The Politics of Emotion, or: Merging Politics with Real Life

Ending a Nine-year Friendship over Trump

I wasn’t planning on posting today but then my [now former] friend and I ended our friendship over politics.

Let me start by saying that this friend—who shall remain unnamed—has been a close buddy since 2016. She’s a fellow writer whose work I admire greatly. When we met—as Trump was rising out of political obscurity to be the front-runner of the Republican Party—I had one albeit embarrassing initial objective: I wanted her to connect me to her literary agent.

Let me back up. The first time I saw her was at a literary reading in Berkeley in 2016. She fascinated me on many levels. (I was living in the Bay Area still at this point, where I lived from 2008-2019. She stood out. Very short, jet-black hair, and she held her baby on her hip as she read. The whole scene was riveting and unusual. Plus I liked her story. She was a good writer. But I didn’t talk to her.

That night I went home and Googled her. She was, at least to me back then, a fairly big deal. Successful as a writer, one might say. Meaning: She had some writing published in legit magazines, bigger lit journals and places like The Washington Post. And she was crucially represented by an agent. One thing led to another and finally I decided—ironically—to reach out via Facebook, which I still used at the time. (I am no longer on FB.)

I was genuinely curious to meet her, and I truly did respect her writing…but at the core of it I can’t deny I was hoping she’d connect me with her agent. Back then, in 2016, I’d been submitting several novels to hundreds of agents since 2011. One novel—my punk literary YA novel The Crew—had generated a lot of initial interest. I had a few dozen agents who read the first 50 pages and emailed to ask for the full manuscript. Some added glowing comments about the writing and the story. One agent—at a firm in San Francisco—absolutely loved the book but also wanted me to make some changes. She encouraged me to work on it. I was very close, she said; she could see it on the shelf.

This agent read The Crew not one, not two but three times all the way through, each time sending me glowing, praising emails. But, interestingly just after Trump won the election over Clinton, she disappeared. Could be a coincidence; could not be. A couple other agents gave the more direct approach: This is really quality work…but with Trump in power I’m not sure the market is that open to novels about straight rich white teens. I wrote about this experience HERE.

Anyway. I digress. Point is: I was hungry.

So We met up at a local coffee shop on a gray Sunday and, as fate would have it: We were like best friends whose paths had somehow diverged years prior. We couldn’t stop talking. I loved this woman. She was amazing. Smart, funny as hell, honest and a wild mix of absurdity and genius. I didn’t mention the agent even once.

~

My friend and I had become each other’s champion over the years, especially as writers. Her writing journey was incredible: Over the course of something like 15 years and three different agents—one of whom was a huge, famous, highly experienced NYC agent who convinced her over the course of four years to rewrite her brilliant memoir into a YA novel which the agent eventually rejected anyway and dropped my friend—she finally, at last got her memoir published. I was happy for her. I told everyone I could think of. I plugged the book vociferously. I interviewed her. I reviewed it on Amazon. I bought multiple copies and gave them out.

She read almost all my work, book-length and short. (I’d read her memoir in pre-publication and talked about it on the phone with her for five hours. I also provided her with extensive notes.) She gave me good, solid, honest feedback. I felt safe with her when it came to my writing. She always told me the truth, good or bad. The edgier and more intense my work became, the more she loved it. She didn’t hold back. She was, really, my First Reader. My ideal reader. My biggest supporter.

We did have issues, too, as all friendships do. She suffered from depression sometimes and took it out on me. She could be impulsive. She once unfriended me on FB because she was “in a mood” and then re-friended later. She loaned me money once and said no worries on when I paid her back but then, within a week of the loan, passive-aggressively sent me a PayPal request for the money.

But the first big rift between us was around her drinking.

As most of you know, I got sober 14.5 years ago, September 24^th, 2010. My friend in 2016 still drank often. And smoked a lot of pot. Her drinking came up a few times. Back then we’d go to bars (2016, 2017, 2018). One night she took it too far and was just acting like a jerk, pushing my buttons when she was drunk. I no longer even recall what was said. Doesn’t matter. Point is I was angry. I called her out the next day and we had a big, dumb text war over it. We both said things we regretted.

We stopped talking.

All of 2018—single again—I worked my ass off doing book editing and saved up to follow my dream of moving to New York City. When I got there, March 24^th, 2019, at the age of 36, a romantic writer’s perfection, my friend and I hadn’t spoken in many months. I'd blocked her on everything. I was off social media. I wasn’t yet on Substack. (Didn’t even know it existed.)

One day, a couple months after arriving in Manhattan, I randomly checked my spam. And there it was, an email from her. I read it and immediately reached out. We reconnected. All was good. She ended up being an especially helpful friend during my 18 months straight living in NYC during COVID, living, of all places, in East Harlem. (Buy my NYC/memoir about that time HERE.)

In 2021, visiting California for the first time in 18 months, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I left NYC, my dream city, after only 2.3 years, and only one year pre-COVID. I was suddenly living in Santa Barbara, with my parents, for the first time in over 20 years, caring for my sick father. (He died 23 months later, June 2^nd, 2023. R.I.P. He was 77.)

My friend and I kept in touch through all this. I visited the Bay Area a handful of times. I drove up once to San Francisco just to see her read and be interviewed at a bookstore on Haight when her memoir finally came out. I ordered multiple copies of her memoir. I told everyone I knew about it. I reviewed it everywhere. I was her biggest champion.

~

Politics

She was always generally further to the left than me. Until the past 8-9 years, I have historically always been a left-of-center person. Interested in politics but not that much. I have only ever voted on any level including federal for Democrats. My parents are/were always dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. They were always more centrist than me. In high school I was a hardcore punk rocker who abhorred “capitalism” and “the system.” Yet I also never bought into Wokeness, identity politics, fringe leftist activism. It always felt phony to me, white kids playacting.

In 2016 and 2017, when the Democratic Party failed to connect with the working-class, and when Hillary, with all her snobbish disdain didn’t even campaign in many of the crucial swing states, I began to question everything I thought I knew about the traditional left.

To be clear: This did NOT mean that I swiveled to the right. I did not become a Republican. I’ve never agreed with Republican values.

To this day I am:

Pro-free speech

Pro-choice

Pro-immigration (with basic restrictions and reasonable limits)

Pro-gay (trans stuff is fine with me unless the person is under 18)

I think everyone should be able to participate in the military, in politics, etc.

Diversity—of skin color, class, views—is always a good thing.

Sometimes it makes sense for the government to spend money on certain communities, causes, etc.

I am pro-gun restriction

I believe in climate change (obviously)

Jan 6 was horrible.

Trump should have been barred from running for president again if for no other reason than he literally lied about the election being stolen and went to court to try to prove that.

~

But as the weeks and months and years blurred on, the left, it seemed to me, became more and more unhinged. In 2015 I’d discovered Sam Harris’s podcast. I was beginning to leave my binary feeling of “us” vs “them” or Democrat vs Republican and was, more and more, starting to question the media narratives I was hearing from MSNBC, NPR, VOX, etc. I began to feel “politically homeless.” I liked either side less and less. I sought my own views, ideas and opinions. I craved nuance. I didn’t pick teams. I looked at evidence on a case-by-case basis, thought carefully and critically, and made my choice from that point. More and more, people seemed to be one-sided, fiercely tribal and unmoved by facts, data, science. It was the era of Politics as Emotion. Post-facts, post-reality, post-thinking.

As smart as my friend was as a person, and as beautiful of a creative writer, like many passionate, creative people, when it came to politics she didn’t seem to know a whole lot about how things actually worked. She operated much more on emotion than on practicality.

Still, she was just like me in most ways. She and I texted and emailed and mocked the radical left endlessly. They were worthy of mockery: In 2020 when almost exclusively young Black men were beating the shit out of innocent Asian people around the country—and specifically in NYC where I literally witnessed it with my own two eyes and you can watch the recorded videos—and the left was calling it “white supremacy”: That was mockable.

When the trans activists said that not only are their endless genders (which: sure; fine) but there are endless sexes, that biological sex isn’t a natural binary: That was mockable. When white progressive women were screaming about no opportunities for “authors of color” yet when you went onto Amazon they were shoving Black authors down your throat and every time you walked into any bookstore in NYC all you saw were Black and brown faces on covers surrounding you: That was mockable. When every agent in Manhattan was looking for “more trans stories, more stories from people of color, more #OwnVoices stories, more feminist stories”: That was mockable.

You get my point. I could go on forever.

We both mocked all of this shit. Because it was fucking absurd.

But something changed, for her, around a year ago. It started when the first Trump assassination attempt occurred. She said “too bad he missed.” I couldn’t believe this. Terrible as I felt then and still think now that Trump was/is, the idea that she would OK the murder of a human being—any human being—was very hard for me to handle. But we agreed to disagree. I wasn’t on FB anymore, which now, in light of what just transpired, makes me wonder what she said on her social media.

Anyway, over time she met my wife and they became new friends. They liked each other. Britney was on FB and they became friends. Over time, as Britney told me about what she saw on social media, we came to the mutual conclusion that my friend spent a lot—actually an incredible—amount of time posting on Facebook. Like, a startling amount of time. A scary amount of time. Every five or ten minutes it seemed she was posting something new. And, my wife added, she was saying things filled with anger and hate, things like “fuck all Trump voters.”

I ignored this.

But then a couple of weeks ago my friend texted me out of the blue and said she “didn’t know how politics right now might affect our friendship.” I was taken aback and responded—with much restraint—that I didn’t think it should affect us at all. I didn’t like Trump. I was a free-thinking, nuanced critical-thinker. She’d picked a side. But we could surely still be friends.

She let that one lie but then a week later she texted again (also out of the blue, apropos of nothing) and said that what we had was “not a difference of opinion” and that Trump “is a fascist” and that he is “trying to dismantle democracy” and added that “planes are crashing and Nazis are running around everywhere.”

This one really took the wind out of me. What the fuck was she talking about? Where was the friend I’d been so close with since 2016. Even a month ago, like always, we’d texted and mocked leftist extreme identity politics. But, for her, Trump was The Line. And, in her view, I’d crossed that line.

Britney had mentioned how often she was posting on FB about politics. Things like, If you’re a Trump supporter, Fuck You. I hate you. One person responded that she lived in a bubble. She said “damn right” and blocked the guy. She seemed to suddenly be filled with rage, bitterness and hatred. She was dehumanizing the other side and anyone who’d supported Trump. (Which again, wasn’t even me.)

It came to a head when she suddenly unfriended Britney on both FB and Instagram. I tried to ignore it but I couldn’t. I knew it was going to nag at me until I spoke up. So, with total restraint, I texted and just mentioned that my wife was hurt about being unfriended and asked if everything was OK.

My friend responded, apologized and said she would re-friend her.

Then yesterday morning, right after I woke up, Britney told me that she’d casually gone onto FB and the first post she saw was my friend. My friend had quoted me saying that I didn’t understand why politics should affect our friendship and that what was going on in national politics made no impact on our real day-to-day lives. She referred to me as her “friend” in quotation marks. Her friends all dunked on me. She responded herself to one friend’s critique and added that I “claim I don’t like Trump” and that I’m “Trump’s target.” Her friends praised her, calling me ignorant, clueless and an ass.

I screenshot her comments and sent them to her via text. I said that this was not the kind thing a caring friend did and that it was childish and wrong. She immediately responded that I had no right to tell her what to post and added that I should “fuck off” and that she was “done.” I said she was a terrible person, that she’d pointlessly lost a friendship, and that she can now tell all her ignorant little lemmings what happened. I blocked her on phone, email and removed her from my Substack.

It’s sad, isn’t it? I feel foolish myself for even participating in it. What luxury we have in America, in the West, living in our homes and apartments, warm and safe, texting and arrowing social media posts at each other. Pathetic. Childish. And I am a part of that. It sickens me.

This former friend is 50 years old and white, by the way. Just so we’re clear. I think she’s a genuinely good person who just got so caught up in social media and her story and tribe that she actually merged her own real personal life with politics. For her this became dangerous. That was another text she sent me: She said she and her husband might leave the country (how many times have we heard this tired story from leftists) and that it was “life and death.” She’s a liberal white Jew living in Berkeley. A full U.S. Citizen. What in the fuck are you talking about? What reality do you live in?

I think this story is part of a much broader story, too, about mental health and social media and what it can do to people if you aren’t careful. When I texted her that she needed to expand her network of friends, grapple with some dissenting views and know people who challenge her ideas, she claimed that she did have those people in her life. But how could that be? She was ruining a perfectly good friendship with me, and I’m not even a Trump supporter!

Social media distorts peoples’ brains. Especially for writers who spend a lot of time alone and in their own head, this is dangerous. It can lead you down the path of tribal distortions. Read Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation for more on this.

I don’t hate my friend. Not even close. I wish her the best. I truly do. She’s a good person, and a fucking fantastic writer. But I cannot be friends with someone who acts this way. It’s too myopic. Too navel-gazing. Too self-enclosed and narcissistic.

Hate is not the answer, people. I leave you with a question: Why is it always people on the Left who seem the most judgmental, the most cruel, the least empathetic and the least compassionate?

Don’t you think it’s time for your side to look at that?