ted cruz launched a political asmr channel and now my nervous system is a casualty of the culture war

tw: legislative violence, parasocial relationships, sensory overload.

i am so tired. i feel like my entire lived experience is just a series of unprocessed traumatic events scrolling past my eyes, and today was... a lot. i woke up, doomscrolled for an hour which is my version of self-care, and was immediately confronted by an act of discursive violence so profound that i literally had to log off. senator ted cruz has launched a political asmr channel.

i wish i was dissociating right now but this is my reality. it's called 'capitol whispers' and it's on youtube and rumble, which is already a huge red flag for my spirit. the first video is titled 'tapping on the constitution & other gentle triggers' and it's forty-seven minutes of him, in a deeply unsettling close-up, whisper-reading subcommittee hearing minutes and tapping his acrylic nails on a pocket constitution.

i feel personally attacked. asmr is supposed to be a safe space, a tool for regulation when the world is, like, actively ending. it's what i use to quiet the existential dread of being chronically online in a toxic economy. but he's co-opted it. he's colonized a healing modality to push his political agenda. hearing him softly crinkle the pages of a defense appropriations bill felt like an actual assault on my nervous system. i am not holding space for this.

the emotional labor required to even exist on the same internet as this content is astronomical. this is what happens when the political landscape becomes so fundamentally broken that our leaders think the path to relevance is through weaponizing tingles. it's problematic on every level, and frankly, i don't have the bandwidth to unpack it all. this isn't a 'bit.' this is a symptom of a deeply unwell system that sees our safe spaces as territory to be conquered for clout.

protecting your peace is a radical act of resistance. for anyone else feeling completely dysregulated by this, i've been using these noise-canceling headphones to create a sensory safe space and block out the literal sound of democracy dying. they're on my amazon storefront if you also need to disconnect from this waking nightmare. i'm going to go lie down for 72 hours. this is all too much.