Poast-Leftism & Bix-Nooding the Birthing Persons
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Author’s Note: This is a work of satire. To the best of my knowledge, none of the people in this work have said or thought any of these things, and probably they wouldn’t, who knows. By the same token, none of the views they express necessarily constitute my own views, either, I’m really just trying to capture a vibe. I intend no offense to any of these people and in fact I think of many of them quite fondly. I don’t know anything about Joe Lonsdale and I mostly chose to make him the protagonist because he was in the right place at the right time and because of a vague phonetic similarity between Lonsdale and Lenny.
</picture>Poast-Leftism: That Party at Lonsdale’s
On the night of the premier, all the leading lights of the New Right had assembled at venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s lakeside mansion near Austin to drink champagne and eat canapés after the debut screening of Alex Lee Moyer’s latest cinematic triumph. There was lobster risotto arancini with saffron aioli, puff pastry squares topped with various combinations of cheeses and preserved fruits, there were shot glasses each containing a raw egg yolk, a little horseradish and tabasco, almost like an oyster, which you were expected to slonk — and this was enough of a novelty that if the conversation ever slowed, someone would razz up one of the girls into slonking a yolk and then tease her about the face she would inevitably make, much to the delight at least of the non-homosexual males in the room.
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“You slonk the egg?”
“…Yes, just down it one gulp. Heat denatures the cholesterol which is why it has to be raw. You must read Benjamin Braddock…”
Lonsdale had spared no expense building out his grand foyer with vaulted arches and rows of ionic columns made of Thuringian red marble. He had instructed his architects to work within a syntax of spare classicism and to develop an architectural language of power and he was pleased by the way his guests had flowed automatically from the foyer through the dramatic rectangular openings into the library and living room, which were custom-made to resemble the doorframes in the Königsplatz buildings and the House of German Art in Munich. The ceiling, reminiscent of Italian Renaissance palaces, also recalled the pine ceilings in the library and smoking room of the Old Chancellery in Berlin.
The guests for their part were pleased as well; more than once, Lonsdale heard someone exclaim that it was all just so… fashy! Fashy meant fascist but it was more of a vibe than any kind of definite political stance. Fashy was part of the vibe shift, it was anything the regime didn’t like, but it really just meant things that normal people want, things like being able to say what a man and a woman are, being able to admit what good schools really meant. Basically it meant anything the middle class liked.
Now that was an odd phrase: middle class. Joe Lonsdale wasn’t middle class, or was he? He was pretty sure the middle class didn’t have a Persian reproduction of the famous sixteenth-century Paradise Carpet in their living rooms. Employing naturalistic forms, the weaver had represented deer, panthers, lions, and bulls—among other real and imaginary animals—in a landscape with cypress, pomegranate, and flowering apple trees. The dealer had told him the estimated 15.4 million knots in the carpet would have taken a lone weaver working every single day fourteen years to complete. Joe must live a certain way. But this was America and everyone was middle class, there was no aristocracy, though there was, possibly, old money and new money. Lonsdale was in tech, that made him the latter, that made him new money which made him middle class.
The film they were celebrating was a stylish half-biopic, half-documentary telling the story—what little was known, along with some timely embellishments—of Nasim Aghdam, the woman who shot up YouTube’s headquarters in 2018 with a Smith and Wesson 9mm. Nasim was a popular figure among the far right because of the (merited) perception by the same that social media companies like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Patreon, Reddit, Yelp, Instagram, Pinterest, Substack, LinkedIn, Medium, Twitch, Snapchat, and TikTok suppressed right-wing content in order to control the narrative and stifle dissident speech. Nasim, although her actions were illegal, was seen as a symbolic liberator who had struck a blow against the woke regime–controlled media and stood up for her principles with little to no regard for her own personal safety or well-being. We needed more people like Nasim Aghdam who
United States
