It has nothing to do with the event itself.
As far as I can tell, there wasn’t much interest in our community in the Deploraball before Mike Cernovich generated a public controversy by banning Baked Alaska. To be sure, there were people who were going to that event, but otherwise no one really cared much about it. I hadn’t thought or written anything about it.
If Cernovich hadn’t made it an issue, the Deploraball would have likely gone off without a hitch. It is highly unlikely that the Alt-Right would have bothered to show up. Those who were going to DC for the inauguration likely already had other plans. I wouldn’t be writing about it. It wouldn’t have become a source of division. To be honest, the thought of going to the Deploraball never crossed my mind.
I’m thinking and writing about it now because the Deploraball story has become about the Alt-Lite and its boundaries and what changes we can expect to see under a Trump administration. That’s what is really fascinating. Is the line Sieg Heils and Neo-Nazism? Is the line the Jewish Question? Is the line White identity politics? Is the line “race stuff”? Is the line homosexuality or talking about White Genocide?
The burning question of 2017 is how much change our wider community can expect to see under a Trump administration:
“Following this weekend’s social media meltdown over the guest list of the DeploraBall —an inauguration bash celebrating the role a right-wing social media insurgency played in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — a man named Jeff Giesea finds himself in the crosshairs of a livid troll army. It’s an army he helped create.
Giesea, a Washington, DC, entrepreneur and consultant, is one of the minds behind MAGA3X, a meme-happy social media organization that describes itself on Twitter as “a citizen grassroots movement that helped elect Trump” and on its website as “Freedom’s Secret Weapon.” He is also one of the organizers of the DeploraBall, now the site of a dispute threatening to destroy the alt-right — the nascent conservative alliance of hardcore trolls, white supremacists, anti-SJWs, Trumpian nationalists, and memelords — on the eve of its greatest triumph.
“We just had a bad public breakup,” Giesea said.
In short: Last week, Giesea, a startup veteran who has worked for Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers, and his co-organizer, the conservative internet personality Mike Cernovich, decided to remove a third co-organizer, Anthime Gionet (who goes by his Twitter handle, Baked Alaska, and the alias Timothy Treadstone) from the “Featured Guests” section of the DeploraBall’s fact sheet after Gionet posted several anti-Semitic tweets. Since then, prominent Twitter conservatives have been taking sides: in one corner, those who decry the alt-right’s associations with white supremacists and racists, and in the other, those who believe the DeploraBall organizers have abandoned the movement’s commitment to offensive speech and its white nationalist vanguard at the first sign of mainstream acceptance. …”
I just took a look at the Deploraball website.
It caught my eye that Deploraball is hosted by #GaysForTrump. It promises to be “the gayest event in all of DC.” This sounds to me like a follow up party to MILO’s “Gays for Trump” RNC event where he had Geert Wilders speak in front of Lucian Wintrich’s “Twinks for Trump” posters. It’s fair to say Deploraball is a gay party.
So, the inevitable questions arise for the Alt-Lite: you have a problem with Sieg Heils, but are you saying MILO’s behavior is acceptable and within the boundaries of respectability under the Trump administration? What’s your identity? What do you believe? Are you just a pozzed version of mainstream conservatism?
“Yiannopoulos: There are some fringe factions of the alt-right that have demonstrated genuinely racist, anti-Semitic, and prejudiced leanings. They clearly don’t want a Jewish, homosexual, black-d— supremacist as a spokesman. And I don’t want to be associated with them, either. I like the free-speech stuff, the political-correctness stuff. And I believe in and love the populist, nationalist, antiglobalist rebellion happening all over the West.”
Here’s the thorniest question of all: all these pro-Trump constituencies are expecting major change, but is the only change going to be … this?
That would make Peter Thiel, Mike Cernovich and Deploraball happy. A bunch of coastal liberals in Blue States that all voted for Hillary would be happy to see that. It’s not, however, going to go over well elsewhere. This is why Deploraball is so fascinating because it is tackling thorny questions which will be answered in the years ahead.