Roger Stone Makes a Decent Martini

The official location for this party landed in our inboxes just a couple hours ago and we weren’t supposed to tell anyone but of course somebody told someone and so the sidewalk outside this restaurant in Little Italy contains about 10 intrepid protesters enduring the New York City rain to shout at the people going in. They have identical black signs that say something, I can’t remember what, I am busy not making eye contact and navigating towards the entrance.

“Go downstairs and celebrate a cop-killer!” one of them yells as I descend the steps. “You’re supporting dictators and cop killers!”

I present my ticket, which says “Martinis with Roger Stone!” and also my name. I am at a strange moment in my career where my name might be recognized but probably not; if recognized I might be barred but probably let in.

They let me in. “You’re supporting dictators and-”

The door shuts and my life smash-cuts to house music and low lights and men in suits steering me to coat check. The bar is small and oblong and dimly lit and full to bursting with more men in suits, infinite suits shouting and talking and drinking at the open bar, which is where I head as soon as I deposit my coat, because my personal code of honor is that it’s fine to pay for tickets to conservative events if you drink enough alcohol to offset the price, and anyway I am definitely going to need alcohol for this one.

I love parties, and I love conservative parties, and I certainly love adding weird selfies to my collection, but sometimes I get The Fear and I got it hard on the subway heading here. Why am I doing this, exactly, why is this my Friday night: there’s no assignment, I’m not going to cover anything, I’m just going to….what, exactly?

This is a New York Young Republicans event, and as much as that sounds like a high school club for dorks it is in fact New York’s edgiest conservative/nationalist club (though still, arguably, for dorks). A lot of the men in suits are wearing little Hungarian Russian* flag pins, which I’ve written about before. Patriotism and nationalism are compatible things but not the same thing, and this is the beating nationalist heart of the thing struggling to be born.

Ten minutes into this sardine crush of suits and ties I realize there’s a patio out back and I gratefully fight my way through the throng and out to it. It is cold and wet and of course there are no heat lamps but most of it is covered. Cigar smoke hangs heavy in the air and entices me with the irresistable promise of Something To Do With My Hands. The cigars, like the alcohol, are gratis: courtesy of the Patriot Cigar Company. I’d been told their cigars are pretty good and, although MAGA is willing to put up with a lot of bullshit if it’s branded correctly, cigar afficionados tend to have a higher bar and so I have higher hopes. They’re not bad. Very smooth. A light and easy smoke.

I make small talk. When asked I am open about who I am: a journalist, yes, but not here to journalist tonight, just here to hang out. Here’s my card. You won’t like most of what I write. There are only two reactions: people who go cold immediately, and people who find the whole thing amusing. Mostly the first. Sometimes, thankfully, the second.

I am trying to be honest, is the thing: my name on the ticket, my name on the business card. I spent time in Portland a few years ago undercover with the far right and I’m sick of that life. I’ve paid a high price to openly be whatever the hell this is and I guess I feel I’ve earned it. Besides, undercover has a shelf life. When you’re burned, you’re mostly fucked. No more events, no more access, people avoid you like the plague. It’s hard to build a career that way.

Still, the lies creep in. I tell the people I meet that I’m not here to be a journalist, and I really do mean it when I say it. But as I stand there, bored and racked with anxiety while smoke from my giant robber-baron cigar curls towards the sky, one of the event photographers begins to snap pictures of me, this weird redhead in a sea of suits—and here it is: proof of my degeneracy headed straight for the internet, another bill for my freak-show life come due. I blow smoke, I look straight into the camera, and I think, I’d better write something about this. I had better be here for a reason and not just for kicks.

I had better figure out what that reason is.

I am talking to someone about power. Like me, he is a poly-sci graduate. Like me, he considered going into politics and decided not to. Money controls politicians. He’d like to control the money, or at least be involved in channeling it. I decided to tell stories for similar reasons. It’s always nice to meet a fellow pragmatist.

“Power is a very weird construct,” I loudly tell my phone’s recorder hours later as I walk down rain-soaked streets, light reflecting off moon-molten asphalt. “You aren't just powerful, you don't just have a bank you can draw on. No, power comes from relationships and networking and knowledge and secrets and discretion.”

Roger Stone is speaking, so I abandon my half-smoked cigar and make my way back into the crush of the bar. I can’t hear a thing he’s saying, but it’s the legend himself and everyone’s excited. Later, a tall lawyer will tell me Stone said something about January 6th and that Trump is going to win in 2024; the lawyer is extremely friendly until I tell him I’m a journalist and then extremely not.

By this point I am jockeying for position at the long bar where Stone, in suspenders and a striped shirt and tie, is mixing martinis beneath a row of tassled antique hanging lamps. I have in my hand a picture of Stone in the same outfit with a red disco background emblazoned with MARTINI TICKET and the number 2. We were supposed to get our martinis according to group number, but that’s out the window now; it’s first come first served, survival of the fittest.

Someone ahead of me has brought memorabilia—not just Stone’s book but several pictures as well. The power broker takes a break from pouring to sign them, listens earnestly while the man tells him whatever it is fans tell their idols when they meet them, and sends him on his way. I’m next. What is there to say? The guy behind me snaps a photo for me. I thank him and retreat to enjoy my kill by the DJ booth.

I keep getting emails about the Oscars; I gather they’re coming up soon. The most I’ve ever watched of the Oscars was when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock and that was more as a UFC afficionado than anything. Before I was old enough to vote, though, I commandeered the living room television so I could watch every single speech of the 2004 Republican National Convention. I’m a true sicko, hair full of cigar smoke drinking a martini poured by the most pure-blooded degenerate of them all; a man so dedicated to the fandom that he has a Richard Nixon backpiece, a man so in love with power that he’s jockeyed at the margins for 50 goddamn years and seems energetic enough to do it for half a century more.

“You want to be able to change the world, but in order to do that you have to get your sticky little fingers all inside the world,” I shout into my phone at 1:00 AM and this is why I have to live in NYC forever: no one even glances in my direction. It’s pouring. “You can't be pure, you have to become filthy. That's how it works. That's why the online left will never change anything. They're so obsessed with purity that they can't actually make connections with the world to change it.”

Red Scare is here as a special guest: a podcast by two women whose names I can never remember and refuse to look up. I’ve never listened to their show, not my thing—wrong kind of dirtbag, I guess—but increasingly it seems like I probably should, if only so I can describe them at times like this. Post-left? Emphasis on “post,” clearly: it’s not at all surprising to see them here. They say something about how much fun it is to hang out with Republicans, there’s some cheering, and then they crank the EDM and hang out behind the DJ table by the coat check.

“Make too many connections with the world and you become embroiled in its filth and you can't do anything, you become part of it,” I tell my phone. “How do you hold yourself apart enough to maintain yourself while also not becoming so aloof in your ivory tower that you are unable to have any kind of impact on the real world?”

This is the counterculture, baby: you don’t have to like it, but it’s true. This room is the last taboo, with its Hungarian Russian* flag pins and Trump fandom and exhortations on the virtues of nationalism: ideas purportedly so dangerous they once were banned from Twitter. What self-respecting adrenaline junkie edgelord could resist the temptation of wandering into this den of debauchery and snapping a photo or two?

The music is good but no one is dancing. Someone asks me if this is my first event. It’s his twelfth. They aren’t usually like this, he says. My martini glass is empty and there’s no chance of another one; the throng clusters, Stone keeps pouring.

Five minutes later the music stops and one of the organizers clears the space in front of the DJ table. I’m at the front, ready for this latest spectacle.

“Put your hands together for the Russia and Ukraine Burlesque Dancers!”

Laughter and clapping. “Peace! Peace! Peace!” someone shouts, and then the music starts.

Ukraine is wearing a bad blonde wig, heavy makeup, a white dress with blue flowers, and yellow thigh-highs. Russia has brunette scene-kid hair with red streaks. She wears a tight white dress with the Russian star over her chest. Both are wearing jackets.

As the DJ begins to play—what else?—Brahams’ Hungarian Dance No.5, the burlesque performance begins. The girls lock arms and dance. They do a sort of Jack-Rabbit-Slim’s twist step away from each other. It is, shall we say, unrehearsed.

As the Brahams hits the midpoint adagio, Russia begins to stretch menacingly as Ukraine prances back and forth within the tight ring of besuited onlookers and looks over her shoulder at Russia in kabuki fear. When the music picks up, Russia snatches Ukraine’s jacket off, fully revealing the not-terribly-revealing blue dress. There is a mock slap fight. More locked-arm dancing. The crowd is hooting and hollering. A woman in a glamorous turquoise dress and sequined gloves carries two water jugs hung from a dowel, urging people to tip to find out which side wins the war. Not many people tip. If they announce a winner, it’s long after I’m gone.

The girls take a bow and exit, fully clothed, stage left, and the house music starts up again and the suits get back to doing suit things and I am struck, suddenly, by how empty it all is. How could there possibly be a good burlesque show in this party of prudery? How could any of these suits really cut loose and dance to EDM?

This is the counterculture, and it kind of sucks.

“Why am I doing this?” I furiously ask my phone and myself as I walk. “What is my fucking end goal here, what am I trying to accomplish, what am I trying to prove, hurting myself like this on weekends, going out night after night, obsessing about this shit when there’s nothing, nothing to be done?” The rain pours down. What else is there on offer? All the libs can promise me is the 90s, endless 90s, the decade of mass incarceration and ennui—where everything’s fine and nothing’s good. At its best, American liberalism is emptiness. I’m sick to death of it.

The new right promises something else, decked out in shards of glass and reveling in content warnings: edgelord promises of something new and dangerous and violent. But there’s nothing behind it either, not even for the winners. What could be more empty than a return to a past that never existed?

It feels low to focus on these things, when people are openly calling for the eradication of “transgenderism” and painting people I love as pedophilic mutilation fetishists, when the Hungary* of the flag pins has actively censored the press and when the American right increasingly denounces the media as not merely in league with communism but as the enemy itself. When evangelical Christianity moves to take the seven mountains and works to make mifepristone illegal. When bookshelves in Florida schools are emptying and activists are getting slapped with domestic terrorism charges in Atlanta for opposing the construction of a compound designed to train police on how to quell urban uprising.

But the Internet is big, and there is room for many things. Tonight I am talking about what’s on offer for the winners: tradwife burlesque, apparently, and an escape from the office, investment bankers and hedge fund managers and lawyers and American Psycho freaks all feeling edgy and cool in a Little Italy basement hoping some of that Roger Stone magic makes its way into the martinis and infuses our gray lives with a little bit of color. I have made it to The Good Room in Brooklyn, I am paying my $20 cover, I am washed clean by the fog and disco lights and dancing, the music is loud and if I keep drinking maybe it will be loud enough to drown out my own thoughts for a little while, some fucking break from the yammering inside my own skull, this trapped-beast feeling of living in a dying world, trying to find something, anything, that promises something more and means it.

*A NYYRC representative has reached out to let me know the flag pins were Russian, not Hungarian. This slightly-colorblind author regrets the error