Poast-Leftism & Bix-Nooding the Birthing Persons

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.

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.

“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 were willing to take action on behalf of the constitution and the first amendment, consequences be damned.

And now this is another one of those perplexing things to Joe Lonsdale, because many of the people in this very room were investors in some of these companies—Peter Thiel had been on the board of Facebook, even—but somehow that didn’t change anything about what you could or couldn’t say. Everyone at the party, he expected, knew that was because of something called Managerialism, which is this idea that the owners of companies, the stockholders, the VCs, they don’t have any control over actual business operations, and everything the company does, that’s done by something called the Professional Managerial Class. The PMCs. Lonsdale thinks he might technically be a PMC, but if so, he’s one of the good ones. He doesn’t have the woke mind virus.

There was something so striking about the story of Nasim Aghdam, all the little details were so delicious, the way it simultaneously affirmed Sailer’s law of female journalism and obliquely also his dictum regarding the correlation between the race of a shooter and his (in this case, her) lethality; the fact that Nasim failed to kill any of her victims seemed to demonstrate that women can’t shoot, and right-wingers know that stereotypes exist for a reason. Despite left-wing (i.e., mainstream) critics’ vicious renunciations of the film, it had proved hard to critique along the expected lines. Nasim was an immigrant and a woman and a vegan, after all, and besides that she was clearly neuro-atypical and probably a great example of how We Need to Take Mental Health More Seriously in This Country. Depending on how you count and who you ask, women comprise between 2 and 0.2% all mass shooters, and Iranians—excuse me—Persians are similarly underrepresented. Throughout the film, Moyer assumes a not-quite-ironic stance where she presents Nasim as a kind of feminist anti-hero, boldly challenging stereotypes and infiltrating male spaces to speak truth to power.

Moyer was a true auteur, and her treatment of the subject was racially aware without being overtly racist; she had only posed the question—indirectly and by proxy through the various experts she interviewed—if the same forces of structural and systemic racism which exclude Black voices in other areas of American civil society have also caused us to discount the involvement and concerns of minority and especially bipoc, queer, female, non-white, indigenous, and non-male persons in perpetrating mass shootings. 

Aghdam opens with warm, dreamy shots of the San Diego coastline paired with the melancholy tones of the Boomtown Rats’ 1979 Irish New Wave Anthem I Don’t Like Mondays, memorializing Brenda Spencer, the first woman active shooter, who shot up Grover Cleveland elementary school in the same year, played by Dasha Nekrasova in a mullet, doing her damndest to look under-age (so what’s new?). The enchanting Billy-Joelesque piano arrangement reaches a crescendo as Dasha gives a wink and blows a kiss at the camera like some kind of shoujo anime girl before charging in guns akimbo and slaughtering 6 million* snot-nosed SoCal elementary schoolers in a scene reminiscent of Tarantino reminiscent of Peckinpah.

From there, Moyer goes on to interview a forgettable sociologist about the politics of what is classified as a mass shooting. The statistics can be sliced half a dozen different ways, but it’s always done in a way that excludes Black shooters in particular, and this is perhaps done subconsciously, but it has the effect of centering mass shootings as a mental health issue which predominantly affects white males, when in fact a more honest accounting should acknowledge that there is a crisis in America regarding the mental health care of Black youths, but we can only have that conversation when we are honest about the exclusionary nature of the politics of counting mass shootings. There is a certain almost tongue-in-cheek quality to these dire, hand-wringing interviews underscored by brooding strings and keyboards and other cinematographic borrowings from the Netflix-NPR-Vox school of telling informed citizens what they’re supposed to think, juxtaposed with cartoon ultraviolence and a kitschy soundtrack curated by NegativeXP who also went by the name School Shooter. 

When Rod Dreher wrote a column in The American Conservative, condemning the film for glorifying violence and lionizing terrorists, Alex Lee Moyer had fired back in an appearance on Rogan, calling him a racist and a sexist, calling it a typical example of White Male Christians trying to erase non-male and non-white bodies. Whatever Moyer’s intent with this remark had been, the soundbite had made its way to several legacy media outlets including Fox and CNN before anyone involved could figure out how many levels of irony Moyer was on. 

…Back at the after party, the lady of the hour Anna Khachiyan, who had starred in Aghdam as the titular (no pun intended) Aghdam, was nowhere to be found. No one had seen her at the debut, and no one seemed to know where she was. But Alex Jones was there. Malcom Kyeyune was there. Glenn Greenwald was there. Ms. [sic] Blaire White was there. So was Mike Cernovich, Amanda Milius, Michael Malice, Nick Rochefort, Nick Mullen, Niccolo Soldo, David Reaboi, Balaji Srinivasan, Mike Solana, Curtis Yarvin, Lydia Laurenson, Aella, Nina Power, Ariel Pink, The Ion Pack, Indian Bronson (under a different name,) Katherine Dee (under a different name,) and many others besides. James Poulos and Robert Mariani were there, but there was no sign of the latter’s sidekick McCrump. Blake Masters and Michael Anton and Christopher Rufo had the good grace not to be there.

Malcom Kyeyune was the only Black in the place, a fact that everyone had implicitly agreed to ignore, and if it ever came up you just had to make a joke about how he’s a Swede, OK? and move on; a polite little laugh, did you know that despite being only 2% of the attendees of the party he’s responsible for 52% of the racial remarks—umm, umm, ummm—but no really—the film is a masterclass in threading the needle and drawing attention to racial realities that we all need to contend with and be honest about if we are ever going to move past them and realize that most of the problems Americans perceive as being racial are also true of working-class whites. 

Whatever anyone thinks about this kind of class analysis among the anti–woke post-left, it’s undeniably got an appeal to many of them, being former or reformed Marxists themselves, this is all very sympatico. It didn’t really matter if Kyeyune was Black, or if Blaire White was trans, or if Glenn Greenwald was gay. All the way back in 1906, Ambrose Bierce had written that An African American is a n—— that votes our way — even in his head, Lonsdale wasn’t quite comfortable saying that word, it just didn’t feel necessary.

A small crowd had gathered around Curtis Yarvin in the library, and he was talking about the Rod Dreher thing, the way Moyer had tried to bend back woke language into a critique of wokeness, but he is saying that using their terms —even to critique them—ultimately reinforces their power, because it gives legitimacy to the structure of control even though it feels like you are subverting it. Yarvin is wearing his famous leather jacket, and his wife is there next to him, but so are several other women, and most of the girls at the party are wearing some variation of Nasim Aghdam’s signature outfits, which had also featured prominently in the movie, such as a metallic spandex leopard print onesie with a gold tassel rope belt and white strappy heels; a red vinyl pencil skirt and a purple shawl jacket with deep cleavage terminating below the breasts and a woven black necklace with knots; a black dress with embroidered flower sleeves and a black cops and robbers eyemask and Doc Martens; a vinyl metallic purple jumpsuit, black yoga pants with a solid red long-sleeve skintight top; a white zebra stripe turtleneck onesie and gold flats; or an orange satinate pirate shirt paired with green and white floral pants. Katherine Dee was carrying a small sign that said “I’m an elefriend, don’t go to the circus.”

Even though there was real extant footage of Nasim dancing while wearing her iconic outfits or demonstrating e.g., how to do an ab workout, Moyer and Khachiyan had recreated all of it with Anna dressed as Nasim in order to maintain a consistent visual identity for the character. The more serious or informative segments of the movie were joined by interstitials of Anna-as-Nasim dancing. Moyer uses these opportunities to introduce key vocabulary and concepts to her audience, such as anarcho-tyranny, which is when the rules in a system, which nominally apply to everyone, are tyrannically written and selectively enforced in order to privilege certain groups over others. Social media website moderation is a prime example of anarcho-tyranny, and this is especially important to understand because it factors into Nasim’s motivations, into why she did what she did. 

To explain this, Moyer brings in PewDiePie, the most popular YouTube content creator from 2013 to 2017, the first YoutTuber to reach 10 billion views, and the creator of the controversial racist anthem Bitch Lasagna.

“I was criticized for posting what YouTube decided to call antisemitic hate-speech. I made some jokes about Hitler, I had two Indian guys holding a sign that said Death to all Jews.”

Major sponsors of Youtube including the UK Government, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Johnson & Johnson, Mars, Adidas, HP, and Deutsche Bank pulled or paused their advertisements on YouTube.

“…Youtube started demonetizing channels that weren’t Family Friendly. I didn’t know who Nasim was at the time, but it was a change that hit everyone. People will say that makes it fair, it’s fair if the rule is applied to everyone, but is it? A rule can be shitty and you can just hide behind saying, we were shitty to everyone. Nasim thought YouTube was targeting vegans and animal rights activists for demonetization and algorithmic deboosting. That wasn’t true, but they didn’t explain it to her. They didn’t explain it to anyone. They didn’t help her understand.

“I’m not saying what she did was justified, of course not. But these companies like YouTube, they basically have a monopoly. What are you going to post on Vimeo? It’s literally a thousand times smaller. A thousand times. And no one holds these companies accountable, not governments, not content creators, not the end users. They control what we see and hear.

“I think maybe YouTube should be afraid of their creators. And Nasim, even if what she did was wrong, she believed in something higher than herself, and she was willing to pay a price for it. How many people can say that? So do I think it was right, what she did, no. I mean look at her stats, she had zero kills. It’s because she’s a woman, ok? You know I have played all the Souls games with zero deaths. Not zero kills, zero deaths. I beat Elden Ring with zero deaths! But even if her kill count sucks, she sacrificed herself for her ideals. And if you’re honest I think you have to admire that.”

PewDiePie had been unable to make it to the party. Lonsdale made his way into the gallery, where Moyer herself was having a loud conversation with Michael Malice, who had obviously drunk his share of chimpagne. The gallery was decorated in the German heroic color scheme of blue, gold and white, made famous in Wagner’s operas, and it had a small portrait of Wagner, and a half-length of Bismarck by Lenbach. There were also pictures by Feuerbach, Cranach, Schwind, Zügel and Breughel. The distinctive door handles, composed of a cube attached to a cylinder, were intended to evoke the Königsplatz buildings, just like the door frames in the library. The centerpiece of the gallery was a twelve foot statue of an amazon warrior on horseback, a spear in her hand, the horse in motion.

Moyer was talking about her next film project already, she was a fountain of ideas, she was overflowing, she couldn’t even rest for a minute. Her next movie was going to be a Hunter Biden exposé (no pun intended) in which she herself would play the role of Hunter, and she would tentatively call it Nein, wir sind der Jäger!, juxtaposing scenes of the popular anime Attack on Titan with uncensored and commentated found footage (no pun intended) from Hunter Biden’s laptop. For the crack-smoking scenes, she intended to actually smoke real crack on camera. She was also toying with the idea of a documentary about white men named George Floyd and how their lives had changed on the aftermath of the Summer of George, tentative title: The Real George Floyd.

Malice thought these were splendid ideas and immediately launched into a tirade about how Jews and protestants are comfortable with iconoclasm in a way that Catholics are not. What comes first, Catholicism or iconolatry? Catholics fundamentally don’t get how to deconstruct symbols and they aren’t even very good at recognizing enemy idols, and even when they do they aren’t comfortable tearing them down. What do you see when you step into a Catholic church? Icons everywhere; the proliferation of icons, they are iconmaxing. Jews in contrast are natural iconoclasts, it’s right there in the ten commandments, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images. When a Jew sees an idol, his first instinct is to smash it, it’s just that a lot of Jews have a blindspot when they themselves are the idol. It’s not that we hate jews and and blacks, ok, It’s about showing that you aren’t infected with their mind virus, if you can’t say “gas the kikes” without flinching, if you can’t demand total n——death, look it’s not about being edgy and transgressive, it’s about renouncing the American civil religion, it’s about showing that you stopped drinking that kool-aid, that you know n—— is just a word, that it doesn’t hurt anyone when you say it, that it’s not violence, words are just words. VIOLENCE is violence. 

Alex Lee Moyer couldn’t agree more. This was in part why she had made a point of exaggerating the violence in Aghdam to the point of post-ironic parody. Post-irony is different from irony, in fact it’s beyond irony and sincerity. Figuring out the intentions of the ironist is easy: whatever is being shown is being mocked. But the post-ironist folds over on her own sincerity with exaggeration, using the ironic to enjoy the absurdities of what she genuinely appreciates.

One of the logistical conundrums of hosting a fashy party is what to do about the help.You’re in a bit of a bind, because what everyone has learned is that free speech is only exactly as free as who is listening, and you need to make sure all your guests are genuinely safe to express their most honest opinions. A carefully-curated guest list is criticall, but it only gets you so far, because of course there is also going to be staff around the house, taking people’s coats, serving them hors d’oeuvres and drinks, and this sort of thing. It’s imperative that you don’t have any Black servants in the house, not because of any inherent deficiency in the Blacks per se but because there’s always a risk that someone won’t understand the nuances of post-irony and because society has trained Black people to chimp out when they hear certain words or ideas that were perfectly acceptable for anyone to discuss even in the recent memory of everyone who is at the party except possibly a few of the e-girls, who (one assumes) were still in diapers and in fact might still be owing to their sexual proclivities.

And but for the same reason you can’t have any Black servants you probably also want to avoid having any white servants, because they tend to be the most mind-controlled, even more than the Blacks, the most likely to secretly record something someone said and then post it to social media etc. At least half the people here have already been canceled already and are now uncancelable, but the other half will absolutely appreciate Londsale’s discretion. In the end he had settled on entirely Latinks waitstaff, falling back on that old chestnut we don’t care what race you are, as long as you’re racist. Not that Lonsdale or anyone else was admitting to anything on that front, in any case. 

For that matter and to be honest the e-girls were probably a bigger opsec risk than any of the servants. A lot of them were only performatively red-pilled, happy to send fashy signals but ultimately willing to say anything and go along with anything if it seems like that’s the thing to do. Lonsdale remembers an old Scott Alexander post from all the way back in 2014, back when Nasim was still shaking her ass for traffic. He said: This isn’t the type of conservatism where I agree with any conservative policies, mind you. Those still seem totally wrong-headed to me. It’s the sort of conservatism where, even though conservatives seem to be wrong about everything, often in horrible or hateful ways, they seem like probably mostly decent people deep down, whereas I have to physically restrain myself from going on Glenn Beck style rants about how much I hate leftists and how much they are ruining everything. Even though I mostly agree with the leftists whenever they say something.

Joe is smart enough that when he read that, it stuck with him, in part because it made him feel cognitive dissonance, because he agreed with it, but then… how does that make you different from a leftist, exactly? Does fashy stand for fascist, or does it stand for fashionista…? I’m not like all the other girls, that’s what it really meant. But of course they were. The thing is, it’s impossible to be cool, it’s impossible to be hip, when all your beliefs about society and morality are the same as those of the government, the corporations, big-tech, the establishment. You don’t want to be part of the party of Mastercard, do you? Be a rebel against the system, join Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Warner Brothers, The Walt Disney Company, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Goldman Sachs, Morgan-Stanley, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, CVS, Exxon-Mobile, Walmart, AT&T, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Nestle, PepsiCo, and Annheiser-Busch in supporting trans rights and overthrowing the patriarchy. But what did that rebellion constitute, in practice? Did it mean being rude to e.g. Ms. [sic] Blaire White, did it mean not inviting Malcolm Kyeyune? A n—— that votes our way. Maybe we can modernize Bierce and answer Matt Walsh at the same time: what is a woman? A tranny that votes our way. This line of thinking didn’t sit right with Joe, left a bad taste in his mouth. A chemically salty taste, one could say. Wasn’t fascism supposed to be the politics of exclusion? Think of all the wasted paper and ink and time that goes into printing these vapid pundit airport books just so a phrase like politics of exclusion can be memed into the common vernacular, hundreds of interchangeable catalogs of claptrap, read by no one, written by a ghostwriter if not an AI.

After PewDiePie’s meditation, a smooth, concerned-citizen Tom Brokaw-crossed-with-Tom Scott sounding voiceover gives the audience a rundown of Nasim’s history. On the 3rd of April 2018, Nasim Aghdam walked into YouTube’s Headquarters located in San Bruno, California, and shot three people and then killed herself. Not much is known about Nasim’s personal life prior to this incident, outside of what is publicly available on her now-removed YouTube channels. Her parents had declined to appear in the documentary, but in previous interviews they had related a story of her childhood, that she refused even to harm ants in their family home, and would instead scoop them up with paper and take them outside.

She was born in Urmia, Iran. Her parents immigrated to Iran from the Republic of Azerbaijan. In 1996 her family emigrated from Azerbaijan to San Diego. She was a lifelong vegetarian. Never married. In 2013 she received her student pilot certificate. She protested with PETA outside of Camp Pendleton against the use of pigs in United States Marine Corps training procedures for victims of trauma. She maintained several personal websites under different names, including Nasim Sabz and Nasim Aghdam. All of this is accompanied by a cinematographically predictable montage of maps, photographs, and etc, a drawing of an airplane tracing dotted lines over a globe. In 2014 she enjoyed a flicker of viral popularity on Iranian social media, and gained 8500 subscribers. Small though this number may seem today, she never recovered from this taste of social media fame. The poison was in her veins. 

NegativeXP’s MkUltra Victim plays over b-roll of Anna as Nasim walking around San Bruno in some vinyl spandex number looking hot. The ascended arthoe larping as the chthonic arthoe. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In the days leading up to the shooting, Nasim had been sleeping in her car, a white pontiac, and the police had even stopped her at 3am the night before and captured the encounter on a bodycam. Moyer also recreated this scene for the documentary in a cartoonish, exaggerated style. The most striking thing about this reenactment is a certain uncanniness to Anna’s performance. In the original police footage, Nasim betrays no hint of her impending plans, and comes across as sad, sleepy, but innocuous as she answers the questions of the police officers, explaining why she left her family, why she is in Mountainview, why she left San Diego, and so on. In the recreation, Anna has an intensity in her eyes, a manic, violent, sexual energy—there is electricity in the air, and she is pregnant, not with a child but with death.

“Why Mountainview,” they ask her, “I know it’s a great city and everything, but…”

And Anna/Nasim says, “I wanted to sleep around here, I wanted to get out of those areas, out of San Diego, I have memories I don’t want to have… Somewhere new… Have no memories about past…”

In light of this scene, there is something conspicuous now in Anna’s continued unaccounted-for absence at the party at Lonsdale’s. There was a rumor, more credible with each passing hour, that she had fallen into a vortex of method acting, dressing like Nasim, eating vegan food, making instructional fitness videos, visualizing herself as Nasim, meditating on the injustices that had been done to her. They were saying she started sleeping in her car, that she had purchased her own Smith and Wesson 9mm, and practiced shooting, and carried it, loaded, into an office park in San Bruno, though she did not fire it. Lonsdale didn’t know if all this was true, but the possibility seemed immanent when he heard a ruckus in the gallery. Swiftly he made his way through the atrium towards the source of the noise, where the combination of colored marbles used for the living room fireplace—sand for the mantelpiece, red for the floor in front—recurred in the interior of the grand staircase. The grooved linear forms of the mantel (here and in the dining room) resembled the radiator covers in this same atrium. 

Anna Khachiyan had finally arrived, talking in a heavily affected Persian accent, and she seems like she’s intoxicated but it’s not exactly clear if it’s alcohol. She’s one of Nasim’s instantly recognizable outfits, a blond wig, a see-through mesh top with embroidered black leaves on it, bright red lipstick, a green and black ballet tutu, and carrying a live rabbit. But this is almost unremarkable compared to who was with her, there were like 5 or 6 of them at once, all in black Adidas track suits with metallic green stripes and rubber frog masks over their heads. Despite the tracksuits you can see their powerful vascular quadriceps and triceps rippling underneath the zogged synthetic fabrics, like they walked straight out of Handsome Thursday. Joe Lonsdale didn’t invite them, and he half suspected Anna had hired some male strippers to put on a spectacle.

One of them was standing up on a round coffee table with a dark marble top, a replica of a piece designed by Paul Troost, framed on either side by a large Flemish Gobelin containing stylized botanical and folkish motifs. The Frog is projecting his voice, speaking loudly in a heavy fake Russian accent.

“Ze fundamental faiz of the metaphyzicians ees ze faiz een anteethetical values. It hyez not occurred to even ze most cautious of them to pause and doubt here on ze dreshold, where hyowever eet was most needful they should: even eef they hyad vowed to zemselves de omnibus dubitandum. For eet may be doubted, feerstly whezzer dere exeezt any anteetheses at all, and syecondly whezzer dese popular evaluazions and value-anteethezez, on which ze metaphyzicians have zet zeir tseal, are not perhyapz merely foreground valuazyans, myerely proveesional perspecteeves, perhyaps moreover ze perzpecteeves of hole-and-corner, perhyeps from below, as eet were frog-perspecteeves, to borrow an exprezyon employed by painters.

“zeez zmall people like Beell Gates, Zuckerfaze, and Beezos are entirely dyependent myen. Zey can’t really do weet zeir wealth what you zink dey can…for exyemple, zey could never juzt keell a myen and take heez wife, but even ruler of zmallest Afreakan country has zeez power, zeez true wealt. When your hyeppinezz and wealt depends on forze of arms of anozzer, you’re not really your own myan…nor can you enjoy ze greatezt delights een life.”

Lonsdale recognized this latter utterance as paragraph from Bronze Age Mindset, this well-worn passage indicting the tech industry for its lack of virility. But Lonsdale had a different take on it, he felt that BAP was using this idea of killing a woman’s husband and taking her for yourself as a metaphor for the Principal-Agent Problem, in other words, he was talking about Managerialism. The Frog had continued speaking while Lonsdale was reflecting on this, and when his attention came back to the speech, the only thing he heard was: 

“Ze world weell not be free untyeel last faggot ees ztrangled weeth entrails of last neegur!”, which Joe recognized as a paraphrase of the folk quotation documented by Meslier, so often misattributed to Denis Diderot. This, as they say, activated the almonds.

Malcom Kyeyune, Blaire White, and some of the (((Jews))) looked around uncomfortably; this last line was a little much. But Glenn Greenwald let out a big gay belly laugh and someone—Joe couldn’t see who, maybe it was Justin Murphy—yelled out that Peter Thiel had paid for this movie, so what was he saying exactly?! But before the Frog could answer, someone else said that Peter Thiel might have sex with men, but he wasn’t a faggot and everyone laughed and the conversation kept moving. But this kind of joke put everyone in a bind. You wouldn’t want to be seen not laughing a joke like that, but depending whose watching, you also wouldn’t want to be seen laughing at it. Some things were better left unsaid.

The final scene of Aghdam is a total stylistic departure from the entire rest of the film. Gone is the post-ironically cheerful soundtrack, gone are the cutesy nods and winks to the audience. The only foley is some wind and the humming of suburban buildings. The mood is stark. Moyer opts for a first person camera, evocative of a shooter game, and follows Anna’s trajectory in grim silence. We hear the gunshots; we hear her victims screaming in terror. In the final moments we see her turn the gun back on herself, and the screen cuts to black with her final shot. There is no music, even as the credits roll. The gravity and the seriousness of this episode remind us that, despite the levity of Moyer’s treatment of the subject matter, there is something brutal, capricious, and tragic underneath all the memes and the jokes.

Balajji Srinivasan wanted to say something, maybe something about the Frogs. Maybe he wasn’t impressed with their little speech, with their antics, who knows? Anna has been doing some Nasim-esque dance and cooing at her rabbit the whole time they were talking. Balaji said They’re not sending their best and then pauses, waiting for the crowd to chuckle and grin but all the celebrities and culturati are nonplussed. They give him a kind of dumb attention. They came here for the Frogs and to be fashy, and here is Silicon Valley Man wearing Allbirds telling them Trump jokes. But Balaji was too deep into his weird hole to get out.

He said people are desperate for a new culture primarily because they are bored by what we have now. They want something new. When people talk about the culture being stuck — movies, tv, music, books, video games, clothes, politics, everything is just a sequel to a sequel, fashion is just and endless reheating and rehashing of the last few decades of the 20th century, it’s because woke is anti-culture, #metoo is an artistic paralytic, and as this cultural virus took over each of these industries in turn, it rendered creativity and innovation impossible. 

Balaji said tech is the only new power and that woke is a strategy that existing powers are, maybe unwittingly, using to shackle tech. Restrictive cultural norms can play the same role as restrictive regulations, forming a moat around existing power structures and increasing barriers to entry for new competitors, but in this case the market is for morality and normativity, for human mental software rather than computer software. Woke is a kind of poison but if we can both drink poison and it kills your but it only makes me very sick, that still means I won.

The Frogs had been standing calmly and quietly through all this, looking like someone’s private army, looking fashy, but suddenly one of them asked Balaji if he was really serious about disruption, and before he could answer they started jumping up and down, banging their boots on the ground, stomping and hollering, chinping out, chanting:

Mup Da Doo Didda 
Po Mo Gub Bidda 
Be Dat Tum MuhFuggen 
BIX NOOD!
Cof Bin Dub Ho MuhFUGGA

They all lined up next to the colossal bronze statue of the Amazon on horseback and pushed it rhythmically.

Mup Da Doo Didda
Po Mo Gub Bidda 
Be Dat Tum MuhFuggen 
BIX NOOOOOD! 
Cof Bin Dub Ho MuhFUGGA

And the second time they shouted BIX NOOOOOD! the statue finally gave and tumbled over on its side, crushing one of the e-girls—metaphorically trampling her. The Longhouse had been defeated. Anna and Dasha were soyfacing. The Frogs all cheered and one of them pushed over a caterer and sent a whole tray of lobster risotto arancini flying, splattering all over Pedro Gonzales, staining his white shirt a deep yellow with smears of saffron aioli. How does this make you feel?