The Mirror

Vox’s Yglesias Is Mad As Hell And He’s Not Going To Take It Anymore

Betsy Rothstein Gossip blogger
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Vox.com Executive Editor Matthew Yglesias is all the rage.

And I mean literally — he is enraged.

In his daily newsletter Monday — and if you don’t subscribe, you really must because this is some good shit that should not be missed — he reveals a strange problem he says he used to have: a rage addiction.

On a side note: Let’s hope his newborn son doesn’t witness it. If you recall, the baby that he stuffed into a Vox onesie shortly after birth solidified Yglesias’s belief that abortion should be as easy as a Burger King drive through.

In his Monday confessional, he admits that his anger problem led him to therapy. He also talks about how he used to link his political views to his rage. He says he’s, ahem, cured, but only in nine times out of ten instances of things that make him blow up. In other words, once in awhile Yglesias still completely loses his mind over something trivial.

Seriously, does Dr. Drew make house calls?

“I used to be a very angry person,” Yglesias wrote. “As in, after a bad incident or two too many, I did cognitive behavioral therapy to adjust a rage addiction. I still get that old boiling blood feeling sometimes, but these days I know how to handle it 9 times out of 10 and reconize [sic] the angry times as the exception rather than the rule.”

But Yglesias is all about self-awareness.

“When I was angry a lot one thing that happened was I really linked my personal addiction to feeling angry to my political views,” he wrote. “My righteous rage wasn’t a psychological problem, it was a political stance. And I continued to feel that way even as my political stances changed. This was, in retrospect, a mistake. A political stance is a political stance. A personal temperament is a personal temperament.”

Being the experienced rage addict he purports to be, Yglesias spouts off about what he sees as an enormous problem on the Internet — people letting their political views trigger their anger.

“It’s a mistake I see people making all the time on the internet,” he explained. “And I think it’s a serious one. It’s great, of course, to be outraged by injustice. But a posture of rage and anger is different. When you’re angry, you blow up small differences. You take an ungenerous attitude and fail to understand what other people are saying. You don’t communicate your own ideas clearly. You find reasons to be in fights with people because that gives you an excuse to be angry. This is just no way to do any kind of effective politics.”

On my wish list: videos of Yglesias while angry.

Or better yet, a Vox explainer on what anger really means.