The Revolution Will Be Catered in Tribeca Rooftop

I read Andrew Stiles's Free Beacon inventory of the American left's trust fund class while standing on a Q train, holding a pole that several thousand strangers had already handled that morning. Somewhere around Canal Street I got to the Tribeca living room.

That living room is where the mayor of New York went last December to finish his transition fundraising. The Post reported it: a private Tribeca home, hosted by Hunt oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix and crypto figure Marvin Ammori. CBS News

I was not invited. Nobody else holding that pole was invited either.

The average donation was $75, and also $3,700

The transition's public number was beautiful. More than 25,620 individual donors, average contribution $75, the whole thing pitched as the opposite of how Adams and de Blasio did it. That is a real number and it came from real people, and I want to be fair to it. yahoo

Here is the other real number. The transition hit its $4 million goal after leaning on benefactors writing checks as large as $3,700 to top off the small-dollar pile. Gothamist did the line-by-line on the maxed-out donors if you want the names. CBS News

Both things are true at once. The press release ran on the $75. The finish line ran on the $3,700. You can build an entire theory of contemporary progressive politics out of that gap and never leave the room where it happened, which is good, because you are not getting into that room. We have [written about this machinery before](INTERNAL LINK: DSA donor infrastructure piece).

She wrote the book. I mean this literally.

Hunt-Hendrix is not a passive heiress who wandered into a fundraiser. She co-founded Solidaire in 2012, a national network of philanthropists funding progressive movements, and Way to Win in 2017, doing the same thing for electoral strategy. Her grandfather was H.L. Hunt. Her relatives include Lamar Hunt and Clark Hunt. Google Books

She has a PhD from Princeton in Religion, Ethics, and Politics. Her dissertation was on the Ethics of Solidarity. In 2024 she published a book called Solidarity, co-written with Astra Taylor, tracing the idea from Ancient Rome through Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Google BooksPenguin Books Australia

So the argument that wealthy philanthropists are structurally necessary to progressive movements was made, at length, in hardcover, by a wealthy philanthropist. Even the sympathetic readers noticed. One Goodreads reviewer, who liked the book, flagged that the authors spend a great deal of it arguing how important wealthy philanthropists with the right ideals are, and found it unconvincing. Amazon

That is the review. From a fan.

Africana studies is a real discipline, and I will not be taking questions

The mayor's own biography is not a secret and never was. Bowdoin, Africana studies, a rap career under the name Mr. Cardamom, a Columbia professor father and a filmmaker mother. Stiles walks through all of it, along with the wedding at the family compound in Uganda.

None of this is disqualifying. Half the people who run this city went to Bowdoin or its equivalent. What is funny is the insistence that it be treated as a fact about someone else. The campaign [ran against modern oligarchs](INTERNAL LINK: Mamdani campaign coverage). The transition closed in a Tribeca parlor. At some point the word oligarch stops describing a class of person and starts describing a seating chart.

The Toys "R" Us of it all

Stiles reports that Daniel Moraff, one of the operatives credited with recruiting the Maine Senate candidate, is the grandson of Seymour Ginsburg, who founded the company that became Toys "R" Us.

I have nothing clever to add. A man whose family fortune came from a store built on the premise that you don't have to grow up went into left-wing electoral consulting. The joke wrote itself, filed itself, and went home.

Will Neff, who podcasts with Hasan Piker, captained the squash team at Blair Academy, where tuition runs $81,950. Squash. The sport of the international proletariat.

The wealth tax and the Range Rover

Ro Khanna cosponsored a wealth tax bill with Bernie Sanders. That is a matter of public record and a defensible position, and plenty of rich people have supported taxes on rich people since roughly forever.

The Beacon's financial analysis of the Khanna household is the part he will have to answer for, because it puts the family's potential net worth north of $340 million and catalogs the specific instruments he has spent his career denouncing. The mansion, the sale, the private school move, all of it.

You can hold both positions. Tax the rich, be the rich. It is not incoherent. It just requires never being asked about it in a room with a microphone, which is a thing you can arrange until it isn't.

The commune closed. The money didn't.

Stiles's best item is Fergie Chambers, great-grandson of James M. Cox, who founded what is now Cox Enterprises. He sold his stake for hundreds of millions and started a Marxist commune in Massachusetts. It went defunct. Per the Beacon, he left the country in 2024 during a criminal investigation into his funding of anti-Israel protests. We have [traced that funding stream](INTERNAL LINK: protest funding piece).

The commune is gone. The money is not gone. That is the only sentence in this entire piece that carries any actual weight, and I would like you to sit with it.

What the list is actually for

None of this proves a conspiracy and I am not claiming one. Rich people have bankrolled left movements since Engels was signing Marx's checks. The hypocrisy charge is the least interesting thing you can do with this material.

Here is the interesting thing. Solidaire is a network. Way to Win is a network. Networks have members. Members have invitations. And an invitation is, by construction, a document that says who is not coming.

The mayor raised $2 million from twenty-five thousand people who will never see the inside of that Tribeca apartment, and closed the last stretch in an evening among people who own it. The $75 donors got a mayor. The living room got the transition.

Solidarity is a lovely word. It is also, apparently, a venue.

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