Burnout Poets of the New Regime

Election night 2024

Election night at Sovereign House—where else to be but here? If this newsletter adds up to anything, it’s that. The countless nights of aimless wandering through carnivals of hipster disillusionment. Flappers danced on tables and beatniks smoked hash and white supremacy became chic in New York City. It’s all parties and vapid bullshit and then finally History shows up, “we’re not finished with you all quite yet.” Oh, have the dark forces of Reaction been lurking this whole time? Now we’re at the moment of decision. If the New Right fascists return to power at least we get a charming little feuilleton piece out of it. You know, it’s the little pleasures…

But what is there even left for me to say? I mean, without reducing myself to cliché. I could talk about the crowd of fratty, slightly-alternative crypto bro types gathered here, lined up around the block. I could talk about how they’re connected to Remilia Corporation, the DAO behind the neo-chibi Milady Maker NFTs that were semi-fashionable for a hot second in the scene two years ago. I could talk about the Remilia’s lore and all the esoteric anorexia discord incel grooming cult scandal shit that caused a big falling out in the New York alt-crypto world, and how it led to the $EGIRL crew taking over and throwing the parties. I could talk about how the bouncers are only letting the girls in because it’s a sausage fest inside. I could talk about the open bar running out of alcohol and McDonald’s catering set up to evoke that famous image of Trump hosting the Clemson University football team from 2019, with Big Macs and McNuggets and French fries laid out on silver platters. I could talk about the poster with the Milady NFT face under crosshairs and some pseudo-esoteric scribble and the message “There is no government. I love you.” I could talk about Bronze Age Shawty. I could talk about the vaguely psychedelic variant of the Amerikan flag with the smiley-face Remilia logo in the blue field at the center of a sea of stars encircling it. I could talk about the books on display that seems to switch up slightly every time I’m at Sovereign House, and today’s rather typical selection of Nietzsche, Houellebecq, issues of American Affairs and The New Criterion, and so on. I could talk about Polymarket—the Thiel-backed prediction market where users can bet on elections and the like—sponsoring the event, and how they have the Polymarket odds superimposed over the major news network election coverage. I could talk about the casual confidence of the crowd and what everyone is wearing and how the erstwhile unwritten ban on MAGA hats at Sovereign House has been lifted. I could talk about the millions of dollars this crowd of scamcoin holders could collectively make if Trump wins tonight. I could talk about how everyone seems to have expected someone else to bring the cocaine.

The feast. Photo by Nick Dove.

But those things are inessential. And they’re not even the things I really “see.” When someone pulls up to a party, they scan the place for familiar faces. And so what I see is the cast of a telenovela that exists in my head. A quick preview of one of its ongoing storylines:

So there’s Keegan aka Grift Shop, the $EGIRL whale and merch peddler, who closed out his affair with Cassidy soon after the Hegelian E-Girl party. And there’s Cassidy, who then started seeing this other guy Billy Pedlow, a poet and filmmaker who made a movie about how he was accused of sexual assault (that’s another story). And then there’s Adrian, who dated Cassidy before all the drama around the Hegelian E-Girl party went down, and he’s pulled up with Maxine, who he started seeing recently. And there’s also their history, which hasn’t gone in the Substack yet. A year ago, when Cassidy was still dating Adrian, Maxine was dating Nick Dove, a seven-foot-tall “poet-photographer” who used to live a vagabond life in Russia and China working for an upstart “crypto-adjacent think tank” before returning to America after the start of the Ukraine War and falling in with the downtown reactionaries, who are of course always in need of more poets and photographers (Nick’s photos are used in this piece). All four of these degenerates lived together in Maxine’s Upper West Side studio apartment, none of them had jobs, all of them got high off the Thin White Duke rockstar image they had of themselves, the couples would be fucking simultaneously in this upstairs/downstairs bunkbed type thing they had set up, they’d be doing lines of coke at 1 in the afternoon, Curtis Yarvin stayed there on New Year’s, and after that came the big hangover. Eventually Maxine and Cassidy became rivals. Maxine is a child of the uptown cultural elite who had Norman Mailer attend her 5^th birthday party, Cassidy is a downtown middle-class upstart from the provinces, Maxine makes Adult-Swim-esque short films that premiere at Sovereign House, Cassidy writes Anaïs Nin pastiche erotica that she reads at Sovereign House, Maxine is aloof to all the weird reactionary online shit, Cassidy is somewhat more plugged in, Maxine is a dominatrix, Cassidy is a sub, Maxine thinks Cassidy steals her ideas, Cassidy thinks Maxine is crazy, and so on. Anyway, these are all people I see right when I walk into this party. Adrian and Maxine exacting revenge on their common enemy by exploring each other’s bodies. Dove feeling some type of way about his homie hooking up with his ex, even though he was the one to break things off. Cassidy not giving a shit because she’s too busy cuckolding the next guy. The farcical vortex of their delusions.

I am a human movie camera and I focus my lens on the psychodrama of the exhibitionist bohemian sluts. They strike their poses against this background, this Lower East Side basement among the crypto bros and pickme waifs, mingling with the oligarchs and their buttoned-up agents in the shadows, this stage that embodies the rise of the New Right, the neofascist ascendency in America, collective psychosis, self-obsession, ignorance, philistinism, cowardice, vanity, hate, death, a vista to the end of the world…

Maybe you could take the bohemians out of this background. You could pose them in another part of town, another period of New York, you could pose them in Los Angeles or Mexico City. You could drop them all in an estate in Tuscany and watch them sunbathe and drink wine and read Ovid to each other and listen to their grandiose declarations on the nature of Truth and Beauty and maybe it’d be all the same, essentially, I don’t know. I wish I could find out. If I had the studios backing me I would do it. I would travel so many places if I had the studios backing me.

I am the best fascist poet. My internal monologue is the external reality of “the scene.”

I get exhausted after a few brief and unremarkable conversations and I stand in the corner and think about how things would be cooler if I had complete control over the set. Like if I was this megalomaniacal auteur in charge. The books on display would be Mishima, Celine, Pound, Genet, Huysmans, Baudelaire, D.H. Lawrence, Sade. The Nietzsche books can stay but the rest would go. Borges can also stay. Midwit Houellebecq would go, no offense. All the Thielworld parapolitics and self-published dissident right autist slop would go straight to the trash. Sovereign House would be called something completely different, it would evoke illusions, mirages, mirrors. There would be a piano. The dorky people could stay, they could even dress the same for all I care, but the things that come out of their mouths would be completely different. They’d be the cruelest and most cynical things ever spoken. (In spite of, or perhaps because of this cruelty, there would be more women around.) The whole business with magical slurs would be so banal, so beneath them as to be unintelligible. The curious passerby Brooklyn intellectual grad student who reads n+1 and studies epic chungus Marxism at the New School would go inside and hear these utterances, contemplate these utterances, and ultimately leave with a deep gaping wound in their soul, the sort of wound that makes it impossible to believe in “love” or in “solidarity,” the sort of wound that would become gangrenous by morning, and in their fevered death hallucinations they’d come to the horrific realization that there is no other world than this one, the most evil of all possible worlds.

“Crumps, check this out,” the motherless, soyfacing chud tells me, “It’s a penis! In the swamp of the medusae!”

When I came to the city two years ago I had this goofy Godardian fantasy of turning the bohemians woke with Brechtian literary techniques, that Maoism would be a better outlet for their internal creative tensions than fascism, that they could free their minds and their art would follow. Instead of fascist ideas trickling out of the psyop factory, they would be joyous, liberating ones. But I think that was a delusion on my part, though I held it close to my heart. It’s now hard for me to imagine such a thing making any difference at all. Ironically it’s the type of delusion that shows my true kinship—a kinship of the stylized and eroticized cinema vision. You could do it with Godard or you could do it with Riefenstahl. Perhaps that’s why the leftists are correct to be suspicious of me. To them I am more dangerous than the anti-political scenester burnouts, to them I am the ultimate fascist and fraud, and my work must be stopped, or at the very least I must be socially ostracized, I am an icon of decadence and complicity, a malignant narcissistic sociopath engaged in reactionary mystification, a project that amounts to the erasure and extermination of true radical marginalized voices, and no obscenity that these strange little downtown nobodies say could possibly outdo my own sadism. I was always a cop and a cliché. In other words, the image of hell is something that only exists in my head, and I’m forcing it upon the world with my serial writing. Or, that since the essence of fascism is male violence, it’s not actually possible for me to write about fascism in a way that isn’t disingenuous as long as I’m a cis man—the call is coming from inside the house. So this work itself is inevitably an affirmation of fascist violence as long as I’m attached to the illusion of being a man, and this is confirmed by the libidinal investment the fascist scenesters have in it, in its illusions of glamor. It would be best if I simply disappeared and stopped sucking up all the oxygen away from other writers with actual talent and principles. When the leftists tell me to kill myself it wounds me far more than when the rightists do. This is all to say that the work has come at great personal cost, and that these portraits and hallucinations come from a place of solitude and melancholy.

They’re saying that Sovereign House is going to be expanding soon, it’ll be a member’s club with a steep monthly fee, but others are saying that it means 185 East Broadway is going to be closing down.

Remilia agent. Photo by Nick Dove.

Outside in the courtyard I am talking to a young woman who tells me her fiancé works for the Trump campaign and that he’s in Georgia right now working as a “poll integrity observer” or something, making sure that the Dems aren’t stuffing ballots. I ask her if he’s witnessed any fraud and she said not really. I ask her if he was “pilled” on the whole 2020 voter fraud thing or if it’s all just a matter of following orders, and she said that he was convinced at some point, he was caught up in the collective “stop the steal” euphoria, but nothing really came of it, and then he realized maybe there wasn’t really any steal at all. She tells me that she almost doesn’t want Trump to win because it would mean moving to DC, and she likes New York. She tells me that the campaign gave her fiancé and everyone else a form to fill out where they listed their preferred government agencies to work for if Trump won, and he listed the State Department, the CIA, and the Department of Transportation. She isn’t happy about the first two because it would mean traveling more. But he put the Department of Transportation on there to make her happy. Everyone likes trains.

The Communists and the Freikorps guys visiting the same brothels, fucking the same whores.

There are a bunch of journalists here tonight. They’re all here because Sovereign House on election night is supposed to represent something. There’s Magdalene Taylor writing a piece for the legacy magazine GQ. There’s Adlan Jackson writing a piece for the scrappy worker-owned local news outlet Hell Gate, and I’m Adlan’s personal connect to Sovereign House and I get him inside past the line. There’s James Duesterberg writing a piece for Chicago-based literary magazine The Point. And there’s some others, too.

I’m sitting outside with Nick Dove and Max Realityspammer and Swiss Cheese. Collectively we feel like the only people here rooting for Kamala Harris to win. We pass the time waiting for the results to come in. Swiss Cheese is a neoliberal hawk who has a lot of political opinions I strongly disagree with, but his coked-out confidence in “Based Kamala” sweeping all the swing states gives Dove and I some much needed hopium to stave off despair over the inexorable collapse of American democratic institutions. Dove is more of a pessimist. He’s someone who periodically has personal crises of complicity. “I’m leaving the scene and all the insane people in it,” he declares, before sooner or later coming back to the realization that he simply enjoys navigating this disreputable crowd. Dove is a left-liberal, not really a communist or anything, he broadly agrees with the mainline millennial leftist skepticism of Kamala and the Democrats, but he’s convinced Trump would be worse in almost every respect. In the weeks leading up to the election Dove would sometimes be like, “I don’t know guys, I think they’re about to fumble this,” and Swiss Cheese would be like “Wanna bet, bro?” and Dove would be like, “Not really,” and then he'd fold. Personally I relate more to Dove’s instincts, but I’ve been in a weird mental place this entire election cycle where I’ve been consciously repressing the thought of Trump returning to power, as if such magical thinking would foreclose the real-life possibility of it happening. I don’t actually know why I’ve been doing this, it’s the sort of de-radicalizing anti-political thinking that I’m ostensibly “against” as a matter of principle (I’m a communist, for real bro, believe me…), but I’ve also had such personal tumult in the last year that willing myself into liberal lala-land doesn’t sound so bad. I guess it’s just literal pure cope. I even voted. As for Realityspammer, he’s also bullish on Based Kamala but for weird esoteric cybermystical and eschatological reasons that are too complicated for me to bother explaining.

The night drags on and Dove and Realityspammer and Swiss Cheese and I are still just slouching around on the courtyard chairs, not even really talking to each other, just waiting and waiting. We’ve all run out of cigarettes so I’m just compulsively smoking weed, I’ve crossed the threshold where I’m no longer getting any higher but the ambient fog around us just keeps getting thicker, the fog illuminated by the light from the news coverage inside, we’re slouched and silent among the chattering crowd of Trump-optimists around us, I think of that shot in Barry Lyndon when Bullingdon finds Barry passed out in the chair of the gambling den, the fog illuminated by the light from the news coverage inside, we can’t see the news but it illuminates us, the light on Dove cradling his camera, the light on Realityspammer with his head down and eyes closed, Swiss Cheese contemplating his bets in the six swing state parlay, nothing for me to do but smoke more weed, the world is going to be different whenever we leave this place… eventually I decide it’s gotten late enough that it’s finally time to check my phone, see what twitter is saying now that we’re past all the useless exit poll noise, it’s maybe around 10:30. A quick scroll: it’s bad. Left twitter is straight up dooming, Trump is winning everywhere, a generational defeat, a bloodbath, a humiliation, it’s literally over. I tell the other guys this and show them my phone because I’m the only one with cell service. “Damn, yeah,” Dove says, “it’s over,” and everyone returns to silence. It hasn’t sunken in yet with all the pro-Trump people around because they don’t want to jinx it. Everything is slow and muted. Sovereign House isn’t even as lit as we would’ve hoped. There’s not even an orgy to make the night worth it. In fact, the leftist dooming in my phone feels more euphoric than the Trump people; they were right that Kamala would eat shit. Now they get to organize under Trump.

On the bright side, we’ll soon be erecting shimmering temples to the phallus.

Watching the results. Photo by Nick Dove.

I don’t know how much time passes before Duesterberg emerges from the crowd. He gives me a cigarette and says he was somewhere else earlier, but he decided to pull up to Sovereign House once it was clear Trump won. I tell him that I’ve just been posted up here, that I’ve been sitting here in silence mentally adjusting to the new reality, and that I had been cautiously optimistic about the Democrats for irrational personal reasons I can’t explain. He says he knew Trump was going to win all along, but, you know, it still sucks. I tell him to sit down with us. Duesterberg strikes up conversation with Realityspammer, and I can tell he’s going into cameravision, the lens focusing on Max, who is still locked in our collective dissociative trance, no idea he’s being perceived:

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.”

It's a few days later and I’m reading Duesterberg’s piece. I’m annoyed by his sharp, clear prose and perceptive eye. That neurotypical bastard cranked out these 2,000 words in less than two days. And he actually did the journalistic work of going around talking to people rather than just getting high and hiding. He manages to tastefully thread together all the inane meme lore shit that I now just tune out. He notices the quirks of the random party guests that I now mostly write off as nameless extras. He catches the dogwhistles. He elegantly makes everyone look like the morons they are. Hardly any bloat. Crisp sentences. Informative and readable. The damn thing looks like it was even seen by an editor. To top it all off, the guy is even quite handsome, and he gets to do his work without being subject to constant humiliation and emasculation. Blackpilled again…

Back to election night, the courtyard, the eerie glow from inside, now the people are dancing to Kanye and Playboi Carti, I can see them swaying. They’re chanting USA USA. But everything’s still slow, sedated. A profound barred-out slowness. Dollboy is dancing. He tweeted a countdown of the days until his ex would be deported to El Salvador. And I follow his ex, and she tweeted something, perhaps unrelated, about how she supports Trump and wouldn’t mind getting deported herself, it would all be worth it. USA USA USA. Chopped and screwed. Like they don’t know what to do with themselves.

My cybercock picks up a transmission from outer space. Bugman extermination imminent. Kamala twinks trapped in the trumpus room. Based pederast regime. No need for the administrative state; new forms of mind control. Leading scientists find Tao Lin’s faux-naive self-infantilization especially promising. Different methods work for different neurotypes. The genial extrovert: “My politics are simple. T.T.S. Total Trump Sycophant. If Trump told me to transition I would do it.” Erections are already up 12 percent in anticipation of mass arrests and abolition of seed oils. They have to go back. All of them. We’re gonna clean up the streets. A grinning, alien hallucination of Doctor Bardamu/Benway: “Crumps, my friend, we are soldiers, lost and sinking in this mire of filth. I always knew you were a real one. We’re gonna get so much pussy now.”

A week before. Madison Square Garden. Dollboy telling me about how the Trump assassination attempt gave him a new sense of purpose in life. It was the first time he truly saw himself in the man. Around us, a Coney Island freakshow. Lackluster counterprotests. A bodhisattva sitting lotus position on the corner. Sailors on leave grabbing asses. Zigzagging downtown with Dollboy and Dove and Realityspammer to Sovereign House. A poetry reading. Then, after. Dollboy is smooching some girl wearing a little black Colombina mask. She’s not bad looking. Then he takes the mic and he’s singing the Star Spangled Banner, like he’s trying to impress her. Behind him, the stars and stripes, and some other dude goosestepping back and forth and making the roman salute. A little old man who goes to Sovereign House sometimes, a true bystander, I guess just interested in weird local culture shit, who knows, there’s a few random people like that, he's flipping them off, fuck you fascists, he’s trying to snatch the mic to make a statement. The other dudes are like, you’re a faggot, you have AIDS, Trump is going to win. There’s a little slapstick show of them fighting over the mic. Internally, the hardest I’ve cringed in a long time. I am so deeply ashamed. But the old man is righteous, and I clap for him. Dove is next to me for the whole thing. We’re gonna be seeing a lot more of this if Trump wins, he says. This tension. Not just here, but the whole city, the whole country. Or, if there isn’t this tension, then it’s even darker.

Dollboy celebrating. Photo by Nick Dove.