“Are you on the list? We’re at capacity.” I wasn’t. The election night party at Sovereign House, a new-right event space in downtown Manhattan, was co-sponsored by Polymarket, the Thiel-backed online betting market, and Remilia Corporation, a crypto collective that during the pandemic bootstrapped a hundred-million-dollar NFT collection—“Milady,” featuring a cutesy, underage anime face—out of a hyper-online esoteric-fascism meme page. When I saw the party announcement weeks ago I felt a sinking feeling and simply avoided it. At 10 p.m. on election night, after it had become clear which way things were going, I decided to go.
At the door they asked if I knew anyone inside—maybe Nick? Nick Allen is Sovereign House’s proprietor, supposedly a venture capitalist, although it seems unlikely that the money for the space, which hosts poetry readings, book parties, film screenings, live podcast recordings, etc., comes solely from him. I knew him, I said, but he probably didn’t know me. Eventually a group of people came out and the doorman waved me in. I headed straight for the bar. People were drinking Narragansett, but when I asked for one, they were out: “We only have White Claw, and it’s only for the girls.”
As for the girls, there weren’t that many of them. Since the downtown neighborhood of Dimes Square became a meme in 2022—hyped not only by participants on the ground and in the virtual world that grew up around it, but perhaps even more by a media ecosystem endlessly fascinated by the “vibe shift” in Manhattan’s culture industry—part of the lore had been that Peter Thiel was paying girls to hang around, and boys too. The girls were mostly of a type: under thirty, formfitting or low-cut dresses, bleached hair, lots of makeup. Remilia had attracted some anime types too, the cutter LoliGoths who embodied, or perhaps reflected, the collective’s feminine ideal. Many of them are at every Sovereign House event, tending bar or tending the party; they post selfies in branded t-shirts.1 They have their own hustle now, too: the $egirl crypto token, though its market cap hovers at a relatively modest $750k. Throughout the night, one of the token’s promoters tried to get a meme going about “crystal night,” which was ostensibly a reference to the fantasy role-playing video game Elder Scrolls, where characters get trapped in crystals (“get in the fucking crystal, libtard”), though the calqued German was surely not lost on anyone. (The anniversary of Kristallnacht is November 9th.)
People milled about, waiting for Nick to deliver more beer. The space is a dark floor-through garden apartment in the Lower East Side, on a section of East Broadway where crumbling yeshivas give way to hipster bars and restaurants. Candles lit up a table with silver trays holding catered McDonald’s; Remilia memes were printed on posters (“THERE IS NO GOVERNMENT; I LOVE YOU,” with a Milady in the middle, her face framed by crosshairs). Curated bookshelves displayed Thielworld classics: The Sovereign Individual, Beyond Good and Evil, Suicide of the West, Rules for Radicals—the latter required reading for understanding the “culturally Marxist” enemy.
In 2016, I had watched the results of the first Trump election come in with fellow graduate students in an apartment in Chicago. The blithe, Jon Stewart-y mood in which things began—a mood that now seems irrecoverable, almost ancient; and not just in relation to politics—started to sour, and as my friend and I started drinking heavily and going out to the deck to stare at nothing, a group of younger grad students at the party slipped quietly but quickly into a kind of traumatized regression, changing into pajamas and switching off MSNBC to watch SpongeBob SquarePants and cuddle.
This was the type of situation I was trying to avoid in 2024. For the past eight years I had been writing about the new right, working on a book that looked for the roots of this energy in a broader postwar dissident culture. Now I wanted to see what the energy felt like in the moment of Trump’s triumphal return; but at the Sovereign House party, everyone seemed listless. By eleven, the betting markets were giving Trump a 90 percent chance of victory; the place was packed, but the energy felt dispersed. This was something I had often noticed at Sovereign House, which was established late in 2022, when the Dimes Square bubble had already started to deflate. Things here always felt a little more “republican”—a little dorkier than at the height of the reactionary-chic moment. The ironically-not-ironic suburban white aesthetic, the potent synthesis of transgression with conformism, had imperceptibly calcified; people often looked, and acted, like unwitting extras in Blue Velvet. A lot of the guys looked like frat bros in their MAGA hats and haphazard party suits, and a portly Asian man was wearing a three-piece suit, carrying a cane and puffing on a cigar. Beckett Rosset, whose now-closed loft space in the West Village was the site of some of the scene’s better parties in 2022, was planning an event here, but at Sovereign House he wasn’t allowed to have a pole dancer; there was a morals clause in their lease.
Outside, people smoked and drifted. “Shit’s about to get really strange,” said a guy wearing red suspenders with the words VENI VIDI VICI printed on them in gold. “Trump’s probably going to win, and the world’s gonna collapse and turn into something else.” Eight years ago, such a prospect was a dark thrill—publicly for Trumpists, and secretly for liberals. Now suspenders guy seemed neither excited nor scared; the way he said it sounded more like a statement of fact. An indie-rock girl wearing a pink Trump trucker hat and a loose jacket over a see-through bra was telling someone that things were going pretty good; her band had just opened for a famous art-pop musician, someone from the heroic eighties East Village scene. In a corner of the backyard I saw Max, the Dimes Square scene’s resident ideas guy, a mantis-like and self-consciously brooding figure with a passing resemblance to Jacob Elordi. He sat on a chair, staring at his vape; on his Substack he has tried to carve out a Deleuzian third-positionist stance on the regulation of large language models, so I asked him what he thought the election meant for AI. “Yeah,” he said. After a pregnant minute of silence he came out with: “Kamala is slop; Trump is fried.”
I thought about the McDonald’s; whatever this meant, underlying it was an assumption that memes formed a substrate, an affective and political logic that constitute our common world. This scene, and the memetic language with which it was associated, was no longer shocking, edgy, avant-garde; as in Trump’s stunt as a fast-food worker, the normal and the exceptional had fused into an uncanny and hyperreal symbolic system. Meme magic and artificial general intelligence were just expressions of this larger logic, in which words and ideas, desires and beliefs, were generated automatically and out of thin air. Traders on Polymarket could meme Trump’s momentum and make their own odds; Elon had bought Twitter and used Twitter to help buy the election, which would buy more fake money, a positive feedback loop continuing ad infinitum.
In this world Trump represented “freedom,” but what this meant was immaterial. It was less a radical disruption of the status quo by an emergent political constituency with its own set of priorities and more a reanimation of the deepest and oldest of American fantasies: to be untethered from history, free even from space and time itself. It was clear that the Democrats had nothing different to offer: “Kamala is brat” was a Trump meme, and a bad one; once it faded, the “vibes election” was over. But the online right were no longer radical outsiders, if they ever had been: they were the system itself, and now they could admit it. Scattered around the party were stickers that hyped the new crypto token $CLERB; compared to the Milady NFT, it seemed pretty low-effort (“MAKE AMERICA $CLERB AGAIN!,” with a picture of the Donald smoking a joint over a generic nightclub background). Remilia’s founder sees himself as an avant-garde artist whose medium is memes; the early output, and the real-world events and viral culture that they anchored, were genuinely out there. (He has also been accused of being linked to a grooming cult that encouraged underage girls to commit suicide.) Now Remilia seemed to be making a play for respectability. After the party, the founder posted on Twitter: “this is the first waves of a total memetic regime change—nothing can stop this.” Back inside, I saw one of the e-girls; she was wearing a Sovereign House baby tee, her straightened blonde hair helmeted by a MAGA hat. “What’s Trump gonna do now that he’s back in power?” I asked her. “Prolly slay,” she said, deadpanning.
On the wall in the back, the election returns were projected alongside a live feed from Coinbase. Bitcoin was up 10 percent; this surely represented tens of millions in virtual gains among those in the room. Someone put on Playboi Carti: “Yeah yeah, you came back and you failed, uh.” Max, the slop-versus-fried guy, swayed along to the refrain as the numbers on the wall kept going up. The song, called “2024,” is about nothing, and about winning; kill your opps, and make everyone famous: “Put em on the news, ha / put em on the news or something.” A wholesome-looking couple came up to me, the man in a suit and a pick-stitched overcoat. “Would you take a picture of me and my wife?” he asked. I took his phone and snapped a couple of photos, then asked what he thought Trump would do now that he had won. “Put them all in concentration camps,” he said, with a forthrightness that, despite my cynicism, took me aback. “Oh… who?” I asked. “The trans people,” he replied. “Just kidding. So, uh—do you think we’re gonna get jobs?” He sounded genuinely worried. “Probably not,” I said. “Well,” he said, “at least we’re all together…”
By one o’clock, the cops had come and gone, people were still hanging out, and despite the occasional shouts of glee and hugs and high-fives, nothing ever seemed to crest. I’d had enough, and headed for the exit. Outside I saw a guy bumming a smoke. I asked him about the rumor that Sovereign House was expanding; yes, he said, they were going to move down the street, to a bigger space. Maybe it would become a membership club, something like Praxis. Would I pay $250 a month to come to Sovereign House? he asked. “Probably not,” I said, again. The guy nodded, pacing and fidgeting a bit, then got distracted by a woman who slowed down as she drove by—perhaps, it seemed to him, to glower at the people celebrating Trump’s win. “He’s back,” he shouted, “he’s back and he’s never going away.”
The next day, walking through downtown, things were weirdly normal. It was warm for November, in the high seventies; people were sitting outside having cocktails and chatting. Manhattan had swung 20 percent toward Trump since the last election. His first election arrived as an aesthetic shock, a bit of épater la bourgeoise; this time it’s for real.
“Are you on the list? We’re at capacity.” I wasn’t. The election night party at Sovereign House, a new-right event space in downtown Manhattan, was co-sponsored by Polymarket, the Thiel-backed online betting market, and Remilia Corporation, a crypto collective that during the pandemic bootstrapped a hundred-million-dollar NFT collection—“Milady,” featuring a cutesy, underage anime face—out of a hyper-online esoteric-fascism meme page. When I saw the party announcement weeks ago I felt a sinking feeling and simply avoided it. At 10 p.m. on election night, after it had become clear which way things were going, I decided to go.
At the door they asked if I knew anyone inside—maybe Nick? Nick Allen is Sovereign House’s proprietor, supposedly a venture capitalist, although it seems unlikely that the money for the space, which hosts poetry readings, book parties, film screenings, live podcast recordings, etc., comes solely from him. I knew him, I said, but he probably didn’t know me. Eventually a group of people came out and the doorman waved me in. I headed straight for the bar. People were drinking Narragansett, but when I asked for one, they were out: “We only have White Claw, and it’s only for the girls.”
As for the girls, there weren’t that many of them. Since the downtown neighborhood of Dimes Square became a meme in 2022—hyped not only by participants on the ground and in the virtual world that grew up around it, but perhaps even more by a media ecosystem endlessly fascinated by the “vibe shift” in Manhattan’s culture industry—part of the lore had been that Peter Thiel was paying girls to hang around, and boys too. The girls were mostly of a type: under thirty, formfitting or low-cut dresses, bleached hair, lots of makeup. Remilia had attracted some anime types too, the cutter LoliGoths who embodied, or perhaps reflected, the collective’s feminine ideal. Many of them are at every Sovereign House event, tending bar or tending the party; they post selfies in branded t-shirts.1A previous version of the article described some of the partygoers as payrolled and misidentified the man in the closing anecdote. We regret the errors. They have their own hustle now, too: the $egirl crypto token, though its market cap hovers at a relatively modest $750k. Throughout the night, one of the token’s promoters tried to get a meme going about “crystal night,” which was ostensibly a reference to the fantasy role-playing video game Elder Scrolls, where characters get trapped in crystals (“get in the fucking crystal, libtard”), though the calqued German was surely not lost on anyone. (The anniversary of Kristallnacht is November 9th.)
People milled about, waiting for Nick to deliver more beer. The space is a dark floor-through garden apartment in the Lower East Side, on a section of East Broadway where crumbling yeshivas give way to hipster bars and restaurants. Candles lit up a table with silver trays holding catered McDonald’s; Remilia memes were printed on posters (“THERE IS NO GOVERNMENT; I LOVE YOU,” with a Milady in the middle, her face framed by crosshairs). Curated bookshelves displayed Thielworld classics: The Sovereign Individual, Beyond Good and Evil, Suicide of the West, Rules for Radicals—the latter required reading for understanding the “culturally Marxist” enemy.
In 2016, I had watched the results of the first Trump election come in with fellow graduate students in an apartment in Chicago. The blithe, Jon Stewart-y mood in which things began—a mood that now seems irrecoverable, almost ancient; and not just in relation to politics—started to sour, and as my friend and I started drinking heavily and going out to the deck to stare at nothing, a group of younger grad students at the party slipped quietly but quickly into a kind of traumatized regression, changing into pajamas and switching off MSNBC to watch SpongeBob SquarePants and cuddle.
This was the type of situation I was trying to avoid in 2024. For the past eight years I had been writing about the new right, working on a book that looked for the roots of this energy in a broader postwar dissident culture. Now I wanted to see what the energy felt like in the moment of Trump’s triumphal return; but at the Sovereign House party, everyone seemed listless. By eleven, the betting markets were giving Trump a 90 percent chance of victory; the place was packed, but the energy felt dispersed. This was something I had often noticed at Sovereign House, which was established late in 2022, when the Dimes Square bubble had already started to deflate. Things here always felt a little more “republican”—a little dorkier than at the height of the reactionary-chic moment. The ironically-not-ironic suburban white aesthetic, the potent synthesis of transgression with conformism, had imperceptibly calcified; people often looked, and acted, like unwitting extras in Blue Velvet. A lot of the guys looked like frat bros in their MAGA hats and haphazard party suits, and a portly Asian man was wearing a three-piece suit, carrying a cane and puffing on a cigar. Beckett Rosset, whose now-closed loft space in the West Village was the site of some of the scene’s better parties in 2022, was planning an event here, but at Sovereign House he wasn’t allowed to have a pole dancer; there was a morals clause in their lease.
Outside, people smoked and drifted. “Shit’s about to get really strange,” said a guy wearing red suspenders with the words VENI VIDI VICI printed on them in gold. “Trump’s probably going to win, and the world’s gonna collapse and turn into something else.” Eight years ago, such a prospect was a dark thrill—publicly for Trumpists, and secretly for liberals. Now suspenders guy seemed neither excited nor scared; the way he said it sounded more like a statement of fact. An indie-rock girl wearing a pink Trump trucker hat and a loose jacket over a see-through bra was telling someone that things were going pretty good; her band had just opened for a famous art-pop musician, someone from the heroic eighties East Village scene. In a corner of the backyard I saw Max, the Dimes Square scene’s resident ideas guy, a mantis-like and self-consciously brooding figure with a passing resemblance to Jacob Elordi. He sat on a chair, staring at his vape; on his Substack he has tried to carve out a Deleuzian third-positionist stance on the regulation of large language models, so I asked him what he thought the election meant for AI. “Yeah,” he said. After a pregnant minute of silence he came out with: “Kamala is slop; Trump is fried.”
I thought about the McDonald’s; whatever this meant, underlying it was an assumption that memes formed a substrate, an affective and political logic that constitute our common world. This scene, and the memetic language with which it was associated, was no longer shocking, edgy, avant-garde; as in Trump’s stunt as a fast-food worker, the normal and the exceptional had fused into an uncanny and hyperreal symbolic system. Meme magic and artificial general intelligence were just expressions of this larger logic, in which words and ideas, desires and beliefs, were generated automatically and out of thin air. Traders on Polymarket could meme Trump’s momentum and make their own odds; Elon had bought Twitter and used Twitter to help buy the election, which would buy more fake money, a positive feedback loop continuing ad infinitum.
In this world Trump represented “freedom,” but what this meant was immaterial. It was less a radical disruption of the status quo by an emergent political constituency with its own set of priorities and more a reanimation of the deepest and oldest of American fantasies: to be untethered from history, free even from space and time itself. It was clear that the Democrats had nothing different to offer: “Kamala is brat” was a Trump meme, and a bad one; once it faded, the “vibes election” was over. But the online right were no longer radical outsiders, if they ever had been: they were the system itself, and now they could admit it. Scattered around the party were stickers that hyped the new crypto token $CLERB; compared to the Milady NFT, it seemed pretty low-effort (“MAKE AMERICA $CLERB AGAIN!,” with a picture of the Donald smoking a joint over a generic nightclub background). Remilia’s founder sees himself as an avant-garde artist whose medium is memes; the early output, and the real-world events and viral culture that they anchored, were genuinely out there. (He has also been accused of being linked to a grooming cult that encouraged underage girls to commit suicide.) Now Remilia seemed to be making a play for respectability. After the party, the founder posted on Twitter: “this is the first waves of a total memetic regime change—nothing can stop this.” Back inside, I saw one of the e-girls; she was wearing a Sovereign House baby tee, her straightened blonde hair helmeted by a MAGA hat. “What’s Trump gonna do now that he’s back in power?” I asked her. “Prolly slay,” she said, deadpanning.
On the wall in the back, the election returns were projected alongside a live feed from Coinbase. Bitcoin was up 10 percent; this surely represented tens of millions in virtual gains among those in the room. Someone put on Playboi Carti: “Yeah yeah, you came back and you failed, uh.” Max, the slop-versus-fried guy, swayed along to the refrain as the numbers on the wall kept going up. The song, called “2024,” is about nothing, and about winning; kill your opps, and make everyone famous: “Put em on the news, ha / put em on the news or something.” A wholesome-looking couple came up to me, the man in a suit and a pick-stitched overcoat. “Would you take a picture of me and my wife?” he asked. I took his phone and snapped a couple of photos, then asked what he thought Trump would do now that he had won. “Put them all in concentration camps,” he said, with a forthrightness that, despite my cynicism, took me aback. “Oh… who?” I asked. “The trans people,” he replied. “Just kidding. So, uh—do you think we’re gonna get jobs?” He sounded genuinely worried. “Probably not,” I said. “Well,” he said, “at least we’re all together…”
By one o’clock, the cops had come and gone, people were still hanging out, and despite the occasional shouts of glee and hugs and high-fives, nothing ever seemed to crest. I’d had enough, and headed for the exit. Outside I saw a guy bumming a smoke. I asked him about the rumor that Sovereign House was expanding; yes, he said, they were going to move down the street, to a bigger space. Maybe it would become a membership club, something like Praxis. Would I pay $250 a month to come to Sovereign House? he asked. “Probably not,” I said, again. The guy nodded, pacing and fidgeting a bit, then got distracted by a woman who slowed down as she drove by—perhaps, it seemed to him, to glower at the people celebrating Trump’s win. “He’s back,” he shouted, “he’s back and he’s never going away.”
The next day, walking through downtown, things were weirdly normal. It was warm for November, in the high seventies; people were sitting outside having cocktails and chatting. Manhattan had swung 20 percent toward Trump since the last election. His first election arrived as an aesthetic shock, a bit of épater la bourgeoise; this time it’s for real.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.