In the 70s and 80s, lefty guitar was much more rare and expensive than right handed guitar. Many contemporary guitarists at the time who come from working class background like Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Billy Corgan, and Elvis Costello are all left-handed but play right handed guitar.
From wikipedia
Blinken was born on April 16, 1962, in Yonkers, New York. His father was Donald M. Blinken, a co-founder of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus who later served as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary. Blinken’s uncle, Alan Blinken, served as the U.S. ambassador to Belgium.
Of course
You can literally buy left-handed versions of most popular guitar models brand new for the same price as their right-handed counterparts; in fact, if you hunt around for sales, you’ll often find the lefties on clearance because manufacturers tend to overproduce them. Granted, this is more in the vein of Epiphone/Squier/Fender (Mexico)/Schecter/Ibanez/Jackson (non-USA)/Charvel/ESP than blues lawyer stuff like Gibson, Fender USA, or PRS (non-SE). Affordable left-handed guitars have existed for the last 30 years. (That being said, it looks like Jackson has been ditching their middle-tier left-handed stuff, and you can only get the entry-level models as left-handed options now. Sad, because the Pro series Soloists are really nice for the money, particularly when you can find model year-end closeouts for under $800.)
My point is that Blinken was a boomer and when he was learning guitar, presumably in his teens, the 70s and the 80s left-hand guitars are not available and had significant markup. Kurt Cobain in the 90s popularized left handed guitar and now it is fairly common, but people Blinken’s age mostly play right handed guitar
And it’s a silly point to make – he could easily have started out on a flipped right-handed guitar, and then switched to a lefty in the past 25 years. Christ, even the one in the photo is just a $500-600 Epiphone, not some jagoff dentist custom shop piece made from endangered tree species. I could have picked up that exact model off of Reverb for under $400 pre-pandemic. I didn’t, because I’m not in a jazz band, a baby boomer, or someone who jerks off in the mirror while wearing a Malcolm Young mask (but I repeat myself…), but you get the idea.
There are a lot of good fuckin’ reasons to rag on Blinken (like the fact that in that photo, he’s playing a Neil Young song that trashes neoliberal imperialist capitalism, in Kyiv, without a fucking hint of irony), but “playing guitar left-handed while being 60 years old is bourgeois, ackshually” is a deeply weird hill to die on.