Later, I asked Allen why all the debaters, and most of the attendees, were men. “I think guys like to debate more than girls,” he said. “They like the structure.” He went on, “The girls are here for more aesthetic reasons—they’re with a guy, they’re interested in the spectacle, they want to dress up.” He pointed out notable people in attendance: Dasha Nekrasova, an actress and a co-host of the “Red Scare” podcast. A lawyer who had recently got a job in the Justice Department. A guy who worked at Palantir, the software company co-founded by Peter Thiel.
Every other month or so, the James Duane Society convenes for a toasting session, where the members sometimes sing tunes from a custom songbook. The titles range from “America the Beautiful” to the apartheid-era South African national anthem. There are also satirical original songs, composed by the society’s members. Take “Trump Rest You Merry, Patriots,” set to the tune of the Christmas carol:
Allen told me that these songs are written as part of the debates, and that the authors may not actually agree with the lyrics. This particular song was submitted for “Resolved: The Mob Should Rule.” (The resolution failed.)
During the history-versus-myth debate, participants effortlessly toggled between provocative jokes and earnest argument. One speaker contended that myths are more useful than history, and that they define our politics. He gave the example of fire trucks spraying Black children with water during civil-rights protests—at which people laughed and stomped. Jokes were made about women and all academics being “stupid and gay or whatever.” At one point, an attendee in the back started shouting, “JEW! JEW! JEW!” (Another member told me this may have been a reference to an Alex Jones meme.) A speaker was chastised for not wearing a tie and was offered a loaner: what Allen referred to as the “autism tie,” decorated with brightly colored puzzle pieces that are used as a symbol by the autism community. Allen described the group’s taste for provocation as a meaningful exercise in trust-building: “Prove you’re not a cop. Do this line of cocaine.” It was meta-satire, he said—a knowing performance of lib-trolling among friends, which allowed them to have more authentic conversations. Matt Gasda, the playwright, formed a different impression after visiting a few times: people there weren’t “just testing the system of Sovereign House—whether it’s free-speech absolutist, whatever. They’re also testing to see if people will like them even if their weird, dark impulses come out.”
One of Allen’s goals, in taking a bunch of people from the internet and encouraging them to foster an in-person community, was to transcend the grievance culture that’s so pervasive on social media—the outrage and mockery directed toward the left. Still, outlandish offensiveness was the local dialect, even in real life. “There’s a highly combustible, cathartic, and reactionary energy that has been bubbling up in young people over the last few years,” Elena Velez, the fashion designer, told me. “I’d go as far as calling Sovereign House the epicenter of that exhaust valve.”
The simplest way to visualize the generational shift in American politics is through voting patterns. In 2020, fifty-six per cent of men aged eighteen to twenty-nine voted for Joe Biden, according to an analysis by a Tufts University research center. In 2024, fifty-six per cent of men in this age group voted for Trump. Young women favored Kamala Harris, but they also moved right, by eight percentage points.
Sovereign House captures and complicates this trend. Some of the cohort are, “like, Zoomers for Trump,” Allen told me. (Born in 1992, he’s technically a millennial, but he told me that he has a “Gen Z soul.”) However, Allen also described voting as “a meme” that co-opts people into preëxisting political identities, and he did not vote in the 2024 election. “We love the fact that we have this strongman who makes us laugh,” he said. “But we understand the bit, and we’re not going to be sucked into this.”
