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The Mean Girls of liberal media

A New York magazine hit-piece on the alleged ‘cruelty’ of Trump supporters has backfired spectacularly.

Jenny Holland

Topics Politics USA

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Since Donald Trump’s inauguration last week, there has been much coping and seething in progressive media outlets, and among the smattering of people who still pay attention to them.

New York magazine really took the biscuit with an article this week entitled, ‘The Cruel Kids’ Table’, illustrated by a cover photo of young revellers at an exclusive Trump inauguration party in Washington, DC. The people in the photo are dressed to the nines in tuxedos and evening gowns, with glowy tanned skin and big smiles. Also, everyone in the picture is white.

The title and the photo together are clearly meant to invoke horrible memories in readers of being stuffed into lockers by the high-school jock because you – a pathetic loser – looked at his pretty, blonde, cheerleader girlfriend. The implication is crystal clear: look at these horrible, white bullies! Look how cruel they are, celebrating this new racist, homophobic regime!

Notably, the article twice references a supposed lack of non-white guests at different pro-Trump parties. However, it has since transpired that the magazine cropped out several black party-goers from the cover photograph. Black Republican CJ Pearson posted on X that he actually hosted the event in the photo. He says that New York magazine ‘intentionally left me out of their story because it would have undermined [its] narrative that MAGA is some racist cult’.

Even more damning, Pearson said that the New York article purposefully neglects to mention some of the party’s high-profile black attendees. Waka Flocka Flame, a black rapper with almost two million followers on X, gets only a fleeting mention. Gervonta Davis, a black professional boxer with eight million Instagram followers, isn’t mentioned at all. These oversights were not simply careless. This is bad faith.

Perhaps the most hilarious part of this story is that, by the end of the article, its author – a they / them from Brooklyn called Brock Colyar – seems to have been won over by the MAGA party-goers to some extent. Reading the article, you can see in real time as the scales fall from his eyes. He goes to a party for young Republicans and finds that ‘they are drinking, smoking, flirting, networking’. Wow. It’s almost like these are just young people, celebrating in ways young people always have done.

Remember how, a few months ago, social media were awash in hysteria about how Trump will open up gay concentration camps? Well, Mx Colyar finds at one party, to his surprise, that ‘it is entirely possible, in this world, to be very gay’. The MAGA youth that Colyar speaks to have no issue with ‘normal gays’, as one young man calls them, and only object to things like pronouns and Pride flags being shoved down their throats.

For the most part, Colyar finds that these kids are normal. They are not backward hillbillies, foaming-at-the-mouth Christian fundamentalists or Wolf of Wall Street types of the liberal imagination. Aryanne Wexler, a conservative social-media star and Colyar’s MAGA contact, informs him: ‘You can be urban, live in a condo, go to Casa Cipriani, and still be normal and vote for Donald Trump.’ Colyar is clearly taken with Wexler. ‘She… called me a “man in lipstick”, though I wasn’t wearing any’, he writes with girlish fascination.

Colyar even remarks at one point that he himself has started to be infected by this new irreverence towards wokeness. He and his friends no longer have ‘any patience for… identity warriors’ and have started to say the ‘r-word’ and tell ‘fat jokes’.

Of course, the they / them journalist still manages to work in an allusion to Hitler, and sneers that another party of older Trump supporters is full of ‘commoners’ and ‘smells like corn’.

Nevertheless, the article is not so much about how ‘cruel’ these MAGA people are, despite the headline. It’s more about a sheltered young man realising that hanging out, smoking and drinking, with people who aren’t afraid to crack off-colour jokes is actually kind of fun. Who knew?

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.

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