Every year I’m confronted with the decision of whether to talk about the Met Gala. And it can be a tough decision if I’m being totally honest.
On one hand, it’s always easy to point and laugh at rich Leftists wearing weird costumes and making fools out of themselves. On the other hand, it’s gotten way too easy to do.
As far as celebrity freak shows go, the Met Gala is sort of like the Oscars at this point. Its “unpredictability” is now cliche. Its zaniness is now boring. Unless mayhem breaks out — say, an actor slaps the presenter live on-stage or something like that — then the truth is, no one really cares about any of these events anymore. In fact, I’m still not even sure what the Met Gala is. All I know is that the celebrities dress strangely and then go into a big museum. What do they do inside the museum? Is there some kind of award ceremony? Is it a dance — like celebrity prom or something? Do they sacrifice a live goat and drink its blood while chanting satanic curses? Is it some combination of these things?
Nobody knows for sure. And most of all, nobody cares.
Fortunately, something interesting did happen at the Met Gala last night — or at least outside of it. Mobs of pro-Palestine demonstrators, apparently bored of their tent cities on college campuses, slowly marched through Manhattan towards the Met. And when they arrived, they tore down the police barricades and flooded the street. Watch:
That’s what she wore to the Met Gala, while riots raged outside, in a clash of poor commies versus rich commies, as Peachy Keenan put it. These riots should also bring to mind some immediate logistical considerations that the Democratic Party now has to think about. For one thing, it’s safe to say that planning for the Democratic National Convention is going through some last-minute revisions right about now. Just imagine being in charge of security for the DNC. You’re going to need bigger barricades than they had at the Met. And probably a lot more cops.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
But more barricades and cops won’t fix the underlying problem that the Democratic Party has created here. There’s now a full-on uprising on the Left against the elitism that Democrats have long embraced — and the media is getting involved, too. Yahoo, for example, has already turned on the Met Gala. They just published a piece declaring, “The Met Gala’s Opulence Is Always Gross. This Year, It’s Obscene.”
The whole article is a rant that hits a crescendo with this paragraph, which is probably the single-longest run-on sentence I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Here it is:
Even in an era filled with the horrors of late-stage capitalism run amok—bipartisan support for genocide; rolling back of reproductive, civil, and voting rights; a threadbare social safety net; decades of wage stagnation; tax cuts for the the rich; the crushing of unions and labor rights; expansion of the militarized police surveillance state; creeping techno-authoritarianism; untested, unregulated, and unchecked A.I.; entrenched racial inequality and injustice; right-wing and white supremacist extremist violence; and Boeing jet parts falling from the sky like so many dead whistleblowers—that kind of frivolous urgency promises that this year’s event nonetheless will stand out as a vainglorious display of self-congratulatory decadence and tone-deaf extravagance.
First of all, just as a stylistic matter — if you’re going to make a sentence that long, it needs to be coherent. “Boeing jet parts are falling from the sky like so many dead whistleblowers?” That doesn’t even make sense. The dead whistleblowers didn’t fall from the sky. One of them shot himself and the other died of an illness. Even if you subscribe to the theory that Boeing’s hitmen killed these whistleblowers — which, who knows, maybe they did — the fact remains that they didn’t fall from the sky. They died on the ground. So it just doesn’t work. This is the problem you get into with 100-word sentences. Eventually, you just lose track of what you’re saying.
In any event, that whole massive paragraph could be summed up as saying simply, “We’re living through late-stage capitalism right now.” That’s what the Left-wing media is saying. They used to celebrate the Met Gala, but not anymore. Now they’re saying the same thing the demonstrators are, which is that the frivolous elite are partying while Rome burns. And they’re furious about it.
What the media and these demonstrators don’t want to admit is that the elitists at this gala — all the celebrities who are dressed like slutty Star Wars villains — are on their team. The celebrities are part of the ruling class. The protesters and media critics are its products and in some cases quite literally its offspring. To be sure, the celebrities and college administrators and the politicians are reluctant to acknowledge that their own Frankenstein monster is turning against them. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
Remember that it was two years ago that AOC showed up to the Met Gala with a “Tax the Rich” gown. There were a bunch of sympathetic news stories highlighting her bravery at the time. Here’s how AOC justified showing up to an event that costs $300,000 per table — while equipped with a custom dress, handbag, shoes and jewelry costing more than $2,000. Watch:
It’s a really important conversation, AOC says. Some people aren’t ready to hear it, but we need to punish rich people. We need to make them as uncomfortable as possible. We need to steal their money. That was the message from AOC, who not incidentally, grew up in a very well-off suburb.
Her whole schtick was always hypocritical and disingenuous. But it turns out that Leftist activists were listening to her rhetoric, they were taking it seriously. We’ve seen this a lot lately. When Chuck Schumer threatened Supreme Court justices, Leftists showed up at the justices’ homes. When the White House claimed that “trans kids” were being abused, a Leftist shot and killed Christians. When Democrats accused Israel of “genocide,” college students occupied university buildings. Now, two years after AOC attacked the Met, leftist are gathering outside the building.
This is the escalation that Democrats have primed this country for. It’s now in progress, whether Democrats intended it to happen or not. But that’s not to say the ruling elites are going to roll over and let this happen. As you saw in that footage, the cops started making arrests the very second that protestors trespassed through the barricades in front of the Met.
When these people set up encampments on college campuses, they were given a few days before the cops moved in. When they looted and burned poor neighborhoods, they were given about three months. But when they showed up at the Met Gala, they were given three seconds before the arrests started. It really shows you how the hierarchy works.
Democrats can’t protect the rest of the country from these mobs, however. Nor do they intend to. So last night, in addition to creating a scene at the Met Gala, Leftists also vandalized a World War I memorial in New York and torched an American flag in front of it. Watch:
Notice what kinds of illegal demonstrations the police will stop, and which demonstrations they’ll allow to continue. The mob can deface World War I memorials all they want because in doing so, they’re communicating their hatred for this country and everything it stands for. So the Democrats who run New York aren’t going to stop them. But the mob isn’t allowed to inconvenience celebrities at the Met, under any circumstances.
We’ll talk more about the vandalism of the memorial in a bit. The point is that this is the hierarchy that Democrats clearly want to enforce. The trouble is getting the mob to respect the hierarchy. The Democrats are having trouble with that at the moment.
Yet they still seem oblivious — or are acting oblivious, at least — to the fact that they created this monster themselves.
That’s why, inside the Met, as chaos unfolded outside, the party continued uninterrupted. And so did all of this associated weirdness, which was as off-putting as it’s ever been. Take for example this decoy costume worn by someone using the name “Karol G.” Apparently she wanted to keep her real costume a secret, so earlier in the evening, she sported this beige umbrella-looking lampshade instead. Watch:
Imagine being a hardcore, AOC-loving Leftist who sees this. Democrats have spent the last several years telling you to despise rich people and commit crimes in the name of political activism. And then, down the street from your hippy commune at the local university, some celebrity is walking around in a lampshade costume. And the entire Democratic Party establishment is pretending this is normal. What would you do? How would you view the Democratic Party establishment after seeing this?
As for the costume itself — of course, it’s clearly a bid for attention. And I guess it worked because I’m talking about it. But it’s not even an original idea. As a lot of people have pointed out, the outfit bears a striking resemblance to a certain shower curtain costume from the film “Karate Kid,” only with different colors. So there’s really no redeeming qualities whatsoever here. It’s a total debacle all around.
But to be fair, there was at least some originality on display last night. For example, this celebrity apparently walked through a wind tunnel full of roses somewhere before arriving at the Met. And for her trouble, Vogue named her as one of the best-dressed women of the evening:
We can assume that this — woman (?) — paid many thousands of dollars for that outfit, which is just a trench coat with flower peddles and glitter glued onto it. It looks like something my four-year-old daughter might make. As everyone knows, in the mind of a four-year-old girl, anything and everything can be made prettier with copious amounts of glitter and flowers. Which is a fine mentality for a small child. But it doesn’t translate very well in this case. And as self-congratulatory as it is, again, there’s no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s almost as if the entire purpose of the event is to celebrate the elites’ total inability to detect how preposterous, self-absorbed and laughable they are.
This is nothing new. It’s been the case since the Met Gala was established. It’s always been a mini-theater of the absurd. What’s changed is that the voting base of the Democratic Party isn’t laughing along with these clowns anymore. They want them destroyed. They turned against the universities, and now they’ve turned against Hollywood. What the protesters of course don’t understand is that they’ve inherited their whole worldview and everything they believe from these very institutions.
Hollywood and Academia don’t realize that they’re being attacked by their own Frankenstein. But Frankenstein doesn’t realize it either. If Frankenstein ever wakes up to that fact, then the ruling class is really in trouble.