The Weird Racial Right Plays Dress-Up
The Weird Racial Right Plays Dress-Up
The New Center: A Wednesday Newsletter by Sohrab Ahmari
Most normal New Yorkers settled down with beer and wings to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday night. But the city’s “dissident right” scene converged on an Upper East Side mansion across from Central Park to celebrate Gone With the Wind: as a fashion inspiration, feminist bible, and repository of edgy racial vibes they wouldn’t or couldn’t quite put into words.
At “Salon 001: Tomorrow Is Another Day,” models and e-girls and downtown podcasters abounded (the event was pegged to New York Fashion Week), the dim lighting flattered nearly everyone, and the drinks and apps were downright opulent. Even so, you didn’t have to squint hard to see something not all that different from a fandom convention for people interested in IQ hereditarianism, rather than the Marvel Universe or the Fallout franchise.
The event was the brainchild of Elena Velez, the fashion designer and dress supplier to Beyoncé and Grimes, among other celebs, who keeps one foot at Condé Naste HQ and the other in the subterranean world of Bronze Age Pervert, L0m3z, ZeroHP Lovecraft, and the rest of the weird racial right. Among the latter crowd, she told me in an interview at her Greenpoint studio weeks earlier, Velez finds a rare freedom from the “rampant totalitarian cultural hegemony” that prevails in mainstream fashion. This, even as she frets about “ending up at a Klan meeting: ’Cause that feels like the inevitable conclusion of exploring this scene.”
I suppose a Gone With the Wind costume ball-cum-discussion salon was one way to keep the balance: sure to draw out “this scene,” in a cultural context that’s racially spicy but not quite “Total N---r Death” (the online mantra of the movement).
The official dress code was “Rustic Americana Black Tie.” I vowed never to eat again as I squeezed my heft into my wedding tux, only to sigh with relief when I found lots of other gents donning what could only be described as Magician Chic: purple tails or the kind with silver embroidery sewn into the black, frilly pirate shirts, heavy-metal boots, and hideous amalgams thereof — Rhett Butler wouldn’t be caught dead. The writer Thomas Chatterton Williams hadn’t bothered, looking elegant in a Foucauldian combo of turtleneck and Houndstooth. (When I mentioned the racial views of some of the “anons” in attendance, Williams replied, “Yes, the science really hasn’t come to their side.” Ever the gentle centrist.)
The women were more consistently Antebellum, boasting massive updo wigs and bustle dresses, albeit frequently with a “sexy” twist (in the same sense that dorm girls dress up as slutty cops or nurses for the Sigma Nu Halloween party): dangerously high slits, platform heels, décolletage that would leave the denizens of a 19th-century bordello blushing. Anna Khachiyan, the Bernie Sis-turned-tribune of the e-right and one of the evening’s speakers, archly acknowledged this when discussing Gone With the Wind’s unbeloved madam, Belle Watling, “whom we all look like tonight.”
The formal event began with a brief speech from Velez, who welcomed us to an evening dedicated to “celebrating and scrutinizing a character whose moral complexity and antagonist wiles — she’s a bad bitch — established a poignant, relevant American archetype.” (The ladies whooooped at the “bad bitch” part.) Before ushering us upstairs to the salon portion, Velez thanked her sponsors, including Passage Publishing, the imprint behind Noticing, a compilation of blog posts by Steve Sailer, the “human biodiversity” guru and author of America’s Half-Blood Prince, a book about Barack Obama.
In the ornate drawing room, Khachiyan was joined by the podcaster Jack Mason, aka the Perfume Nationalist (“on my show, I pair historically relevant fragrances with different media”). Cranking the vocal fry to 11, Khachiyan complained about the enervating effects of a long flight from LA, and how her wig was inducing a headache. The tight corset can’t be helping, Mason said, to which Khachiyan replied, “I can’t breathe” (get it?). The room guffawed.
The actual substance was far less provocative. Khachiyan droned on about the significance of fashion in Gone With the Wind, how clothing reflected the social hierarchies of the Southern gentry, and how the threads in the women’s tattered dresses continued to bind them to a now-distant world of luxury amid the deteriorating material conditions wrought by the Civil War. The upshot wasn’t nostalgia for the South, but how Scarlett O’Hara survives social transformation precisely by resisting nostalgia. The North might be wrecking your “civilization” — cough, just as racial egalitarianism is doing to ours — but that just means you gotta hustle harder, #GirlBoss.
This isn’t exactly a revolutionary or even reactionary message, but it is typical for the e-right, which, for all its epithet-slinging ferocity, often boils down to libertarian self-help (hit the gym, slonk raw eggs, gather enough wealth and technological prowess to exit the sickly feminine “longhouse” of democratic egalitarianism). Which raises the question of what exactly Velez, Khachiyan, et al. hope to achieve by coyly tiptoeing around the race stuff, even as they definitely want you to think naughty thoughts about the race stuff.
“Should we talk about hatred of women?” Khachiyan asked as the salon came to a close. “ ’Cause that’s a safe topic that we can talk about. There’s another topic that we’re not allowed to talk about.” A trio of black guests I was sitting next to turned to each other and then to me, one of them whispering, “Does she mean black people?”
When I pressed Khachiyan during Q&A to delve into the topic “we’re not allowed to talk about,” she demurred: “I wouldn’t want to do that. I’m a libtard. I’ve finally earned the right to be a libtard, and I’m going to bask in it.”
One Thing I Noticed
I’ll be closing each issue of this newsletter with one notable under-the-radar development, and one movie I’m watching or book I’m reading. This week’s development comes courtesy of Chinese state television’s “Spring Festival Gala,” at which a magician taught the live audience (and the audience watching at home) a pretty neat card trick. You take four playing cards, cut them in half, and then shuffle them in a variety of patterns: Depending on whether you’re a male or female, where you hail from, etc., you shuffle the cards differently. And yet, when it’s all over, you end up with the same half-pairs that make a complete and correct card. I tried it, and it worked. So did my whole family, including our youngest, who is 4 years old. The magician in question is notably Taiwanese. The secret political message of the routine, according to the Chinese online rumor mill, was that no matter how divided they might appear (as a result of recent elections, say), Taiwan and Mainland China will eventually be reunited.
What I’m Watching
Michael Haneke’s first three films, informally called “The Glaciation Trilogy,” bear all the hallmarks of his later style, above all a brutally clinical approach to the alienation of modern consumer society. The second film, Benny’s Video (1992), is especially prophetic, predicting a world in which people do ever-more outrageous things to please a camera’s gaze.