A couple of years ago, I saw a tweet about an entitled white novelist who’d just published a memoir about being entitled. So I read Jonathan Dee’s New York Times review of Quiet Street: On American Privilege, by the novelist Nick McDonell, an exemplar of the “blue-blooded, white upper class” who “reaped enormous benefits from having grown up in hyper-privileged circumstances.” According to Dee, McDonell “sees . . . [his privilege] more clearly now, and he feels bad about it. And so, having unconsciously monetized these unearned advantages all his life . . . he now monetizes his consciousness of them, courtesy of corporate publishing, at a rate of roughly $1,495.73 per page.”

Dee’s is a competent and composed takedown of McDonell’s grossly ironic social transgression. Yet when I looked up Dee’s bio, I learned that he, too, is a successful novelist who graduated from Yale and went straight to work for George Plimpton at The Paris Review. To a probably lesser degree, he himself is one of the entitled . . . which, according to the worldview of the New York Times, is the only way it could be. Why, you couldn’t rightly have some working-class striver review McDonell’s book now, could you? That would be socialist class warfare. No, it could only be someone “internal” to the club.

Unlike other mainstream media, the Times doesn’t hide its pedigree. Much of its masthead is DEI hires: Dynasty, Entitlement, and Inheritance. The same week the Dee review ran, columnist Nicholas Kristof—the Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar who regularly tells white liberals how to look upon/do unto the global poor—did so in the context of the country singer Anthony Oliver and his controversial hit “White Men North of Richmond.” True to form, Kristof concludes that “liberals should show more compassion for workers who have been left behind,” not bothering to consider that workers who’ve been left behind might contain “liberals.”

In the continual tumult of the intervening two years, the cognitive dissonance of the Times’s liberal virtue-signaling while carrying the water for the monied classes has only become more pronounced. A headline from a June Ethicist column by Kwame Anthony Appiah reads like something from The Onion: “Is It OK to Earn Rental Income from an ICE Holding Facility?”

Preserving wealth within a family might be the strongest impulse in our culture, because the best way to succeed in life is to start with inherited advantages. You don’t have to inherit money; it can be a set of intellectual priorities, but it has to be something of value, a legacy. Everything the New York Times stands for is legacy, for even the first-generation immigrant success story will attempt to send their kids to Harvard. Like the upper-class liberals it markets to, the Times may blanch at “excessive” wealth, but it firmly believes that such lopsidedness is a worthy price to pay for the orderly transfer of excess wealth and the stability of private society.

Given all this, it is highly ironic that the man the New York Times does NOT want to be the next mayor of New York City is himself a nepo baby (at least according to the New York Times), with an acclaimed filmmaker mother and an academic father. But the Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani doesn’t play by the class rules of neoliberal Democrats. He talks about rent freezes and free bus rides. Thus, the paper of record was terrified of Mamdani even before the primary, drawing much attention to his sidestepping a question on whether he would denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada.” The Times claimed that this position “fuels tension” and “provides fodder for his staunchest foes.” The stunning results of the primary only kicked the paper’s anti-Mamdani campaign into high gear: It’s not us but the Democrats who hate him; “A Potential Mamdani Mayorship Strikes Fear in the Real Estate Industry.”

It was Mamdani’s statement that “I don’t think we should have billionaires”—made during a June 29 conversation on Meet the Press—that really pierced the hyper-capitalist American soul, which includes close to 2,000 billionaires along with the owners and editorial board of the New York Times. Among the gasps of horror heard across the political spectrum, the X-delivered cri de coeur from billionaire and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made for a frothy Fourth of July. Whining that he was now “politically homeless” because the Democratic party was no longer encouraging a “culture of innovation and entrepreneurship,” Altman argued that “we should encourage people to make tons of money and then also find ways to widely distribute wealth and share the compounding magic of capitalism.”

The “magic of capitalism”? Research released in May by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity found that because of wage stagnation and soaring prices, a “minimal quality of life” is out of reach for American households with annual incomes of $100,000 or less (a.k.a. “the bottom” 60%). Between 2022 and 2023, the cost of living for the bottom 60% increased 8.6% while their spending power decreased by 3.6%. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis in February, half of all consumer spending in America is driven by just the top 10% of household incomes (>$250,000 annually). The roughly 306 million Americans who make up 90% of the population account for just half of all spending.

I point those interested in the “magic of capitalism” to The Obscene Wealth Issue of the New Republic, where editor Michael Tomasky offers this simple scenario: “To count to one million without stopping takes 11 days. To count to one billion takes nearly 32 years. To count Elon Musk’s fortune would take more than 13,000 years. Who needs that much money?” In 1995, as Timothy Noah explains in the same issue, Forbes counted 129 American billionaires, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as the world’s two richest people; “by 2021, there were 1,370 American billionaires, according to JPMorgan Chase, and over the next three years their number increased by a stunning 45%, to 1,990” in 2024.

Quick question for the New York Times: Are you on the side of the people or the side of the billionaires? Because in 2021 you professed to be on the side of the people of New York State when you almost single-handedly pushed Andrew Cuomo out of the governor’s office, siccing first Jesse McKinley and then Emma Fitzsimmons on him during COVID. I agree that Cuomo was personally unfit to be governor, but his administration (in which I worked from right after Trump’s election in 2016 to the end of 2020) was legislatively effective. Kathy Hochul is basically carrying on Cuomo’s policies. I still don’t understand the relentlessness of the Times and the capitulation of weak Democrats to force Cuomo to resign instead of allowing the people to vote him out in 2022. Now, four years later, Cuomo’s self-designated terminator wants him back as mayor? You can’t make this stuff up. Nor can you make up Cuomo saying he will move to Florida if Mamdani is elected. Discounting the fact that Cuomo lives in Westchester County, threatening to pull up stakes for Florida is the kind of thing that Donald Trump does.

Given his lack of executive leadership experience, Mamdani was not among my top five ballot picks (and obviously neither was Cuomo). But the aftermath of Mamdani’s victory has made me a defender. It’s been frightening to watch the erratic behavior of Democratic-Capitalist Democrats (vs. Democratic-Socialist Democrats). A new low for the paper of record was publishing an article questioning Mamdani’s honesty on his Columbia University application that used documents hacked from Columbia’s computer systems and provided to the Times by Jordan Lasker, a promoter of white supremacy. You can read a Columbia Journalism Review analysis of what happened, but suffice to say that this was a politically motivated attack, trying to drive Black voters away from Mamdani (and presumably toward Cuomo or the current mayor, Eric Adams). This instinctual baring of teeth by neoliberals at the Times reminds me of the wedding scene in The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman (from what looks like a college library skywalk) repeatedly shouting “Elaine!” as Katherine Ross down at the altar looks to the snarling hatred on the faces of her parents and the groom before running down the aisle toward her rescuer.

Inequality and unaffordability have made New York a cartoon city, something only the voters seem to get. We are seeing in real time how the institutional “opinion” of the New York Times means nothing to the majority of New Yorkers. The Times is no longer our local paper but a global media company that makes its money on Wordle, cooking videos, and infomercials for tech gear. In the same way that Republicans comport their morality with MAGA, the New York Times and mainline Democrats comport their morality with the “techno-capitalism” of Sam Altman and the billionaires. Zohran Mamdani won support purely on small-dollar donations; he is not beholden to corporations and rich people.

Just yesterday the Times published an unintentionally amusing interview with Robert Reich, who famously warned in 1994 that “we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society, composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind.” What made the video interview amusing was not the sobering content, with Reich claiming that “some Democrats don’t want to tell the true story of concentrated wealth and power because they are drinking at the same trough as Republicans in terms of their campaigns.” The amusing part was the visual juxtaposition of the affable Reich with his pleasant beard and giant headphones and the tense Times interviewer, David Marchese, whose chronic pinched frowning and facial contortions suggest an anthropologist from long ago encountering a class traitor for the first time. A pretty good metaphor for where we have come to. §