LIBBY EMMONS: MAGA meme warriors take a victory lap with the Coronation Ball, celebrating the Trump-inspired cultural ascendancy 

"I think a lot of us share in the impression that our culture has been stuck for a long time, and it's broken in many ways." 

"I think a lot of us share in the impression that our culture has been stuck for a long time, and it's broken in many ways." 

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I wasn't at the DeploraBall in 2016 when the MAGA faithful celebrated the inauguration of the man they memed into the White House. I wasn't there when Antifa militants caused chaos outside. I wasn't even on the Trump train back then. Instead I'd been at the Women's March with the women of my feminist theater collective where Linda Sarsour preached her anti-semitic nonsense to a gullible crowd in knit pink kitty hats and Madonna said something about blowing up the White House. 

I was making experimental stage plays when the meme wars began. So I can't compare back then to this year but Mike Cernovich can—he and Jack Posobiec threw that ball and they were both there this year to celebrate the hard fought win just one night before Donald Trump took office as the 47th President of the United States, only the second president ever to win a second term after ceding the White House to an interim president. 

The Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel was a black tie affair. The press had other ideas about the event, calling them "fascists" or the "far-right," just like they did back in 2017. Cerno was in a tux, Posobiec in his white tux jacket with black lapels. But the host of the evening's festivities was Lomez, aka Jonathan Keeperman of Passage Press, and while the DeploraBall was all about the political ascendance of the populist right, Passage Press, and sponsor Remilia, are making a strong play to take back culture. He spoke about how important it was to address the cultural situation in the US. "I think a lot of us share in the impression that our culture has been stuck for a long time, and it's broken in many ways," he said.




Jack and Tanya Posobiec Photo: Passage Press

"Many in this room will play an active part in the restoration of our country in the coming years," Lomez said, "and we must point ourselves in the direction of realistic goals. There will be arguments, there will be disagreements, and there will be disappointments, but we are in the good timeline."

"In this new environment," he continued, "anything is possible. We must look forward, even as we drop on our path, the conditions are ripe for unprecedented growth and innovation. We are going to the stars, literally, and the stage where an across the board cultural renewal has been set. This is our time for every man and woman in this room, this is your time. There is much work to be done, and it will be a long road that will require patience and prudence and careful execution. It will be good work, but it will be work, and there will be people, enforcers, that will also be working tirelessly to stop us. That work we can save for Tuesday. Tonight we celebrate and cheer for the 47th president."

For the record, Lomez wore a navy blue velvet smoking jacket with a stars and stripes bow tie while his wife wore a luscious Selkie monarch butterfly dress, complete with butterfly embellished heels and butterflies adorning her hair. Fashion designer Elena Velez wore her own silver creation and dressed others at the ball, including Natalie Sauer, wife of Tom Sauer, a veteran who runs rehab center Miramar in southern California. Tanya Tay Posobiec wore a striking silver silhouette from Stephanie Costello. Fun fact, Tanya Tay told me, she met Costello at the DeploraBall and Costello slipped Tanya Tay her card and she said she wanted to dress her.


Jonathan Keeperman, aka Lomez Photo: Passage Press

A custom made gold MAGA necklace adorned Sarah Hunt who wore an Andre Soriano original Gadsden Flag dress. Yellow, strapless, with a black, sequined snake coiling up from hem to bodice, the dress was emblazoned with the words "Don't Tread on Me" around the flounce. Sarah Brady, a Utah mom who was tried by the state for having taken her kids to a playground during Covid, was spotted in DC wearing her own creation—a repurposed wedding gown with a black and white detail of Trump's famous post-assassination attempt moment. Black streaks show the trail of blood, fist raised shows the power of that moment when the man who would have been dead instead stood to reassure the people that he would "fight, fight, fight" to the end.


Photo: Passage Press

In photos, Brady posed before the Capitol with her own costumed militia. Hunt photographed her gown before the People's House as well. Both of these dresses, along with Human Events columnist Vanessa Battaglia who made her own version of a 1930s Lanvin dress that's in the collection at the Met, reminded me of the distinctly "homespun" tradition of American fashion. The labels don't matter, just the ethos. 

During the Revolution, American women eschewed British-made clothes, though those were the highest quality, and began spinning their own yarn, weaving their own fabric, and making their own dresses and gowns. The material was courser, the fashion less sophisticated in nature, but it was authentically American in a way that set up the nationalist culture that has infused that great grey area between political statement and cultural relevance. In the Confederate south during the Civil War, the southern women did the same thing, rather than buy goods from their northern adversaries, where mills were a roaring enterprise. 

The women of the MAGA right have done their own version of homespun and while they're not spinning their own wool into yarn, they are creating fashion from without the fashion industry. During Trump's first term, many designers refused to dress his super model wife Melania. Only Christian Siriano and Italian house Dolce & Gabbana would provide her custom gowns. Hunt, Brady and Battaglia have created outsider fashion in a culture where couture houses think it is within their purview to judge the politics of a woman before dressing her. Others, like Velez and Costello, dress conservative women regardless of any ramifications from that. 

One man who chose not to be named told me about his jacket, a replica of George Washington's, complete with brass buttons, a wide lapel, and that chambray blue that defines so much of the revolutionary color palette of our collective memory. It was made by Denver atelier AJ Machette. Red Scare's Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova wore long, slinky black gowns when they were introduced by War Room's Natalie Winters. Her red body con dress and platform strappy, sparkle heels set off her blond hair as Anna and Dasha joked that they'd been sitting at their table "trying to figure out if those things are real." It was a moment that drew laughs from a crowd that never once uttered an uncomfortable titter. Reactions were honest, sometimes causing a speaker to urge their applause. Steven K. Bannon, former 1st term Trump adviser, War Room host and founder, recently sprung ex-con had been Red Scare's first guest, and they delivered the warm intro, musing as to how many shirts Bannon might be wearing.

Bannon worked with the late Andrew Breitbart, whose missive that politics is downstream from culture has been a driving concept in discourse as to how to win elections and the nation. "You're the vanguard of the revolutionary movement," Bannon said, "a vanguard of a revolutionary movement, and this movement is just at the top of the first inning." He appeared to be wearing at least two shirts.


Steven K. Bannon Photo: Passage Press

Remilia's LB Dobis delivered striking remarks on the state of the arts, and by arts, he meant net art. Like any industry, art is one in which disruption is progress and net art, which has its beginnings back in the 1990s when the only acceptable form of new art was the kind that plugged in or was only visible on screens is a disruption in the concept of what art is. For those of us steeped in 20th century notions of artistic enterprise, net art can be disorienting. It's authorless, or driven by anon accounts, it's memefied, it builds on itself, it is a perpetual series of inside jokes where consumers can track back to the beginning and still feel like they're missing something essential. The essential is the ephemera, the layers of concepts, influences, and references. 

"As artists, our ethos is rooted in the American ideal of absolute artistic freedom" Dobis, pseudonym, said. "The conviction that the artist must be free to transgress boundaries, to experiment radically, to harness technology to its fullest potential, because only when left unshackled can art become a vehicle for transcendence. In concert with this commitment to radical freedom, we also reject nihilism in favor of embrace of meaning in the pursuit of divine truth." This is what art always was and should be. The forms Remilia are engaging in are new forms. "All the forms are known," Neil Cassidy once said on the William F. Buckley show alongside Jack Kerouac, hippie-era Allen Ginsburg in the audience. But what Remilia is proposing and engaging in are new forms. The abstractionists played with the edge of the canvas, but net artists play with the edges of reality.

"We are techno optimists," Dobis said. "We're also accelerationist and futurist. We come from a new cultural underground, those extremely online communities where anonymity and pseudonymity offered creative refuge for free artists during a decade marked by creative repression, cultural stagnation and fear of exile under the left hegemony for the last four years." Indeed, this new form is art for the digital natives. It doesn't surround you in the physical realm, but in the digital one. And in undertaking this effort, it was necessary to conform to the limitations. How to do that? Stay anon and create without the boundaries of self and identity. It is an anti-identitarian art form and the layers upon layers would be enough to make Jean Dubuffet jealous.

It wasn't just the fashionistas that were left out during the suppressive, oppressive regime of not only the Biden administration but the woke, politically correct culture that preceded his White House win, but artists, authors, people who eschew the bullsh*t term "content creator." 

"Over the last few years, we saw young artists aligning with our defiance of censorship more and more. The attitude was: we know you're canceled and we don't care. We want to be canceled too. This quickly grew into a whole movement of post-canceled artists, because for an artist operating in the latter stages of the left's sensorial regime being canceled was the right to be free, a badge deliberation, and by refusing to play by the rules of their world, it opened opportunities for us to build our own by rejecting the institutions that placed restrictions on artistic freedom. We could lay the groundwork for new ones. Remilia became a shield and platform for many of the best artists of our generation who were forced to outsider status after years of resistance, we're finally seeing the cultural pendulum swing back into our camp," Dobis said.

The Trump win signals "the post-cancel era," he went on, and it's true. The leftists can keep canceling each other, but for those who refuse to be canceled, who, when doxed, stand up and say "yeah f*ck you that's me," the threat of cancelation is meaningless. Instead, the artists, the cultural heralds operating in the anon spaces, prefer to lead private lives while speaking out like Publius for the betterment of the nation, for the furtherance of creation, for the sheer fun of it.

The movement that spawned the DeploraBall was entirely online. When everyone showed up in real life, many were meeting in person, showing their faces to one another, for the first time. Indeed, Dobis remarked that many of Remilia's benefactors, and likely those of Lomez's Passage Press as well, were in the room, unknown to one another by real name, by face not avatar. That meme movement that propelled Trump into the White House the first time around has only become stronger the second time around and it began with a nameless, faceless cultural takeover of online spaces, a transformation of the internet back to the thing by 1990s fractal-making speed freak autistic tech friends wanted it to be—a place where controls are not top down but bottom up, where the people are in charge, where freedom is boundless. "The canceled," he said, quoting a 2023 essay from Charlotte Fang, "will inherit the Earth."

And here we are. Trump was canceled and he has ascended to the throne of global power. The memesters and net artists do not reveal their public names but their authorship of the movement has transformed the political and cultural landscape. And for myself, now having attended the Coronation Ball when only 8 years ago I was ensconced with the p*ssy hat-wearers on the National Mall, then canceled over trans just one year later, now serving as a writer of right-wing cultural influence, I can attest to that fact. My guess is that next time, anyone will be able to buy a Gadsden Flag dress off the rack and we'll all be able to go out into the world with the face of our own avatars.


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