News/Trending Politics/Community

I Don’t Give a Sh*t About Louise Linton’s IG Meltdown, and Neither Should You

Louise Linton, actress, producer, and wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, is in a lot of hot water for her tone-deaf Instagram post in which she tagged the numerous designers she was wearing as she stepped off a government airplane upon returning from a trip to Kentucky where her husband was lobbying for tax reform.

But it’s not just the fact that Linton boastfully advertised all the rich things she owns to the rest of us plebeians who are less worried about the tag that accompanies the clothing we’re lucky to wear and more worried about job security and sustaining a roof over our children’s heads that got her in trouble. It was her passive-aggressive response to a commenter that really sent the sharks a’circling.

In response to jennimiller29’s comment, “Glad we could pay for your little getaway. #deplorable,” Linton unleashed a tirade that essentially amounts to, “Aren’t you adorable? Clearly you don’t know how much more important I am than you. Now run along and live your adorably meaningless life with your adorably meaningless children as you watch adorably meaningless common-folk TV shows.”

And people are foaming at the mouth about it.

Linton’s Instagram account has since been set to private, but that hasn’t stopped the rage and fury from escalating among people who see Linton as just another piece in the problem puzzle we find ourselves attempting to deconstruct.

But here’s the thing: Why do we care? I mean, seriously. Are we surprised someone like this posted something like that and responded in such a way?

Let’s be honest. She looks beautiful in that photo. And who hasn’t responded to someone’s insults in kind? We may not agree with Linton’s world perspective, but she’s entitled to it.

And perhaps most importantly, she’s not the Treasury Secretary. Her husband is. As off-putting as I think she is, and as symbolic of what is wrong with the 1% as she is, she’s entitled to wear pretty things and to post those pretty things on her Instagram account if she wants, regardless of how tasteless and tactless that might seem to me and to people struggling to make ends meet. Yes, I think she should be held to a higher standard of conduct given she’s a public face for her husband and, in turn, the government — whether she likes it or not — but hey, I also think money should grow on trees, and look how that’s working out for me.

Louise Linton is not the biggest of our concerns right now. Let’s direct our rage at things that are. Like the escalating alt-right with their radically dangerous racism and misogyny. Or the prospect of nuclear war. Or the crisis in Venezuela and around the world. Or our president’s continuously unhinged behavior which, try as he might to deny it, is further dividing a country already in chaos.

Yes, Louise Linton is an asshole. Many of us can agree on that. But there is so much more out there deserving of our attention. Let’s badger our representatives, stand up for our marginalized neighbors, and fight to dismantle institutional and systemic oppression with our boots on the ground, so to speak. But let’s not waste our time hemming and hawing about Louise Linton on the internet (and yes, I recognize the irony in this very post right here).

Louise Linton says, “Let them eat cake.” So let’s eat some motherfucking cake and get back to work, shall we?