The fact that America, unlike Europe's class-based societies, has always had economic mobility, has meant that pure Marxism, which is predicated on class warfare, hasn't managed to take root here.  Instead, America's hardcore leftists eventually realized that America's Achilles heel isn't class; it's race.

Using race as the spear point, leftists have managed to spur America's limousine liberals into an orgy of apology.  Meanwhile, corporations staffed with indoctrinated college graduates send out virtue-signaling messages backed with big bucks — not just because they're true believers, but in a desperate attempt to buy off looters and McCarthyites.

It turns out, though, that there is one industry in America that is still a bastion of old-fashioned economic and class distinction, and that's the American media.  To its credit, The New York Times published an article by Ben Smith (founder of BuzzFeed) describing how the media magnates live, something that spurs genuine class envy among their often poorly paid employees.

The article opens by describing the Hamptons, where New York's media upper class have vacation homes.  This is where many New York media magnates retreated when the Wuhan Virus made Manhattan just too unpleasant for them.  Smith tells of a world in which it costs $400,000 to join a golf club, where parties for a few dozen friends can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and where people buy million-dollar-plus yachts to assuage their children's boredom during the virus's enforced downtime.

Smith names a few of the media people who enjoy this lifestyle, whether in the Hamptons or at other pockets of extraordinary luxury throughout America: David Geffen; Discovery, Inc. executive Henry Schleiff; Jeff Zucker; Discovery CEO David Zaslaf; MSNBC president Phil Griffin; Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch; Condé Nast artistic director Anna Wintour; Hearst Magazines president Troy Young; New York Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger; CNN's Chris Cuomo; and many more.  These people lead lives that would be familiar to the old French Ancien Régime, the ones who found themselves carted off in tumbrils to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Meanwhile, in the newsrooms, employees have been stuck in lockdowns (which they support or don't support depending on how the lockdowns will affect Trump's re-election chances).  Smith posits that it's this class divide that's driving the well publicized ousters in the media world.  That is, when The New York Times, Bon Appétit, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Variety dump editors who deviated from Black Lives Matter doctrine, the motivation has as much to do with economic class divisions as with race:

The ousters were driven, in many cases, by employees who believe the companies' internal cultures don't mirror the progressive and anti-racist values they sell. And while the immediate spur is the wave of protests against anti-black racism and police violence set off by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the New York-based media had already been activated by something else: The clarity with which the onset of Covid-19 revealed who could afford to get out of town, who might be OK if they lost their job, who had money or family to fall back on. The backgrounds of Zoom calls, your colleagues' Instagrams and casual Slack references revealed who was trying to get the air-conditioner in their Crown Heights studio working, and who was opening up the pool.

"People are scared and they're seeing other people's safety nets at a time when everything is uncertainty and they don't have one, and everybody else's safety nets are in their faces," said Ashley Ford, 33 and living in Flatbush, who has written for outlets including Refinery29 and Marie Claire, and has a memoir due out next spring. "Not only are people mad, but they have time to talk about it."

Smith reached out to Amber Jamieson, a former employee of his when he was the editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed and a Bedford-Stuyvesant resident.  She was clear that the media elites' decision to abandon the city to the Wuhan virus and riots enraged her:

[S]he thinks that the bosses, and journalists, have a special obligation to stay: "Being a leader means staying with your people and seeing what they see."

But Ms. Jamieson said it had been an eye-opening experience.

"It revealed the money in journalism — who has cash and who doesn't and how much this industry is from people with trust funds or well-connected parents and they could stay in the Hamptons or the Catskills," she said.

The Media Régime has long thought that, by allowing its employees to use their media outlets to vent their race, sex, and gender identity rage, it could keep the employees from noticing the gaping chasm between the leadership and the foot soldiers.  The Wuhan virus and the riots seem to have stripped the foot soldiers' blinders.  They may soon come to think trundling the bosses in a tumbril to meet a grim fate is preferable to a small paycheck and a byline.