Commie Mommies

ragin', full on, now with valet parking

She sees you, she sees it, she sees the whole sick pile of shit that we pretend to be a so-called civilization, and she’s done pretending.

Saira Rao — sorry, saira rao — probably felt this way when she got her law degree at NYU and went to work as an associate at the virulently anti-capitalist big law corporation Cleary Gottlieb¹, too, and when she published with Penguin Random House, which is reputed to have some limited involvement in capitalism. By the way, her husband appears to not be sick of capitalism at all:

But she probably doesn’t let the sick pig poison her with his capitalist blood money. Except on ski vacations to Aspen, Nazi!

I live in Los Angeles, and we started our child in an expensive private school on the faulty premise that we wanted to make sure she had the best possible education. These are my people, or they kind of were at some point, and I just threw up in my mouth a little. I’ve met a thousand of saira rao, raging communists in German SUVs with hedge funder husbands, and I lack the ability to fully explain how exhausting they are.

This observation (clink link to play repulsive video, since Twitter stuff still won’t embed on Substack)….

….implies the questions we’re all asking. See also, to discover where I shamelessly stole the term “commie mommies”:

The secret of the commie mommies, I’m pretty sure, is that they aren’t commies. They perform commie rage, as a status signal, like well-to-do white women who were afflicted with neurasthenia during the Gilded Age. (They…had to…summer at…very expensive resort hotels…to…recover.) But they don’t divorce the hedge funders, and they don’t pull their children out of the $50,000 middle schools, and they don’t give up the keys to the Mercedes. Their signaling of disgust and loathing for capitalism is how they separate themselves from the poors, much as the more you spend on college the more you learn to despise wealth and privilege.

We’ve established the yearning for cultural suicide as a high-status socioeconomic signal, like you burn your house down to prove that it’s the nicest one in the neighborhood. They posture as communists because they want privilege. This is, how does one put this gently, not enormously sustainable. Pretend-suicide playacts itself into reality. The AWFL wine mommies see where they are, but they don’t see where they’re going.

1. Cleary Gottlieb will advise you on your IPO or your mergers and acquisitions, motherfucker, but they’ll for sure hate you for it, sick monster.