The Met Gala on Monday evening was an expression of the putrefaction of the ruling establishment where fashion, Hollywood, corporate money, celebrity culture and politics comingled in a display of wealth and privilege.

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“The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance…” [A Tale of Two Cities]

So wrote Charles Dickens of the French aristocracy on the eve of the great Revolution. The words apply with undiminished force to the attendees at the 2026 Met Gala, an annual display of self-congratulation at which the American oligarchy and its hired entertainers gather to admire themselves. The 2026 edition was bought, paid for, and presided over by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and world’s third-richest man, owner and political enforcer of the Washington Post, together with his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos.

A check for $10 million, a rounding error in a fortune estimated at between $223 and $279 billion, purchased the couple their seats as honorary co-chairs. The wealth that Bezos now distributes in such gestures was extracted, dollar by dollar, from the broken backs of warehouse workers urinating in bottles to make rate. Outside the museum, protesters projected the slogan “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala” onto the Bezoses’ $80 million Madison Square Park penthouse. The guests inside, costumed as their own self-image, evidently did not consider that the conditions which produced their wealth and the conditions which produced the protest were one and the same.