This is so ridiculous I’m reluctant to even comment. But the sad fact is that there really is a convergence of some on the left and right, particularly on the issue of Russia and it’s starting to bleed into other areas. Sigh:
When they take the microphones behind a DJ booth at the New York Young Republican Club party, Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan have a less-than-captive audience. The event’s headliner, longtime Republican operative Roger Stone, has just finished speaking and is on his way to the bar to make martinis, setting off a small stampede of young conservatives.
Nekrasova and Khachiyan, co-hosts of the podcast Red Scare, address the remaining crowd.
“Hey, we’re all Republicans here,” Nekrasova says. “I’m a Democrat now,” Khachiyan deadpans. “Yeah, we’re actually Democrats.” “After tonight, I changed my mind. I am registering as a Democrat. It’s over for you hoes, I am slamming that button for Joe Brandon.”
Have the hosts of Red Scare—once a left-ish podcast that backed Bernie Sanders—become Republicans or is this just another ironic stunt that happens to benefit the right? The distinction is barely worth parsing anymore. They’re here on a Friday night as “special guests” at a $140-a-ticket party for a Republican club whose leaders are eager to recruit from a larger pool than the shallow puddle of young conservatives in this liberal city.
“I’m here for the Red Scare girls,” says one man who earnestly describes his politics to me as “far right.”
Khachiyan suggests the event is at least a partial letdown. “There’s no young people here,” she tells me. “They lied to us. They said it was young Republicans.” She’s mostly right. Aside from a couple of baby-faced Brooks Brothers types struggling with cigars, most of the under-30 set here is from the downtown Manhattan art scene, where Republican investors like Peter Thiel have poured money into efforts to astroturf a cool-kids conservatism.
But Khachiyan and Nekrasova otherwise decline to comment on the evening’s commingling of conservative hedge funders and self-proclaimed socialists. That duty falls to NYYRC leaders who are all too happy to proclaim the party as a sign of the future.
Vish Burra, the NYYRC’s executive secretary who also works as Rep. George Santos’ director of operations, describes the gathering to me as “the horseshoe party,” a reference to the theory that people on the right and left ends of the political spectrum end up curving back toward each other. “The populist left, at least the ones who haven’t lost their minds, and the new right are finding places to work together, especially now that the Republicans are in charge, at least on the congressional level.”
Burra’s pre-Santos efforts to land a young New York Republican in office involve managing an unsuccessful campaign for Joseph “Joey Salads” Saladino, a right-wing YouTuber best known for videos in which he dressed as a Nazi or pissed in his own mouth.
NYYRC president Gavin Wax nods at an effort to cast the GOP as edgy, alternative. “I think there’s a lot of currents on the right that are more transgressive and counter-culture than people want to admit,” he tells me.
Some of those efforts come meticulously planned and lavishly financed. The likes of Thiel and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have spent big on experimental downtown film festivals, literary magazines, and cryptocurrency-forward social media platforms, all tailored to attract an overlapping sliver of disaffected post-leftists and academic conservatives who, a few years and rebrands ago, would have called themselves “neo-reactionaries” or “Dark Enlightenment” thinkers.
They’re wise to distance themselves from the boomer aesthetics of the mainstream Republican Party, although the event’s DJs, with current-event gimmick names like “Chinese Spy Balloon” and “Non-Non-Binary,” can’t seem to shake the smell of a Fox News comedy panel. The GOP remains deeply unpopular with young people, who are more likely than older generations to favor LGBT rights, action on climate change, free college, and universal health care—not exactly popular planks in the Republican platform.
A flier for the party, at the Little Italy bar Gigi’s of Mulberry, gives its top billing to Stone but prominently advertises Red Scare and the event’s multiple art-scene hosts and DJs. Most of that set tells me they’re at this Republican event in a non-political capacity.
One of the DJs from the Chinese Spy Balloon collective says he’s been to a couple Young Republican events but isn’t a Republican. “I don’t have a stake in this because I’m not conservative,” he tells me, expressing gratitude that this isn’t an event with PowerPoint slides.
“Me DJing here is not like—I’m not on the dollar to do that, so it’s not something I’m doing on behalf of the conservative club. It’s just more so simply having fun.”
I understand the impulse to be transgressive, especially when you’re young. But there are limits…