Maison Marxism
Marty Supreme, a Muslim Mayor, Jewish Bagels, and Christian Dior
Last month, Zohran Kwame Mamdani was sworn in as Mayor of New York City, becoming the most powerful elected socialist in American history.
That is a significant achievement.
Mamdani’s campaign will be studied for decades to come as a triumph of messaging, vision, and grassroots organizing.
I have only the utmost respect for the man and his fiercely intelligent, elegant wife as they take on the Manhattan machine and try to form a government of New Yorkers, by New Yorkers, and for New Yorkers.
His campaign fulfilled some of the wildest hopes that socialist street organizers have nursed in the decade since Bernie Sanders was robbed of the Democratic presidential nomination, and all of it against the backdrop of ascendant fascism within the Imperial Core.
With that said…
I have some thoughts about how all of this is being branded.
On New Years Eve, I posted a series of Instagram stories which seemed to resonate quite strongly with my audience.
Sick in bed after a weeklong battle with flu or Covid (the State no longer provides adequate resources to determine or prevent either), I allowed my unhinged side to come out online.
Chic, party-approved influencers have plucked the movement for Palestine, sanitized, from the rubble in Gaza and added it to their cunty diadem of performative social justice causes.
My followers call this ‘Wormposting,’ because it usually involves myriad references to Frank Herbert’s Dune and ecstatic plans to create an ecological meta-religion that I will enforce with the zeal of a Torquemada (show-trials for fossil executives).
My internet community loves when I get cranky online because I have been blessed with a sharp tongue, and while I have sought to restrain it recent years, I have found that the proper way to do so is not to blunt it, but rather to point it in the right direction.
As such, I try to refrain from directing it at my own people (chronically online, eco-socially conscious progressives and Leftists), but then I stumbled upon two internet things: a girls-girl TikTok about Zohran Mamdani and that stupid fucking Marty Supreme jacket.
I couldn’t help myself, and I started typing.
From Brat Summer to Pokémon-Go-To-The-Polls, America’s Left-Liberals have paid the price again and again for adopting trends that appeal deeply to clued-in bicoastal elites and literally no one else.
Muslim Mayor, Jewish Bagels, Christian Dior
Timothée Chalamet is on a generational run as America’s premiere white boy, mostly as an inevitable result of Newton’s Fourth Law of Motion, namely that a white boy with motion stays in motion.
From the sands of Arrakis to the streets of New York, Chalamet has been a juggernaut, racking up success after success in his bid to write his name into the history books as one of Hollywood’s greats. After a stellar awards season run, he has set his sights on a career first Best Actor win at the Oscars in two weeks time.
The jewel in his diadem of achievement is the stellar marketing campaign behind his latest project, the new Josh Safdie film Marty Supreme.
If you’re anything like me, you probably heard or saw the words Marty Supreme about thirty times before realizing it was just the name of a new movie about a goddamn 1950’s Ping Pong player.
I have to hand it to the guy, Marty Supreme was everywhere. On my feed, on my friend’s feeds, in the sky, but most importantly, on the chests of every celebrity with any relevance.
These are the new vanguard of the Democratic Party. Defanged progressive Zoomer girliess and gays who court Super PAC money to funnel collective outrage at The System™️ into support for the very people who built it.
This was courtesy of a viral, 90’s style color-blocked windbreaker, the capstone of a marketing campaign perfectly tailored to bypass the blood-brain barrier of conspicuous millennial and zoomer consoomers.
The kind that live in Bushwick and Silver Lake and role play as bisexual feminists to get laid. The vocal Antiracists with vacations paid for by their MAGA boyfriends’ tech salaries. Kids with trust funds and vintage totes who talk about smashing patriarchy on BlueSky but never seem worried about making rent.
You get the gist.
Anyway.
I hate this kind of Marty Supreme marketing bullshit. Achingly elaborate schemes to leech cash out of giddy consumers who imagine themselves as tastemakers. I hate tastemakers. I used to be a luxury American menswear model and influencer so all forms of ostentation (including my own) now feel cringe to me.
But it finally worked on me. After two months of resistance, I finally saw it last week at a SAG event featuring a discussion with Mahdi Supreme himself, that boy Timothée. It was amazing. It is truly an incredible achievement of a film.
Not even I could escape the sucking void of conspicuous consumer capitalism.
Alas, even me, he who prideth himself on his consciously plebeian tastes.
Speaking of which, if you can’t enjoy the simple comforts of shitty black coffee from the pot, three rotating outfits that re-enter relevance once a decade, sturdy Toyota engines, and used IKEA furniture, I may like you, but I’ll never really trust you. At least not to help me move apartments or make the tragic demise of a prominent fossil fuel CEO look like an Orca attack.
Depressed Liberals can once more gush over cunty, “exotic” aesthetes with handsome progressive husbands like its 2008 all over again!
This trait drove my poor ex–a very chic and rather patient fashion girlie–so crazy that she embarked on the not insignificant project of yassifying me for the sake of all mankind, and it is for this noble sacrifice that I owe her a life debt.
For my part, give me the levers of ultimate power, and I would ban marketing agencies outright and send their C-suite executives to the cobalt mines. And then I’d be forced to join them, because most of my professional life has involved some form of marketing.
This would merely increase my satisfaction as I would get to watch consultants perform grueling manual labor up close, which is one of my less vengeful fantasies.
I’m getting sidetracked again.
That windbreaker was Trigger #1.
Trigger #2 was seeing a perfectly innocent TikTok by some New York girlypop of unknown status but predictable enough provenance dancing in a fur coat with her equally chic homegirl.
The point of the video and the source of its humor and virality, was the–admittedly brilliant–caption overlaid on top of it: “Muslim Mayor, Jewish Bagels, Christian Dior.”
Omg such a slay.
I am literally going to hurl myself into a fucking woodchipper.
No offense to girlypop, I thought her video was brilliant, clever, and humorous. Its merely that I think it represents something about the American consumer that is, for me, just as sinister to that goddamn Marty Supreme windbreaker.
Namely,
The Yassification of Political Progress™️
“Y’all ever feel like people’s personal desire for extreme material excess and relevance disguised as self-care/self worth is a serious obstacle to global liberation?” I wrote in an Instagram story post on New Year’s Eve. “Like I’m not sure we have collective capacity to choose between a livable world and being relevant + chic.”
Bars, honestly.
It struck a chord. My inbox flooded with personal anecdotes and outbursts of frustration regarding these precise phenomena. It raised a question that has evidently been afflicting many: why is it that America’s young, ‘radical’ coastal professionals are still so obviously gripped by the punishing logic of conspicuous consumption?
“This is a battle I fight every day” wrote Adele. “If I were sisyphus, my personal desire to be relevant and chic is an added 20lb to me rock 😔.”
The same goes for many longtime Democratic influencers, silent for months about the slaughter of innocents in Gaza, they now try to launder their reputations through Zohran’s yassifaction.
She also described an intense pressure that seemed to accompany this feeling: “But also like let’s stop constantly making women feel bad about themselves for not being chic and relevant. We have created an insecurity in women for advertisers to prey on and make us feel like we absolutely must consume more in order to be chic and relevant!”
I could not have said it better myself!
“Dude, yes! Everyone is living their own personal influencer fantasy” replied Dasha. “Even their “activism” comes off as brand building. If they even care to take a stance on anything at all outside of whatever makes them feel good or relevant in a moment.”1
“Access to social media has rotted people’s brains. At the end of the day, wealthy people will behave like wealthy people” she concluded.
That this woman took extreme professional and social risk by early and vocally speaking up about Palestinians and calling for an end to the butchery in Gaza is never mentioned by the New York tastemaker commentariat.
Referencing that TikTok video I had found, I remarked “like ts is objectively funny but it also just yassifies Left political momentum into the only true American religion of unbridled material accumulation.”
Then came my point.
“If socialist Zohran is sworn in next week in head-to-toe Comme, the Klonopin class would lose its mind in a fit of collective effervescence” I continued. “And Jewish heiresses with play jobs on the LES will buy his impossibly chic wife’s Palestine-themed art prints instead of asking their dads to resign from the boards of Raytheon, United Healthcare, and Elbit Systems.”
(Again, bars!)
Well, I was right on the money. Within hours of Mamdani’s swearing in, Instagram and TikTok lit up with little videos from various types of gay simply gushing over his wife Rama Duwaji’s chic outfit and agreeing with the girlypops that she was definitively slaying and eating.
Tastemakers from Berlin to Bushwick were oozing admiration for the gorgeous couple and Rama’s iconic witch boots, while embittered New York Post writers complained about their $650 price tag.
The discourse surrounding the whole affair was freighted with the semiotics of conspicuous consumption. “Not since Michelle Obama have we seen a First Lady exude such diabolical drip!” crooned the fashion commentator John Villa, in a video unpacking Rama’s recent feature in The Cut.
“These Balenciaga witch heels are the perfect unconventional but powerful heel to stomp around Manhattan in.”
He added a slew of insider, art world signals in rapid succession and with barely concealed admiration, concluding that “the color of dimensional contrast along with the lack of ornamentation and status signaling is uniquely profound. This is a series of really regal portraits of a modern, working woman of Middle-Eastern descent with a clear identity and sense of self.”
Cool. Thats all great, I guess.
Socialism is cool again, because the hot people are doing it. And looking damn good while they do!
I think Rama Duwaji is also a pretty fucking inspiring person. The idea that anyone, let alone a 28-year-old Syrian-American girl, could so gracefully handle the pressures of such a bitterly racist and Islamophobic mudslinging campaign is truly mind-boggling.
But what I missed in every one of the gushing videos about her coat and hairstyle, in the buzz about the cunty flair of her shoes, the effortless artistry of her photoshoot in The Cut, or her gorgeous wedding photos was any real acknowledgment of this woman’s deeply consistent social activism going back years. A tradition of social justice likely imprinted on her early by her courageous pediatrician mother who spent years delivering care in warzones.
That this woman took extreme professional and social risk by early and vocally speaking up about Palestinians and calling for an end to the butchery in Gaza is never mentioned by the New York tastemaker commentariat.
And why would it be? What matters are the vibes. Woke is back, and cool again! Depressed Liberals can once more gush over cunty, exotic aesthetes with handsome progressive husbands like its 2008 all over again! New York finally has a first family who are, far more importantly than being actually progressive, incredibly chic.
It is not as if Mamdani eschewed this kind of fawning yassifcation. In fact, he deliberately courted it, because he is the consummate tactician. One by one, he made the social pillars of New York City fall in love with his charming demeanor and ambitious promises.
One by one, he wooed them away from their centrist benefactors and seduced them with his carefully branded, heartwarming working class schtick.
He did this so effectively that even many of the embittered Zionists who smeared him for months for his principled stances on Gaza can’t help but warm up a little and join in the fun. Or maybe the tens of thousands of additional dead Palestinian children just eventually made their stances socially embarrassing.
New York finally has a first family who are, far more importantly than being actually progressive, incredibly chic.
The same goes for many longtime Democratic influencers, silent for months about the slaughter of innocents in Gaza, as they now try to launder their reputations through Zohranification, getting in on the ground floor of what is becoming an increasingly vibes-based sort of cultural politics.
Last month I saw a video from the official Democratic Party TikTok that was a very GenZ-coded hype edit of Mamdani’s swearing in ceremony. This from the official account of a party that fought Mamdani’s unprecedented rise tooth and nail, who refused, almost to a man, to endorse him in the general election, and waited for his victory, and a pretend ceasefire in Gaza, to accept the inevitability of his public mandate.
How manifestly insincere do they all feel! Now that the Palestinian cause is firmly within the realm of acceptable Liberal discourse–thanks to a vicious genocide by people they supported six months ago–these chic, party-approved influencers have plucked it, sanitized, from the rubble in Gaza and added it to their cunty diadem of performative social justice causes.
These are the new vanguard of the Democratic Party. Defanged progressive Zoomer girlies and gays who court Super PAC money to funnel collective outrage at The System™️ into support for the very people who built it.
They will gush over Palestinian-made garments crafted by woman-owned labels on fashion week runways, while manufacturing consent for supporting Democratic Party candidates who materially contributed to the genocide of Palestine’s people.
While we must not gatekeep these newcomers from our movement, we must take care not to make the mistake of forgetting who stood against us, who stood with us, and who was silent for the past two years.
The Dangers of Cultural Relevance
The yassification of socialist Mamdani feels like the exact inversion of the classic rich kid working class LARP,2 with which any bicoastal denizen of LA or New York will be instantly familiar.
Instead of the children of studio executives wearing busted up workwear for date night with their ceramicist (pharma heiress) girlfriend, they are, with Mamdani’s rise, trying to wed a victorious agenda of progressive political radicalism to the aesthetics of insider exclusivity and unrealistically aspirational “it girl” cache.
Because thats all they know how to do. Repackage lived reality into identity signals that they can buy or sell, like that fuckass Marty Supreme windbreaker.
You see, Socialism is only cool again because the hot people are doing it. And looking damn good while they do!
But what happens when the vibe shifts again? When the difficult work of building a more humane, livable city shatters the allure of all this insider signaling?
Is it possible for Socialists to permanently lash a radical politics to the aesthetics of conspicuous consumption and ride that precarious raft to continued electoral victory? Or was the Zohran moment more about chic, cultured Zoomers sticking it to their Trump-voting millionaire fathers?
The problem with chasing chic trends is not that they are chic, but that they are trendy. How often has the Left misjudged the cultural moment? From Brat Summer to Pokémon-Go-To-The-Polls, America’s Left-Liberals have paid the price again and again for adopting trends that appeal deeply to clued-in subcultures and literally no one else.
Just ask the “performative males,” punished for misjudging the aesthetic moment last year. This 2025 meme featured a figure that was common enough to emerge as archetypal in the consciousness of online Gen Z women. Everything in his aspect, from the frumpy clothes and shaggy haircut he wears to the retro wired headphones and dogeared copy of the The Bell Jar he carries in his local library tote simply scream “I learned just enough therapy-speak to bypass your mate selection guardrails but not enough to meet your emotional needs.”
We hate the performative male archetype because of how manifestly insincere it feels, not because secondhand clothes, tote bags, feminist literature, and matcha lattes are wrong, but because masking manipulative behavior by trafficking in the aesthetics of “safe” masculinity just to get laid is wrong.
In the same way, we feel the insincerity of the Klonopin class as they rally around their hot new Muslim Mayor and his chic, young, Arab wife. This is a class of people who chase political baubles, whose identity is measured in the number of the insider signals they can socially employ, and whose constant need for recognition and cultural relevance overwhelms their every militant instinct.3
They are, at best, temporary political allies in a broader antifascist struggle. At worst, they are gatekeeping Liberal quislings who will sell out the Left at the first opportunity, or be the first on Daddy’s PJ en route to St. Barth’s when the America First fascists start sending their socialist friends to the camps.
Or I am overreacting. Maybe we can have nice things.
Inshallah, the Mamdani Caliphate will spread its fingers across the nation, and that boy Timothée will finally win his Oscar.
Thankfully, this doesn’t apply to me because I’m based and clearpilled and built different (I am the only one with clarity of purpose).
For my normie readers, LARP refers to Live Action Role Play, a form of elaborate social self-sabotage that nerds do because they’d rather pretend to live in Middle-Earth than talk to women. Neither I nor any member of my family have ever engaged in such activity repeatedly and publicly.
I don’t know how I made it this far in an essay about capitalist cultural capture without mentioning Mark Fisher, but you should probably read Mark Fisher.
I feel beyond blessed that I’m here, in this space, witnessing this social commentary:
“Timothée Chalamet is on a generational run as America’s premiere white boy, mostly as an inevitable result of Newton’s Fourth Law of Motion, namely that a white boy with motion stays in motion.”
It’s true—we do love it when you get grumpy online. It’s because you start saying that stuff we’re all thinking!
On the yassification of leftism: I think humans of all political persuasions have a weakness for people who are cool. We all wanna be cool or at least be close to, or associated with, someone who is cool.
(See: the left’s weakness for Obama. See also: the GOP being so pissed off that Bad Bunny is incredibly cool and not on their side.)
So that makes me wonder: how can we use that to our advantage? For one thing, we need to continue making fascism look so cringe that people want to run away from it.