisher and will be making its way off the internet and into our hands very soon. Her book is all about living through ongoing societal collapse without losing your mind, which I know will resonate with the real Unhingement-heads. Congrats, Sarah! Inspirational queen behavior must always be celebrated! 🎉🎉🎉This seems like a great time for me to re-introduce myself:
Hi, I’m Liz! I’m a writer and social strategist who has seen the entire internet at least twice, probably thrice. I’m also the chronicler-in-chief of the Age of Unhingement™ — my name for this “world-gone-mad-screen-addicted-content-goblin” era we are living in. In 2023, after we had all fully emerged from our covid caves with merely a crumb of normalcy left, I felt compelled to discuss the rampant cultural insanity and started writing my Unhingement-themed newsletter. Here we are, nearly two years later, and everything just keeps getting crazier. Would you look at that.
Hi friends!
Lucky me, I’m back from a week-long vacation in Mexico that felt like a year. I do believe I entered some sort of energetic portal at LAX where time ceased to make sense. And honestly, I needed it — the vacation and the illusion that it was longer than it was.
I think the week also felt long because I managed to sleep in three different locations, starting with one night at an all-inclusive resort in Puerto Vallarta for a friend’s 40th birthday celebration with a group of people who had not all been in the same place for at least 10 years.
My flight landed early, and when I stepped outside the airport, I ran straight into my friend and her husband, who were curbside, drinking beers, and waiting for their car in some truly outrageous humidity. A beautiful, serendipitous moment for me because I love a free ride.
In that car, knowing everyone’s views (and my vibe lately) and wanting to reconnect with my old friends without being consumed by political psychosis, I seized the opportunity to put it out there: Please, for the love of god, do not discuss politics with me. That seemed like a good idea and we all agreed to behave.
We managed to make it through that first night with only one minor infraction, a question about the failings of the fire hydrants in the Palisades. LA fire conspiracies make me want to unleash a primal scream, but I did my part and refrained from turning up the burner on my simmering outrage. We had a lovely dinner and a great time catching up and celebrating.
I woke up the next morning too hungover from four drinks, feeling like a baby animal born with its eyes closed. My best friend Daniel and I headed to the breakfast buffet, but there was a wait for a table. I begged the hostess for coffee and she mumbled something about the buffet, so we went to check it out (a fool’s errand), and met a young-ish American bro who was clearly cruising for a chat because neither of us can remember what prompted him to tell us that he’s a financial advisor in Atlanta who plays both sides politically depending on which client he’s talking to and that he once “gave Trump’s ugly daughter enough ketamine to scramble her brains.”
“And yours too?” I asked because I have no filter before I’ve had my coffee.
That afternoon, Trump and his cronies verbally attacked Zelensky, a stunning display for the annals of Unhingement that did nothing to dispel the viral rumor started by a former KGB agent that Trump is actually a Russian asset named Krasnov. And in the wake of that brutal redefinition of the world order, upon finding out my friends and I were Canadian, two people at that resort didn’t think twice before jokingly referring to Canada as the 51st state.
Daniel and I left the resort for the serenity of an Airbnb, and later, after a very fun night out with the group during which we saw a woman proudly wearing a MAGA hat in a gay bar, we sat on the balcony as the soothing sounds of the ocean washed over us, and had a heart-to-heart about the crazy state of politics.
Daniel lives in Toronto and I live in LA. The last time we had seen each other in person was in New York right after Trump was re-elected. I had skipped the denial and bargaining phases that had women forming a club on TikTok and believing psychic prophecies of a protracted Kamala victory. I was immediately horrified, briefly took up smoking cigarettes, and in lieu of sinking fully into depression, gave myself 20 allotted minutes to cry about it daily.
Now, I’ve looped back around to anger, the kind of anger that makes me want to buy a bullhorn so my yelling can be amplified.
The past couple of months have loosened my screws in new and exciting ways. It might surprise some of you who have been reading these rants of mine on a newsletter I called Burn It All Down, the most popular post of which is a VENDETTA (lol), that I did not fully embrace my own rage until, like, yesterday. My sensitivity? Yes, been honoring that for years. Chronic facetiousness? I express that proudly. But being angry, unapologetically? Well, that’s a loaded way for a woman to be.
But I don’t care anymore.
Has Elon Musk literally once in his nasty, attention-seeking life internalized his anger and felt bad about it? Unclear if he has human emotions, but if he does experience anger, he externalizes it into living his techno-fascist fantasies out loud, firing government employees, and slandering empathy to fucking Joe Rogan (more on that in just a little bit). If he’s going to be a Nazi and destroy our planet as he tinkers with his little spaceships, I shan’t feel weird about being perceived as “angry” when I say that the malignant narcissists who are currently tag-teaming the US presidency are unqualified, drug-addled lunatics who don’t seem to get how this is going to end for them. I know how this ends, because I am a smart woman with great pattern recognition, and these motherfuckers are clearly aligned with history’s worst villains.
It’s all good, though! Turns out that anger works for me. When I told Daniel on the Mexican balcony that mentions of the Hindu goddess Kali — who represents the darkest, fiercest aspects of feminine power and is famous for destroying what no longer serves the collective — have been following me around since January, he didn’t bat an eye, pulled up a pic of her on his phone, and said, “she’s very you vibes.” Then, he suggested I photoshop my face on hers for this newsletter.
Politics — and all the emotions they trigger — are unavoidable right now. You can be at The White Lotus or the Hyatt Ziva Puerto Vallarta or at a coffee shop finally getting some work done, and it’s a safe bet that politics will be discussed. You can wear noise cancelling headphones in every public space. You can brick your phone and bury it alongside your head in the sand. But, eventually, you will meet a friend for lunch, have to tell them that you’ve opted out of paying attention, and then feel obligated to share your justification for it. This news cycle is engineered to make us all lose our minds, so more power to you if you claw your way out, and please share with the class how you did it. As for the rest of us, we will continue being terrorized by information while we try not to ruminate over the fact that a demented convict is likely shitting in a diaper while he films Tesla infomercials and stokes World War III live from the Oval Office.
It’s a lot to contend with for everyone. But for those of us living in America, we also have to deal with the fact that people in our proximity may have voted for this apricot-hued demon. And when we suspect (or know) that they did, and the government is so obviously shifting toward fascism, do we let it slide and try to maintain the relationship (thoughts and prayers to my friends with FOX News parents), or do we stand up for what we believe in and ream them out for it?
In earlier days of dealing with … this … there was a lot of screenshot activism that encouraged any decent citizen to call their racist uncle out and ruin Thanksgiving. But when a little over half of the people who voted in November watched Trump spew lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats and then voted for him anyway, I’m not sure that one more person calling them out is going to change anyone’s mind about anything.
It’s been so many years of wild polarization, and yet, I still can’t wrap my head around how many people are willing to align themselves with racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic misogynists. In the immortal words of this perfect lady, “you voted for a candidate that was endorsed by the KKK. For the rest of your life you have to know that you voted the same as the KKK, no ifs ands or buts, no doubt about it.”
You either get it or you don’t.
So, if you voted against my hard-won rights and the rights and safety of literally every marginalized group in existence, I probably won’t waste my precious energy on calling you out to your face, but I absolutely will take it personally and talk shit about you behind your back.
It’s hard to believe in the context of how personally we take politics these days — curating the perfect collection of screenshots and reels to share to Instagram stories as a form of political identity pastiche — that the idea of the personal being political was once radical. But in the late 1960s it was.
“The Personal Is Political,” the essay that brought the term into the zeitgeist, was written in response to backlash within the Women’s Liberation Movement that questioned the political integrity of radical feminists who had formed groups to share their personal stories. The idea that women could overcome self-blame and re-contextualize their painful, private experiences as a reflection of systemic issues was new and paradigm-shifting. And the work of these groups was derided and dismissed by others in the movement as “navel-gazing” and “therapy” in a very different culture where no one quoted their therapist in casual conversation, weaponized the word “boundaries” in text messages, or had the means to create and consume 25 million TikToks about attachment theory.
Politics did become intertwined with a better definition of personhood, and America had a Black president, but then algorithms entered the chat, white dudes discovered podcast mics and the phrase “identity politics,” and it all went off the rails. I’m going to start a throwback-but-make-it-intersectional-this-time Women’s Lib “therapy” group of my own and invite all my girlfriends over on the new moon to drink tea and shriek. Gathering offline again might be the way out of this mess and I think hearing each other out instead of posting into the void is exactly what we need.
Once upon a time, in a land before broligarchy, social media wasn’t an opportunity for the government to conduct AI surveillance, violate freedom of speech, and detain student protesters — it was a catalyst for change.
It’s easy to criticize political action on social media as performative, but Twitter birthed and organized movements like Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter. And those movements got people in the streets. The biggest day of protest in US history, the Women’s March in 2017, when by some counts 5 million people wore their pussy hats on their sleeves, was largely organized on Facebook.
Now, we’re on the timeline where Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it “X,” and reshaped it in his image to influence elections, boost the same racist conspiracy theories that have inspired mass shootings, and get more engagement from his putrid little fanboys. And that’s why, when TikTok served me a clip of him telling Joe Rogan that empathy is a “bug” in Western civilization, a vein popped out of my forehead.
Because I wanted to make sure that I saw the full context, I watched the interview on YouTube and was forced to witness a conversation about sex robots and hear those two flirt with different versions of AI while I scrolled through the comments, desperate to find a timestamp link. You think I’m going to listen to Joe Rogan talk to Elon Musk for three fucking hours? In THIS attention economy? I found a link, saw what I needed to see, and then crawled back into my cozy silo with my heated blanket and my vape pen. More context didn’t make the phrase “civilizational suicidal empathy” make any more sense, by the way.
The idea of empathy being a problem and “wokeness” destroying Western civilization is a fallacy on par with saying it’s illegal to boycott Tesla. Trump can address congress and the nation and the ping-pong paddles and say that “wokeness is trouble, wokeness is gone,” but “wokeness” in the Trumpian universe is about as real as the tooth fairy and makes less sense as a concept.
Empathy is famously not a flaw in the matrix; it is the core of meaningful human connection. And it is essential for a free and open society where we all have an equal right to exist. Elon Musk views empathy as a “bug” because our emotions are what separate us from machines, and his agenda is based on the unbridled advancement of technology. This is personal, but it’s not even about politics, it’s about preserving our humanity.
Trump may be in the White House running his mouth and moving his pen, but that doesn’t magically erase more than half a century of social progress. He didn’t win in a landslide, not even close. And Elon Musk wasn’t even elected.
The culture is divided, but it’s not decided.
The media can publish clickbait stories about MAGA being cool now, but as this brilliant man on TikTok reminds us, Trump being president doesn’t change the fact that Shonda Rhimes had “the gays eating ass on prime time television.” Plus, people I know who work for, like, corporate ad agencies were hard posting in support of Luigi Mangione. That unhinged energy (like all energy) can’t be destroyed.
Unfortunately, since NASA said there’s now “no significant potential” for that asteroid to take us out in 2032, we’re going to have to get it together and do something about this.
Let’s just hope I don’t get deported first for asking the all-knowing bread how quickly it will end:
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
Fade to black... No, blacker... darker, just fucking dark, like a black hole... We ain't getting out, are we? This Age of Unhingement, this Assholocene... this epoch will acquire a name... Something like The Great Confusion of the Early Third Millennium, or whatever future historians will find catchy... and it's gonna last a long time... Maybe they'll subdivided into plagues... The first plague of the Orange Nosferatu, the second plague (it's begun, hasn't it?) and so forth...
"So, if you voted against my hard-won rights and the rights and safety of literally every marginalized group in existence, I probably won’t waste my precious energy on calling you out to your face, but I absolutely will take it personally and talk shit about you behind your back."
Lovely. :) +1. :)