Mass Migration is Our National Leather Vagina:

The Beginning of the End for Luxury Beliefs

There was a well-deserved kerfuffle over a dumb post on X this week. Not a sentence I thought I would type in a million years. Well-deserved? It’s a damn Tweex.

But it was SO unintentionally nude, it felt… special. But not in the way it wanted to be. It felt like a mask being slowly ripped off, so naked you can see the Velcro attachments dangling from the shreds of flesh underneath.

“luxurious branded underwear”

It felt like part of a watershed moment, in which what is left of what calls itself the American left—it’s not, but at the risk of leaving behind a trail of “no true Scotsman” shriekage, hold your horses, I’m going to explain in my next piece—loses its mind over losing the election to such a degree that they drop the 15th-generation Marxism and let us see who they are:

Some seriously spoiled, adult brats whose hobby is moral preening.

We all know that the kind of person who says “You can’t be racist to a one-legged white veteran freezing to death on a Chicago street” has never been freezing, much less hungry; and has no idea what it’s like to work forty hours a week and not know where the rent is coming from.

The trustafundian is a well-worn cliché, one I’m guilty of wearing down a bit more, if only because I have been exposed to the bald frozen face of its hypocrisy a thousand times too many.

Here, see for yourself. I’m not sure quite how deep behind the gates you have to grow up, or how sheltered you need to be, to think this is a scary threat in MAGA country, but I guess ole Jason C meant this as a threat:

My dad isn’t MAGA, he’s just country, but if you told him that at age 80 he needs someone else, anyone else, to mow his lawn for him, he’ll run you over with his push mower.

The only person who has ever done housework for my mother besides my mother is me.

Well, probably my aunt helped when they were homeless and had to stay with us. My sister too. But for pay? Are you people SERIOUS?!

Don’t threaten me with my average Saturday!

Just ask working-class heroine Kamala Harris: The dying American middle is PROUD to be stuck mowing that shit! They do it for entertainment!

Cripes, when I was a teenager and would mow the lawn to shut my mom up about how lazy I was, Dad would sulk at me till it grew another centimeter, then rush out there at dawn to protect his hobby from me. PAYING someone to do it? Are you allergic to money?! Lawnmowing season is short in Wisconsin, you gotta sow ye rosebuds whilst ye may.

But this is what this post, while trying to showcase its owner as a Brave and Truthful Fighter for the People, actually wound up showing us:

The people who sold your manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China, the people who filled your tech jobs with more people from across the globe, then decided to give the rest of the service industry jobs at home away—the people behind that criminal who should have been in prison but raped you instead, or killed your neighbor—

—they think you live like them. Or close enough to them to be threatened by the removal of a service which you cannot afford to use, BECAUSE OF THEM.

These are the people who have given your lives away.

They still think they’re middle-class. They still think they’re the good guys. They still think, unbelievably, that they are speaking out bravely for the oppressed and the downtrodden.

Lordy, lordy, lordy.

Mais en plus: This didn’t only feel like a feeding frenzy; there was also plagiarism involved, of the sneakiest but dumbest kind.

I have a hard time believing Jason C didn’t see THIS smug, overly groomed monster-lady on his team get shellacked, not two weeks ago, for warning us that our manicures might get chipped if we persist in our Nazi project of getting hyperviolent gangs out of the country:

I guess there’s SOME chance he didn’t see her get her beating; every group on the Internet seems to have its own zeitgeist these days, and on top of the algos you’re bound to get a lot of this synchronicity.

Or maybe he did see it, but figured if he could get ANY of that level of engagement, it would be a good thing. Maybe he thought he was smarter and better than her and would somehow fare better with the same dumb sheltered opinion? (Note: This is merely a frustrated guess; you animals are all a mystery to me.)

Which is, I suppose, more damning than an individual case of intellectual thieving—the soft kind, the kind you probably do every day, where you re-phrase someone else’s idea and toss it out there as if it were your own because you’re desperate to fill some slot or other with content—which, by the way, makes you part of the human cholesterol problem, but that’s yet another rant for another day.

But I’m not as worried as I was. There might be a chance that, now unmasked, these luxury beliefs might be going out of style.

Why? Because of the declining prestige to a related luxury good: Stupid overpriced leather vagina-substitutes.

After decades of laughing at men over sportscars, we women have been caught with our pants down, after a decade of spending the price of a small house (well, not me; I am neither rich nor quite this stupid) on objectively hideous designer purses.

But, like the Democrat establishment, the luxury houses have overplayed their hand, and now they’re looking down the barrel of…

Well, of things going back to normal. Let me explain.

There’s a current kerfuffle about the pricing scheme for Louis Vuitton’s new bags. I knew nothing about fashion till I moved to France; I was a writer who chose the wrong parents and those were Rich People Things which were none of my business.

More important, for the purposes of my argument: Much like politics, designer crap didn’t used to be cool.

No, seriously. In the 1980s, Dior was for old people. Lame people. Yuppies. If I had a hundred bucks to blow on a pair of boots in 1996, they would have gone to Doc Marten, not to Vuitton (yes, that used to be an expensive pair of shoes, a hundred bucks. Now they have the nerve to ask that Chez Tarjay).

The spectacle of young artists thinking they need Gucci sneakers to succeed is a temporary lunacy; the luxury market is not supposed to be the only source of non-sweatshop garments, but I guess that’s why I never buy anything new anymore.

Similarly, nobody except Young Republicans and crazy Trotskyists used to give a damn about politics, and in a proto-horseshoe theory move, they were shunned together for roughly the same reasons.

I worked at a newspaper in the early aughts, and even those of us whose job it was to bring you the local news would rather talk about ANYTHING ELSE once the paper was sent to bed. Usually music or books.

Now, even on Substack, which is nominally devoted to books—ha ha, nobody reads anyone’s fiction. Compare the numbers. My account got no traction till I started writing this political crap again. Gods help me, am I gonna have to write about writing? The world’s second-oldest scam.

But it’s not merely an annoyance for one annoying profession: Politics have replaced our water cooler talk, our general gossip about other human beings who are close to us, with a combination of celebrity worship and parasocial delusion.

Now Susan in accounting and her tawdry love life aren’t important enough to gossip about. We wanna gossip about HILLARY.

Even if we condescend to gossip about real people we know, it’s not because of whose boyfriend they slept with, or what dastardly or admirable thing they achieved—it’s about their opinion about some fucking boring, lying political figure.

Liars are boring; I don’t understand the appeal, and yet here I am, a fiction writer forced to piss into the general stream just to divert the odd pair of eyeballs my way.

But maybe everyone is almost ready to catch up with those of us who remember, or yearn for, or have sacrificed in honor of, a better way.

I’ve found that not knowing thine enemy is a scary place, so here I am, both in the online sewer, but also in the sphere of fashion knowledge: I moved to a country where my only contact with my old society must happen via the Internet.

But since migrating (long story, will tell soon) I find myself in a place where a used pair of Chanel pants costs less than the asymmetrically-sewn garbaggio you will find at Monoprix, the French version of Target (yes, you are contractually obligated to pronounce this instance of “Target” to rhyme with “gay”), and, with the help of YouTube, I’ve been inspired to get a glimpse into this hitherto forbidden world.

I know both worlds now—the world of online virtue posturing, and the world of using clothes to send similar messages—enough to notice how strikingly similar people’s irrationality around fashion matches their irrationality about their luxury beliefs.

Which is what most online politics boil down to; gimme a break. Have you studied the economics behind your favorite political star’s “policies”? Have you? Or are you just loud about how you feel?

Or even louder about how you think you’re supposed to feel?

That Palestinian flag on your account reminds me of those giant tacky logos that luxury brands plaster all over the less-good, third-world-manufactured crap they sell to the new crowd of plebs who think they can buy class at the YSL store on the Champs-Elysées.

You’ve bought or absorbed the suckers’ version of the real thing. But you can hardly blame the sellers for cashing in on the slavering crowds, can you?

But eventually, the least well-compensated of the slavering crowds begin to Walk Away.

The first kind of cunsumer revolt-ish merely ended up costing the suckers more money: “Stealth wealth,” which was a trend last year, pretended it could loft you above the crowds of logo-ribbon-taped sweatshirts and balloon sneakers with plated-gold monograms. All you had to do was spend even MORE money for the “stealth wealth” pieces and you were reassured that you were now wearing a secret code that only the wealthy understand. This is how you can visually signal that you’re faking it till you make it!

Too bad everyone ostentatiously did it all at once.

But it was a crack in the façade.

Maybe people noticed that a truly great objet d’art, just like a truly well-informed opinion, feels so good in your hand that you don’t actually need other people to know.

I dunno; but it seems to have set them up for the current revolt against luxury. Well, that and the several-grand pink leather Chanel bags that lost their pink after 20 minutes of wear. That annoyed a couple of key influencers, and the revolt was born.

What will be the worn-off pink vagina crust that wakes people up to the dangers of their luxury beliefs.

Well, so far, people like me, working people, genuinely vulnerable people, have been the targets of the unbridled violence and economic loss that luxury beliefs across the first world have unleashed on us peons.

But just the other day, a rich person in California was attacked. Oh, my goodness!

Ehhh, but have some compassion, Ann. I don’t want to blame individuals TOO much; the most damaging phenomenon is entire countries acting this way.

Take the ridiculous amount of cash prizes and luxury accomodations countries like the US, France, and England are handing out to illegal border crossers.

People who have paid taxes their entire lives, when things were going slightly better—people like me, who recieved no aid from the city of Chicago after these dumb policies got me sexually assaulted in our homes; I had to flee, I was in genuine danger, they let my attacker keep roaming around my neighborhood—what help was there for me?

Big fat zero. And I almost died of typhus as a consequence.

And why? WHY was a taxpaying crime victim hung out to dry while criminals who jump the border are put up in hotels? Yeah, it’s unfair, life is unfair, but in a democracy this is a bit mask-off, wouldn’t you think?—why would our leadership do this to its innocent citizens?

Well, do you think that girl wearing all those Chanel logos is wearing Chanel underwear? Not with all the credit-card debt she’s got going on top.

Vulnerable citizens like me, taxpayers in need? We are nothing but underwear. You need us, but you can get away with mistreating us. You can hide us. We’re too desperate to make much noise. We have nowhere else to go. There’s so much flash being purchased to impress the neighbors, there’s nothing left to catch the bloodstains.

But strangers demanding you show your charity? Families with eight children, who throw themselves on your doorstop, with fat bellies, iPhones, and really big eyes?

They’re a designer handbag. They’re a logo. They are what politicians and the upper-class stakeholders they represent, like Macron or AOC, like to drape all over their wives or themselves and parade them around like they invented clothing.

Spending lavishly on strangers who haven’t earned it is flashy. Showy. You can brag about it to the other countries:

“We’re the most rich and generous! No WE’RE the most blah blah blah generous.”

But the people making these decisions are not giving up a damn thing.

They’re just wearing us, the underwear, that really keeps them warm and dry, for years on end, stretching us thinner, wearing us ragged, washing us over and over and over till the last fiber of cotton is used up to its max.

But the logos are losing their charm.

The superficial prestige is wearing thin.

And the emperor has wandered out of the house thinking he’s got outer clothes on, one too many times.