Keep away from New York Metropolis, males in fits and “plutocrats of Park Avenue!” The New York Occasions doesn’t need you again on the town. That was the message on the entrance of the Thursday Types part in “Hisses for the Rich Who Fled – As the pandemic eases and wealthy New Yorkers return, they may face resentment.”
The two,000-word rant was penned by Jacob Bernstein, son of Washington Submit journalist Carl Bernstein and his second spouse, journalist and screenwriter, Nora Ephron. In different works, the culturally plugged-in Bernstein discovered a formidable bunch of likeminded people to trash their fellow elitists.
Whereas Luke Winkie’s mean-spirited Times essay in March appeared tongue in cheek, Bernstein’s wasn’t and gave off an ethnocentric, we-don’t need your-kind power as even an image caption focused a particular group: “Males in fits on New York Metropolis’s streets once more: an unwelcome sight for some.”
Bernstein discovered proudly contemptuous lefties, seemingly unaware that the tradition mecca of the nation isn’t funded on drag queens and BLM activists, however on revenues generated by the Wall Avenue sorts they freely detest (click on “broaden”):
Even with out remaining knowledge from New York Metropolis about how many individuals remained within the metropolis throughout the pandemic, an abundance of anecdotal proof exists in regards to the exodus of its wealthiest residents.
On the author Molly Jong-Quick’s Higher East Facet condominium constructing, lower than half a dozen of the 47 items have been occupied in April 2020, she mentioned. Mark Armstrong Peddigrew, a private coach in Decrease Manhattan, mentioned that roughly 85 % of his purchasers left city.
At Loaves & Fishes Foodstore, a grocer within the Hamptons the place lobster salad prices greater than $100 a pound, there have been 30-minute strains on Thursday mornings throughout the off season.
Now, as the speed of vaccinations will increase, the blooming bulbs across the metropolis really feel like a metaphor for extra than simply spring.
(Molly Jong-Quick is the left-wing pundit and daughter of feminist writer Molly Jong and granddaughter of novelist/communist Howard Quick.)
With town lastly beginning to reopen, The Occasions has determined it’s time to settle ideological scores — not between the haves and have nots, however between town leavers and people who stayed.
A lot of Bernstein’s respondents used the pandemic abandonment as an excuse to precise hostility towards the individuals who really pay an outsized share of town’s payments by taxes: Bar proprietor James Dorje Halpern “took nice pleasure in seeing fewer Wall Avenue sorts and so-called digital nomads, the type who’d labored close to the meatless meatpacking district for Google or comparable.”
One other dependable liberal offered an ideological angle (emphasis mine):
For Faye Wattleton, the previous president of Deliberate Parenthood Federation of America, one of many greatest was watching folks of all shades and stripes take to the streets in droves, having lastly woken as much as the horrors of police brutality that had been recognized to her and so many different Black folks for hundreds of years.
The horror of abortion went unmentioned.
Bernstein piled on extra sneering contempt for the wealthy, who apparently weren’t welcome (an odd stance for a liberal newspaper with a rich metropolis subscriber base): “The plutocrats of Park Avenue have been already receiving pleas in Palm Seaside, Aspen and elsewhere to return whence they got here.”
Bernstein did enable an precise conservative policymaker to advance an argument, and didn’t even give him a hostile label:
Eric Kober, 66, a senior fellow on the Manhattan Institute who focuses on housing coverage, mentioned that with out the taxes from the wealthy, town would possible need to slash social packages and lay off 1000’s of workers. That, he famous, was what occurred within the Nineteen Seventies, when town confronted a monetary disaster and the inhabitants dwindled.
However he rapidly neutralized that feint towards steadiness with the “former managing director of the Black Lives Matter World Community” to offer him with this gripe: “With the intention to dismantle oppressive, unique techniques, we require the participation of those that have historically benefited from probably the most oppressive practices.”
