The Only Opinion That Matters
I can't take all these takes.
Hi friends!
I’m back. Thank you for your angelic patience and continued support for this newsletter that, if you can believe it, is still written by a human lady who needed a break and not a chatbot optimized to bait the sheeple. That was directed at my paid subscribers only — the rest of you can read this whenever I send it and be grateful for the opportunity!
But seriously, my job job, the one that keeps me in the aspirational lifestyle I’m accustomed to, has been way more creatively demanding lately, and I was so exhausted after I wrote my last dispatch that my boss (I’m the boss) said to stop writing extracurricularly until I felt a bit fresher. Then, I turned 40, which, for a Peter Pangela like me, as I told anyone who would listen, was like staring down the barrel of a gun.
Of course, there was a full-ass supermoon on my birthday. I had a very fun party with my beloved friends here in LA and got so many presents and nice wishes sent my way that I felt like a sultan. For a week, I kept all of my flower deliveries clumped together on my dining room table in a magnificent funeral arrangement for the dregs of my youth because I am dramatic. It was a great birthday and I was loved and celebrated and I have nothing enlightened to say about turning 40 — the new decade was a real shock to my system and I don’t like this descent into midlife because I like being young and wild and free. Thank goddess I have the cheek collagen of a woman who has smoked much less of everything and the wisdom to know that my prime has only just begun.
Age has also given me the wisdom to know that if we want to live in a better world and resist the dystopian boot-on-face future that the sex offenders and AI-loving madmen running ruining the world and milking our brain cells for billions of dollars want us to think is inevitable, we must begin by reclaiming our humanity wherever and whenever we can. The current pace of the internet is disgusting and the discourse is getting worse. Not sure how that’s even possible. If you need a reminder to take a deep breath and honor your own energy instead of trying to whip up a post on the takebait du jour like a gladiator entering the Colosseum of Clicks or the Forum of Front-facing Cameras, here it is:
Take a break!
Participating in the degradation of what’s left of culture is a choice! And so is burning yourself out completely to keep up with it. Speed and reactivity are rewarded with engagement but they’re not actually what makes for good, enduring work or a well-rounded life.
Put that in your vape and vape it.
Anyway, I’m feeling much better and more rested, and now I’m ready to unleash some timeless opinionation in this opinery.
If you have a rich offline life and missed the cacophony of deafening uproar over a few recent headlines — great. I’m not linking to them here. You do you and keep raising the vibe as the rest of us demean ourselves by ingesting the internet.
Social media didn’t invent sensational headlines, but it did elevate the art of treating readers like a bunch of slack-jawed fish. Back when the Age of Unhingement™ began, we mostly baited our hooks for clicks. I say “we” because, in 2016, I famously did a short stint as a “trends editor” at a political news startup where my entire job was to write headlines and photoshop thumbnail pics with strategically cut-off tweets that would get people clicking on Facebook. I’m a bit twisted and love writing one line of copy, so I was great at it.
The primary goal was to make people curious enough to click for more info — known in the business of mass manipulation as employing the curiosity gap — by withholding the right nugget of information. The secondary goal was to get people to share the story, and that was best accomplished by a declarative headline that they would agree with and want to virtue signal to their friends. There was some ragebait involved — we wrote about Amy Schumer a lot that summer for no good reason other than she made people so mad in the comments — but, above every other form of engagement, it really was about clicks.
That year, algorithmic feeds replaced linear timelines on both Instagram and Twitter and then, shortly thereafter, Trump was elected for the first time. That combo ushered in a new era of emotional manipulation in both politics and media, and because the haggard remains of legacy outlets need content that will resonate with a dwindling audience, they’ve been increasingly tied to what works on social media ever since.
But social media platforms, now more than ever, are fucked. And AI has also entered the chat. What works best these days seems to be shameless ragebait, also known as taking a provocative, hardline stance that is rooted in nonsense, delights a minority, and pisses everyone else off. It encourages engagement not only in the form of clicks, comments, and shares, but in motivating other writers and creators to respond with their own timely take on the take.
A trend-based onslaught of hot takes after an article goes viral is nothing new on social media or the internet-at-large, but increasingly provocative opinions being published in, like, The New York Times, as a form of engagement farming that I call takebait, now fuels the growing takes-for-profit cottage industry populated by independent writers and creators trying to survive media collapse. We’ve entered an even more depraved era of media manipulation that builds off of everything that preceded it: The thirst for views and traffic is still there, the rage is still being weaponized, and now the bait is being dangled not just for reader engagement or angry retweets, but to encourage creators and writers to opine on TikTok and Substack so they can grow their following, make a buck, and send a little traffic back in the meantime.
I don’t have any answers on how to fix this or lessen the appeal of taking the bait (as a consumer whose emotions are being exploited or a creator hoping to monetize in this economy). What I do know is that the one thing any of us opinionistas who regularly sling takes on the internet can ask ourselves is: Why am I so horny to post about this nonsense? And if the answer is that rent is due, then do what you gotta do. But also, watching this cycle repeatedly unfold makes me want to log off indefinitely. Society is crumbling in tandem with the media ecosystem, and if this all continues its trajectory, by Q4 next year, this newsletter will be about my vegetable garden, and I will be xeroxing it and sending it to you all via mule.
So, we made it to November of 2025. We’re finally rounding the corner on this godforsaken year, and here comes Jeffrey Epstein, emailing from beyond the grave, making us all wonder if Trump fellated Bill Clinton or if the Bubba in question was perhaps Ghislaine Maxwell’s horse? New levels, same devils here in hell on Earth!
Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother and the man who emailed the question that inspired some truly cackle-worthy TikToks, told The Advocate that it was a joke. I say believe whatever you need to believe to get through the news cycle because more Epstein survivors are coming forward to tell their stories, the files are ostensibly making their way to us even with Trump calling it a hoax, and he’s now literally calling for lawmakers to be hung as his latest distraction from what we all know.
All week I have been thinking about how the REAL, ACTUAL story that needs to be told is the one that focuses on the courageous women who, as girls, survived being trafficked into an international sex ring under the guise of being helped by a man so well-connected that his correspondences transcend partisan and global politics. And how, in our nasty, mediated world, the abuse and trauma these women endured has turned into a political circus of finger-pointing and misinformation and speculation about whether the sitting president gave Bill Clinton a blowjob.
Don’t you DARE drag Monica Lewinsky into this, she has been through enough.
Being a woman in a patriarchal culture is to be reminded that you inherently have less value as a human being. Women are not piggies or baby factories or ruiners of places or objects to be ogled, bought, sold, fondled, fucked, and cast aside.
Women are people.
And so, the only opinion that matters right now is one that I hope we can all agree on: No matter what unfolds when these files are released, or how crazy it all gets, we need to remember the victims first.
Yes, this is a story that begs to become gossip because it drops more names than two narcissists at lunch in Hollywood. But this story is really about how powerful, soulless men can perpetrate this level of abuse and machination, globally, with little consequence.
And I am hoping with every fibre of my being that this is also a story about how the women who survived that abuse take those men down and see the justice they deserve at last.
For an entire year, I have been meaning to get matches printed to spread the BIAD gospel IRL and I finally did it! And if you see me in the wild this holiday season, I just might bless you with some.
Stay strong out there, my friends! We’re in the homestretch now and nothing needs to get done until 2026. Consider this your signed permission slip.
See you sooner than last time!
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
Happy belated birthday, Sultana...!