The new New Right. Credit: Mark Peterson
Content warning: offensive language
In the January 27th, 2025 issue of New York Magazine, Brock Colyar describes their personal experience navigating the right-wing influencer parties held between the 2024 election and the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Their feature, provocatively titled “The Cruel Kids Table”, is nothing short of fascinating, most of all for its insight into the other side of some of the most abjectly miserable and horrifying few months of my life.
I have thought about this article almost every week for the past nine months. There’s almost too much to think about. Colyar’s witty writing (“Many are hot enough to be extras in the upcoming American Psycho remake.”). The eerie, 1980s-esque glamour of Mark Peterson’s cover photograph. The ongoing erosion of whatever semblance of democracy, critical thinking and media independence we had in this nation. But this is all almost trivial against the bones of what these influencers believe:
This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity (…) Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a VIP section “like a little Mexican.”
(…) “Six months into Biden being president, I was like, I can’t fucking do this anymore,” says a 19-year-old New Yorker who once quite literally had blue hair and attends Marymount Manhattan, which he describes as “75 percent women and 23 percent t——s.”
(…) Later, a former Bernie supporter (who looked like the most Bernie-supporting person one could imagine with long, curly hair and a plaid shirt) told me the same: He wanted the freedom to say “f—-t” and “r—-ded.”
These are all excerpts from a single paragraph in the article. I can’t imagine how many times over the duration of this research phase that Colyar heard phrases like these, and I don’t believe it to be a stretch of the imagination that they had heard more unsuitable for publication.
Maybe I’m just a politically correct, bleeding heart, easily offended, neurotic, identity-politics obsessed snowflake / social justice warrior / friend that’s too woke. Make no mistake: I am, but I also think it’s frankly absurd that someone’s politics should be rooted in something as silly as making jokes about Mexican people. It would be around as inane as people voting to kill the country because gas prices are ten cents higher under the current guy. Of course, it would be silly to claim that these issues are one and the same. It would be almost as silly as, say, believing that every political issue exists in isolation rather than as part of a system, constantly interacting with one another.
We live in the most prosperous nation that has ever existed throughout organized human society (for now). Our convenience is everywhere, from the convenience of throwing around epithets for a modicum of social mobility to the convenience of ordering an underpaid taxicab for our takeout hamburgers. Our convenience is everywhere, because like politics, convenience does not exist in a vacuum; our selfishness begins at the expense of another. Am I being unreasonable in arguing that the same, base emotions connect liking an Instagram reel with the r-slur1 and filming a 17-year-old Chipotle worker to get an extra scoop of beef?