\n<\/p>\n
\u201cLook.\u201d I elbowed James, a Hill comms guy I\u2019d just met in line. \u201cIt\u2019s Taylor Lorenz, the founder of, uh, User Magazine.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGood lord,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
At 7:57 she scurried up the sidewalk, chin down and shoulders turned in, wearing a surgical mask that was slightly too big \u2014 it stretched from the bridge of the nose to the chin, obscuring everything but her wide-set eyes. Two crowd-control lanes had been set up out front, and all us proles were squeezed into one of them. The other was empty, presumably reserved for big celebrities like Lorenz.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey, Taylor!\u201d I said, loud enough that she had to acknowledge it.<\/p>\n
\u201cHeeeyyy.\u201d She didn\u2019t quite stop. \u201cWhat\u2019s going on, guys?\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cguys\u201d in question were James, me, and a cluster of boomer couples who paused their conversation long enough to look at her, register nothing, and resume it. I considered asking some obnoxious question about her age (Lorenz is famously secretive about the exact birth year) and decided against it. I was worried she\u2019d denounce me as a troll, at which point I\u2019d be frog-marched off the premises of this third and most extravagant New Media Party, promoted by Substack as the founding event of a new American press.<\/p>\n
What had been advertised, in the run-up to the night, was a celebrity gathering. Looksmaxxing icon Clavicular was supposed to attend and didn\u2019t. Quentin Tarantino was supposed to attend and didn\u2019t. Gavin Newsom was supposed to attend and didn\u2019t. What did attend was a couple hundred people who write newsletters for a living, a handful of former CNN anchors, a Miami Herald reporter who covers Jeffrey Epstein, and David \u201cFluoride Stare\u201d Pakman. By any measure, this was a less impressive room than the one I\u2019d been promised. It was also, almost certainly, a more honest one. Every previous new intellectual class \u2014 the New York Intellectuals arguing about Trotsky in a City College cafeteria in 1937, the soixante-huitards <\/i>throwing cobblestones at French police in 1968 \u2014 has looked, at the moment of its emergence, like a cheap imitation of the elite it was about to replace. If the Renwick was any indication, the next American intelligentsia was going to look like Jim Acosta threatening to fight Michael Tracey on the floor of a federal museum. Which is, I came to suspect, a more accurate sample of the future than anything happening at the Hilton.<\/p>\n
I went through the metal detectors at 8 p.m. sharp. A red-carpeted staircase climbed two stories under a vaulted ceiling, and through the arch at the top of it, I could just barely hear a party. The Grand Salon at this hour held maybe fifty people, all sober, all standing in the unsettled clusters peculiar to early arrivals. I needed a drink immediately. The bartender, an African migrant whose grasp of English was tenuous, took my order for a double tequila soda and reached for a bottle of Tito\u2019s. I corrected him.<\/p>\n
\u201cAhahaha! Sounds just the same, eh?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cUh, yeah. I guess so,\u201d I said, and chuckled politely.<\/p>\n
He set down the Tito\u2019s, surveyed his station, and reached for a bottle of Absolut. I corrected him a second time. He started over. He worked at a pace that, by the third round, I came to understand was less a function of skill than of an entire continent\u2019s relationship to time, and possibly to the postcolonial project as a whole.<\/p>\n
By the time the drink was in my hand, the room behind me had quadrupled. It operated on a geometry I recognized from every other DC event I\u2019d been to \u2014 cliques of three and four, each one a closed circuit that opened occasionally to admit someone, then sealed shut behind them. The conversations all had the same posture: people facing each other but looking past each other, scanning for the next conversation while performing the present one. I didn\u2019t know who any of them were yet, but I knew what they were. They were people, by and large, who had figured out that you could leave a real publication, take your Twitter following with you, and charge five dollars a month for what you used to give away for free. Some of them were making more money than they\u2019d ever made. Most were only pretending to.<\/p>\n
The first person I spoke to was David Pakman. I found James, the comms guy from outside, deep in conversation with him near the bar, and inserted myself. The subject was Virginia congressional redistricting, on which Pakman had strong views. He was small and quick and never quite still \u2014 he held forth on the redistricting question while alighting on James\u2019s words for a beat at a time then shifting to whatever conversation was happening around him, the way a lemur tracks movement. When he had exhausted the redistricting subject I mentioned I was writing a piece for the Daily Wire.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh. How is the Daily Wire lately?\u201d he said. There was an accusation in the cadence, like he\u2019d recently read something disqualifying about the place and assumed I had too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I said. \u201cI don\u2019t work there. I\u2019m a freelancer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOK. Well. I\u2019m going to go mingle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he was gone. I didn\u2019t see him for the rest of the night.<\/p>\n
Michael Tracey was easy to find. He was the loudest person in his vicinity, and his vicinity contained two young men in suits who, in the course of about thirty seconds of eavesdropping, identified themselves as Oxford PPE graduates working somewhere or other. I had only ever seen Tracey in his X profile picture, the sort of stylized cartoon avatar a man commissions of himself on Fiverr when he wants to be perceived as a serious thinker \u2014 bearded, bespectacled, knuckles to chin. In person he was sweaty, faintly purple, and topped with the kind of hair a bald man might acquire by rubbing glue on his scalp and rolling around on a barber shop floor. He was already belligerent when I joined the conversation. The subject was Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who has spent the better part of a decade documenting the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s a cunt,\u201d Tracey said, \u201cand I don\u2019t use that word lightly.\u201d<\/p>\n
I said that on the contrary I considered her a beautiful angel and one of the most important journalists of our time. The British guys found this funnier than Tracey did. Tracey did not look at me; he continued his train of thought as though I hadn\u2019t spoken, which was probably the most impressive thing he did all night.<\/p>\n
Substack had advertised the party as \u201can ideologically diverse mix.\u201d This was technically accurate but beside the point. What Tracey and Pakman and the several hundred others sipping cutely named cocktails \u2014 one was called \u201cThe Hot Take\u201d \u2014 had in common was not a politics or a sensibility but an enemy. Every person in the room had built an audience on the conviction that the institutions producing the news a mile and a half north, at the Hilton, where the actual White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner was getting underway, were no longer fit to do so. The two routes were both in the room. Acosta had been pushed out of CNN. Tracey had been on the outside throwing rocks at it for fifteen years. And now they were both under the forty-foot ceiling of the Grand Salon, drinking all night from the same open bar.<\/p>\n
A little after 8:30 the music stopped. A man I didn\u2019t recognize was standing at the DJ booth, behind a Marlboro-styled Substack logo, asking for everyone\u2019s attention. There had been an incident, he said. The Renwick was closing its doors as a precaution, which meant that nobody inside would be permitted to leave. Since we were all already here, he added, we were going to keep the party going, and somebody would let us know when it was safe to step out. He thanked us for our patience and the DJ resumed.<\/p>\n
He wasn\u2019t telling most of the room anything new. For some minutes before he spoke, the news had been spreading unevenly through the Salon. A handful of people had drifted into the side galleries \u2014 past the butter cow in its refrigerated case, past a stack of jars called Mount Zeitler \u2014 and were pacing on phone calls, faces troubled. For others, the announcement was the first they\u2019d heard of it. Nobody left, because nobody could. The complaint I heard most often in the hour that followed was not about the shooting itself but about Tarantino and Newsom: multiple people informed me, with apparent disappointment, that it was why they hadn\u2019t made it to Substack that night.<\/p>\n
While we drank, the Hilton was being evacuated. A man named Cole Allen had charged the security checkpoint outside the ballroom with a 12-gauge shotgun, a .38, and a manifesto he had emailed to his family ten minutes before. The president was being lifted from the dais. The speaker of the House, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the directors of the FBI and HHS were all escorted out in a hurry. The press corps \u2014 the people most of the room at the Renwick had built their careers denouncing \u2014 were diving under their tables in evening dress.<\/p>\n
The Renwick stayed locked for another 90 minutes. None of us could leave. Neither, it turned out, could Julie K. Brown. What happened next, I missed. I had drifted into the side galleries, or to the bathroom, or to whoever I\u2019d been introduced to in line for the bar. Tracey, who at 8:45 had merely been calling Brown a cunt, had by 9:30 graduated to the physical phase of his plan. Allegedly, he cornered her, started screaming, and blocked her when she tried to walk away.<\/p>\n
What I learned the next morning, in pieces, on Twitter, was that several men intervened. Acosta was among them. So was security. Acosta, by his own account and Brown\u2019s confirmation, stood between them and helped escort her away. At which point Acosta turned to Tracey and yelled, \u201cLET\u2019S STEP OUTSIDE.\u201d Tracey accepted, replying, \u201cOK JIM LET\u2019S GO.\u201d Security pulled Tracey out before either of them could leave.<\/p>\n
In any case, they couldn\u2019t have gone anywhere. The Renwick was still sealed. But the gesture had been made, and Tracey, escorted out and free of the lockdown that constrained the rest of us, took it with him. He walked east, arriving sometime after midnight at the Hampton Inn on 6th Street, where he\u2019d been told Acosta was staying. He lurked on the sidewalk. At 1:01 a.m., he posted to X that he still had no idea what had happened with Trump that night. Six minutes later he posted a photograph of the entrance with the caption: Jim, I\u2019m literally waiting for you right now, you piece of shit. <\/i>Acosta did not come downstairs.<\/p>\n
The image of a middle-aged man standing alone outside a Hampton Inn at 1 a.m., posting threats at another middle-aged man on a website neither of them owned, was a degraded image. But it was an old one. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal \u2014 members in good standing of the New York literary establishment that produced both of them \u2014 had spent the \u201870s trying to kill each other at parties. Mailer headbutted Vidal in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show<\/i> in 1971. He threw a drink at him at a Lally Weymouth party in 1977. Mary McCarthy went on television in 1980 to call Lillian Hellman a liar; Hellman sued her for libel; the suit was still unresolved when Hellman died. None of these men or women were friends. Several of them loathed each other, for legitimate reasons.<\/p>\n
Mailer\u2019s grievance with Vidal was that Vidal had compared his writing in print to the work of Charles Manson. McCarthy\u2019s grievance with Hellman was that Hellman had spent decades lying in her memoirs about her Stalinism. They were serious ideological feuds \u2014 about American masculinity, about the responsibility of the intellectual to political truth, about what could and could not be said about the Soviet Union \u2014 that found, in time, a personal form.<\/p>\n
The class that fought through these feuds eventually replaced the older liberal establishment it had grown up wanting to displace. It produced Trilling, Bellow, Sontag, Hardwick. It also produced Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and most of the intellectual scaffolding for the neoconservative project, including a great deal of what came later in the way of American foreign policy. Sometimes it honored its inheritance \u2014 but it often squandered it, too. The record is mixed in a way that should give anyone watching the next emergence pause.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019d watched for three hours at the Renwick was, I believe, an emergent class of the same model. The substrate was different \u2014 Substack rather than the little magazines. The disputes were smaller, pettier. The people were obviously less impressive and more embarrassing. But the resentments were structured the same way. They will probably win, in the sense that previous classes of this type have won. Whether what they produce will be worth what they replace is a question I\u2019m in no position to answer, and neither, on the evidence I\u2019d collected over three hours of standing in the room, were they.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Thomas English<\/p>\n<\/div>\n