You missed something big about The Met Gala

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I was too mad to talk about the Matt Gallow before, but um I think I think I've calmed down enough that I can get through this video without too much swearing. That's not true. There's going to be swearing because I [ __ ] hate Jeff Bezos and most celebrities. By the way, shout out to Meil Stre who backed out of the Met Gala when she found out that Jeff Bezos and his wife were going to be running the show. It's been interesting to watch people put out their various think pieces over the last day or so about the Met Gala and some folks trying to defend their favorite celebrities and talking about how high fashion is art and we have to support that blah blah blah. But I think overwhelmingly the response to the Met Gala has been, "How dare you? How [ __ ] dare you?" Variety had a really good piece out yesterday entitled How the Met Gala transformed into the Tacky Bezos ball. Now, we knew that Jeff Bezos was gonna run this thing and his wife, what's her name? I don't know. I just I can never remember her name. I just think of the Joker because she has such a such a bad facelift. Lauren. I had to go look up her name. It's Lauren.

[00:00:58]>> Activist groups are calling for a boycott of Jeff Bezos Met Gala by projecting these messages on his $120 million penthouse and on the Chrysler building. Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez Bezos are the event's main benefactors.

[00:01:11]>> Shame on you, Jeff Bzos. The people that need to be being celebrated at the Met Gala are the workers, people like me.

[00:01:20]>> Posters showing Bezos with the slogan party like it's 1939 have been placed around New York City, while other posters have depicted Bezos as an ICE agent. Video shows activists from the UK campaign group everyone hates Elon hiding hundreds of bottles of fake urine in the Met Museum ahead of the gala. The group says it's to highlight Amazon's treatment of workers who have reportedly been forced to urinate in bottles because they weren't given bathroom breaks. But criticism hasn't stopped the gala from raising funds. This year, the event brought in a record $42 million so far, almost $10 million more than last year's $31 million. In a statement to CNN, an Amazon spokesperson said of their warehouse worker expectations, quote, "Safety is our top priority and at the core of everything we do. Amazon does not have fixed quotas at our facilities. Instead, we assess performance based on safe and achievable expectations.

[00:02:10]>> My name is Mary Hill. I am a 72 year old warehouse worker at one of your facilities. When we struggle from paycheck to paycheck, from we to we angers me because if it weren't for every assumption in every Amazon facility, he wouldn't have all those zeros behind his name.

[00:02:36]Shame on you, Jeff Basilos. The people that need to be being celebrated at the Met Gala are the workers. People like me.

[00:02:46]We deserve that celebration. We deserve so much more than we're getting. There's power in numbers. And there's more of us than there are of you. Remember, Jeff, ordinary people like myself that helped make you billionaires, if we built it, we can tear it down. Think about that tonight, okay? After that bottle of champagne when you go to bed. We're going to keep growing and we're going to keep building and we're going to keep protesting and we're going to keep marching and we're going to keep fighting this dystopian culture.

[00:03:23]We're not stopping. We're just getting cranked up. Enjoy your damn gala.

[00:03:36]So the the two kind of main reactions that I saw from folks were overwhelming disgust at the kind of conspicuous consumption. The um constant references that I saw over the last day to the Hunger Games and the way that people at the capital lived. I mean that's a totally apt comparison. Loads of people comparing the Met Gala to starving children in Gaza to school girls being murdered in Iran to Americans losing their food stamps to the destruction of our public lands and saying things like the Met Gala was in poor taste and shame on anybody who decided that this was a good idea when this is happening in the United States. I mean the Met Gala I don't give a [ __ ] if people say like oh this is all about fashion as high art whatever. No, it is all about maintaining class distinctions, right?

[00:04:29]Okur is all about maintaining class distinctions. It is this display of the super wealthy cloaked as like a fundraiser. This display of the superw wealthy that is meant to be bred in circuses for all of us. It's meant to be a circus that we are entertained by, but it's also meant to make us feel like those guys are up there. They live an entirely different life from us. And so I've always found events like the Met Gala and celebrity culture in general to be just abs absolutely vile, right?

[00:04:57]Absolutely abhorentt. I've never understood the worship of celebrities.

[00:05:00]So this the second most common thing I saw people posting after people were making comparisons to the the garish opulent displays of luxury that happened at the Met Gala to the rich the rich flexing and flaunting all of their wealth in our faces to the way that people are suffering more than ever right now. Um, the second most common response I saw was people feeling betrayed by their favorite celebrity that they had a parasocial relationship with that they expected to do better than to go to a Met Gala hosted by Jeff Bezos. Now, in advance of the Met Gala, we saw all kinds of activism, right?

[00:05:36]Because do we even need to explain what's wrong with Jeff Bezos right now?

[00:05:40]Amazon and all of its um exploitation of its workers, all of the harm of Amazon warehouses, all of the ways that Amazon Web Services support ICE, all of the way that Whole Foods supports ICE, all of the ways that Jeff Bezos as an oligarch is intent on facilitating and supporting Donald Trump's destruction of democracy.

[00:06:02]I mean, his wedding to Lauren was was gross and garish enough, and I covered that back when that happened last year.

[00:06:08]Um, and people were surprised to see their favorite celebrities show up to Jeff Bezos's wedding. So, why are you surprised that those same celebrities are showing up to the Met Gala? Why are you surprised when celebrities think that putting a dollar bill on as a mask is somehow some kind of protest? I hate celebrity culture. I look forward to the waning of celebrity culture. And I actually want to talk about that for a second.

[00:06:33]>> Okay, so I hadn't seen any of it.

[00:06:38]I had been running around all day and then my girlfriend called and said, "Jennifer, they showed up anyway."

[00:06:49]I said, "But they cut nearly 30,000 jobs and gutted the Washington Post.

[00:06:59]They showed up anyway, posturing and posing, hoping to be the most They cut 1 billion in funding for children's nutrition.

[00:07:20]And there they all were vying for the next position.

[00:07:31]Huh?

[00:07:33]We're at war.

[00:07:35]and so many people are dying.

[00:07:40]I said to my girlfriend, tell me you're lying.

[00:07:55]How much fame do we need, y'all?

[00:08:02]How much more fame?

[00:08:17]Wow.

[00:08:22]Because I think that maybe this is the really big takeaway for people who don't understand why it is that Beyonce would go to a gala hosted by Jeff Bezos. For people who don't understand why their favorite celebrity, wealthy celebrity would show up dripping in diamonds and expensive Oak Couture and support something that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos put on. I think there's a really key takeaway that we all need to understand. If any of you were hurt by your favorite celebrity showing up to the Met Gala, I think you're missing something. I think you're failing to understand something about celebrities, about the wealthy. When I say there's no such thing as a good billionaire, not Taylor Swift, not Beyonce, not Oprah Winfrey, like not not any celebrity that typically gets painted in the media as like a a good billionaire, right? None of them are good. And many of the things they do to appear good are all for their tax benefit, right? It's all their PR team saying, "Give to this charity. Spin it this way so that you look like a good person." And your audience, your your fans will relate to you, will think that you're one of the good ones. But then they still go and party with Jeff Bezos.

[00:09:32]They still go and support the work that the oligarchs are doing. They go and lend creative. They go and party. They go and party with the technocrat bros.

[00:09:41]Go and party with our oppressors. And that's so disheartening to people because folks have such strong parasocial relationships with the carefully crafted image that is presented to the public of whoever that celebrity is, right? You don't know them in real life. You don't know them. You know an image crafted by their PR team.

[00:09:58]But what I want you to understand, what you need to understand about celebrities, about the wealthy in this country, even the ones that you think are the good ones who actually care. I don't know, maybe Mark Ruffalo is an exception, but um you know, you know the billionaire Warren Buffett, you know what he said about the super rich? I paraphrase here, but he said, "Yeah, there's a class war going on right now.

[00:10:18]It's the billionaires. It's the super rich against everybody else." And do you know who's winning that class war right now in the United States? It's the super rich. It's not us winning that class war at this moment. It's the oligarchs. And do you know why that is? I mean, I agree with I agree with Warren Buffett. I think right now um they have ascended right now. They've hoodwinkedked an awful lot of people right now. They are pillaging the coffers of the American people. They are exploiting American workers right now. The oligarchy has so tremendous amounts of wealth consolidation and they are rubbing it in our faces. They are flaunting it right in front of us at events like the Met Gala. But but do you know what? The reason that they're winning is because the only class in the United States to actually have class solidarity is the super rich. The reason you're seeing your favorite celebrity show up for Jeff [ __ ] Bezos is because they actually have class solidarity. And we don't, right? We are so busy fighting amongst ourselves. The super rich have done a really good job of pitting us against each other, but they all show up for each other. Right? Look at billionaire Donald Trump whipping up the working class with racism, with misogyny, getting them to hate their immigrant neighbors, getting them to hate their trans neighbors. Capitalism leverages white supremacy and the patriarchy to keep the working class hating each other, fighting each other when we could have solidarity. The super rich, they they have that solidarity. They will abandon They will abandon everything else to stand up for each other. They don't have any [ __ ] scruples, but they sure as [ __ ] have solidarity for each other. That's that's my big takeaway from the Met Gala was like, "I'm sorry y'all were upset by it. You should be upset by it, right? It's despicable. It's despicable, but let that galvanize you. Let that push you to a place where you're like, I'm no longer supporting celebrity culture." Why do we even have is this is this a point in our history where we could see celebrity culture start to fall out of fashion?

[00:12:19]Where we could desire to prioritize workers over billionaires relationships with people in our real lives over parasocial relationshipships with a carefully crafted PR image? Is this a is this a turning point for us? Right? Is this a moment where we can get our [ __ ] together and get class solidarity for us and decide that we don't owe these guys our attention, our clicks, any anything?

[00:12:40]We don't owe them our money. We don't owe them our loyalty. And in fact, we should tax them out of existence. They don't give a [ __ ] about us. The Met Gala is proof positive that they don't give a [ __ ] about starving kids in Gaza. They don't give a [ __ ] about school children dying in Iran. They don't give a [ __ ] about the fact that you can't pay your rent. You can't feed your kids. You can't afford to fill your gas tank.

[00:13:00]They're going to be dripping in diamonds, flaunting their wealth in your faces all [ __ ] day long. They will party it up with each other while you struggle harder and harder. That should be the takeaway. That should be the takeaway of the Met Gala. We need more class solidarity than the elites have for each other because right now they're winning because they have each other's backs. They show up for each other. And we can't we can't even get our [ __ ] together to have a coordinated diverse big tent resistance to stop the fascists. So let's let's get our [ __ ] together. Let's decide that we are more powerful together. And we we don't need to have we don't need to have gallas in the future. We don't have to be content with this version of reality where Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos get to run the show. [ __ ] the Matt Gala. [ __ ] all you [ __ ] who showed up to it. How dare you?