“The last spectacular ball in the history of the empire ... [but] a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace ... while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low." - Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch
The theme of the Met Gala this year was Black Dandyism. In case you don’t know what that is, The Met explains:
Black Dandyism is cool and all as its authentic self. I’m not sure it maintained that coolness last night with “radical chic” on full display as a symbol of virtue for the powerful watching in real time as their empire comes crumbling down.
You no doubt noticed the vibe shift. Something seemed off about it. It was like the Blue Origin flight. It felt inauthentic, all for show, a ritual to genuflect to their chosen status symbols while disguising who they really are.
Not that they will be criticized by the people who matter to them. Those outlets that aren’t owned by Donald Newhouse, the billionaire who owns Vogue and the New Yorker, worth around $18 billion, wouldn’t dare say a word. Everyone is to applaud and praise them for their goodness and moral virtue.
But as I watched the parade of famous Black artists walk the red carpet, alongside ashamed, self-hating white celebrities who looked like they’d been kidnapped and who couldn’t wash away the fear in their eyes, I could see the man behind the curtain, or in this case, the woman.
Who are they kidding? This was not power or progress, not for any of them. The Met Gala served the same purpose it always has: to make rich white people look good. How they measure what defines good is all that has changed.
The white guilt among the wealthy in our modern Gilded Age is thick. They know something is ending. They can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. Just as the very wealthy in the late 1800s did. They have no choice but to try to buy absolution by bribing the virtuous to be their facade.
They have no choice. They know the mob would eat them alive if they didn’t defer, de-center, elevate, platform, and do something to make their insular world seem like the good place, not the bad place. They have to be on the right side to survive a little bit longer, to hold their place in society, even as, especially as everything falls apart.
They didn’t call it “virtue signaling” during the Gilded Age. They called it Civic Virtue, which has a long history in America, going all the way back to the Revolution. It is one of the reasons we see so many of the big names from that era splashed across major institutions, like the Andrew Carnegie institution, etc.
The billionaires alive today are all expected to give back to society in a way that justifies or absolves them of their sins. But something else entirely is going on with what we saw at the Met Gala and with Blue Origin. It wasn’t Civic Virtue so much as virtue signaling.
But it does seem strange in a year when Donald Trump and his MAGA Deplorables won the popular vote, where he is attempting major change to elevate the silent majority, to attend this spectacular ball and to send yet another message to America that you are not invited to this party because we think you are bad people, racists. So we’ll celebrate in front of you. We’ll rub it in as though we never lost the election at all.
The wealthy aristocracy in our country has figured out that they need shields. They must hide behind people whom no one would dare attack or criticize. It is the reversal of the fanaticism that afflicted and ignited the mob when the streets were filled with protesters in the Summer of 2020.
What we see now is their way of healing from the trauma of the agreed-upon reality that emerged that Summer. Most people don’t remember how unprecedented this uprising really was. Remember chanting through the neighborhoods in Seattle?
If you were cowering in your home as a Good White Liberal, what did you make of that? How much guilt did you feel? Their escape hatch for all of this madness we’ve been living through, a fake-pretend fix to oppression because Lulu Lemon and the Lifetime Network now center Black characters and de-center “whiteness.”
I’ll never forget my white friends in Santa Monica, of all places, hurling themselves in front of “Black bodies” because the cops were less likely to shoot them. They all believed this delusion, even in Santa Monica. But now, there is a reversal of that dynamic playing out. White people need Black people and other non-whites or LGTBQIA+ members to hide behind.
This problem afflicts white women especially, but not exclusively. I see the beardos on TikTok doing everything to throw themselves at the mercy of the woke by pointing their fingers at Trump supporters. THEY ARE THE RACISTS! Not me! I don’t exist at all! I am but a grease stain where a man used to be.
But the women, whose primary need — a pathological need - is to appear GOOD and be liked, have turned into intolerant, intolerable bullies. Cancel culture isn’t over. It’s just the accepted norm on the Left. Take Kate Mackz, with a popular TikTok running profile.
As white people, they are vulnerable to attacks by the mob, just as Kate Mackz was. That is why they must hide behind shields that protect them from those attacks, which also maintains the real power hierarchy as it did in the Gilded Age, as opposed to the manufactured one invented by the woke that pretends to protect the most vulnerable.
The Met Gala was borrowed absolution. It was a way to get Vogue off the hook for its decades of elevating white models. They know that. Anna Wintour knows that as she tucks into her bloody red hamburger and perfectly whipped up mashed potatoes.
The more successful and wealthy a person is in America, the more likely they are to genuflect to the cult and ignore the people who just won the popular vote, who can’t stand them for one more minute. That’s why movies suck and why the Democrats can’t win. They stopped caring about serving the people and only serve themselves once they reached the highest status inside utopia.
Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez, and pop star Katy Perry used diversity to justify their Bachelorette party in space. It was a sign that things are shifting that almost no one praised that. They could have learned a lesson or two from the wise Anna Wintour. Perhaps if a marginalized person had built the rocket, they might have gotten away with it.
What it’s like to glide through the rarified air of the elite’s empire is to go along with a lie. Everyone just decided that if history couldn’t be made, we would all pretend that it had been, that our utopian diorama was our reality. If the media covers it, and they do, and the awards community rewards it, and they do, who’s to say it isn’t actual reality?
Because it isn’t.
Drive through the broken-down neighborhoods of Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles, or any major Black neighborhood in America, and you’ll see the reality of what the Left has abandoned. This from Ideastream.
Cleveland has identified a new public health crisis: gun violence.
For several years, gun violence has been the leading cause of death among children and teens in the U.S. Though homicides and violent crime are down city- and nationwide, public safety and illegal guns on city streets remain a chief concern for leaders and residents.
"A lot of this is happening in areas where people are having challenges as far as living in survival mode," said Richard Starr, Cleveland's Ward 5 council member, who sponsored the legislation. "That's where you start to say, 'Well, what are we doing? What are we doing to help people up? How do we get them out of this mindset? How do you get them out of survival mode?'"
Maybe you could sit them down in front of the Met Gala and show them the Dandy fashion. Would that get them out of survival mode? How about Blue Origin? Do those “astronauts” in space inspire little girls?
The Democrats will blame the guns. They’ll blame the Republicans. They will never blame themselves because they don’t have to. They just have to put on the right mask, wear the right costume, and bask in their unearned moral superiority for one last ball.
The victims of crime, the victims of a failing public school system, are invisible to the people at the Met Gala, just as the many Black and Brown voters who flipped to Trump are invisible because they are inconvenient to a movement that relies on demonizing half the country as racists to elevate itself.
The truth? Like everything else in American culture, it was a walking advertisement for the real power in this country.
But the Democrats are once again sending a message to the American people that you don’t matter. Your problems don’t matter. The only thing that matters is our spectacular ball, the one you’re not invited to because you don’t believe that this is history being made. You see who we really are, and that ruins everything.
If this is the plan for the Democrats, for Hollywood and the Left’s empire, they’re not reading the room, or looking out the window.
There has been a vibe shift. They must feel it too, because otherwise, they would not have to work so hard for forgiveness.
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