A recent New York magazine cover story profiling a group of young Trump supporters who were partying in the Capital on inauguration night appears to have been willfully manipulated by the magazine’s editors and its author to conceal the racially diverse nature of the group, party attendees tell National Review.
Brock Colyar, a reporter at the outlet who identifies as nonbinary, writes about the “Cruel Kids’ Table” on the cover of the latest edition of the magazine. He offers a reporting dispatch from a place “among the young, confident, and casually cruel Trumpers who, after conquering Washington, have their sights set on America.”
The cover includes a photo from the event, the Power 30 Awards, that depicts only white attendees. Within the story, Colyar describes this “new class of conservatives” by explaining that “almost everyone is white.”
But as party co-host C.J. Pearson has pointed out on social media, the cover photo crops out several black men from the image – and Pearson, who was not even mentioned in the article, is himself black.
Pearson and Raquel Debono of Make America Hot Again, a singles meetup in New York, planned the party to honor the young influencers who helped deliver Trump a win in November.
The event was hosted at Sax in D.C., a nightclub that the New York magazine story describes as “sort of a cheaper Mar-a-Lago.” Among the honorees were Ben Shapiro, Riley Gaines, and TikToker Bryce Hall.
Pearson notes there was a diverse crowd of attendees and performers that included Xaviaer DuRousseau – a black conservative influencer whom the magazine quotes several times — along with rapper Waka Flocka and former Congressman Vernon Jones.
Some of the more than 500 attendees of the party quickly came to the hosts’s defense online:
Paula Scanlan, who first entered the online conservative orbit when she competed on the University of Pennsylvania swim team alongside transgender athlete Leah Thomas, told National Review the party was “quite diverse.”
“I think people want to paint the image that conservatives are not fun, not cool, not diverse, don’t know how to have a good time, and that party showed the exact opposite of that, and I think they’re just having a really hard time accepting that,” said Scanlan, who is Taiwanese American herself and is close friends with Pearson and Debono.
A spokeswoman for New York magazine defended the article, and the cropped photo, in a statement to National Review.
“The magazine’s most recent cover story explores the new class of conservatives taking Washington by storm, through the lens of inauguration weekend. The cover was cropped to the center of a picture that was published in full online, and we believe both the cover and story provide an accurate impression of the weekend,” spokeswoman Lauren Starke said.
But Debono told National Review she found it unusual that Pearson was never mentioned by name in the article and said the cropping on the cover photo was “insane.”
Still, she says all press is good press. “I’m not offended by the article. I think it’s iconic.”
“We all look like characters from Gossip Girl and that front cover image to me is beyond iconic,” she said, adding that Elon Musk and J. D. Vance had both reacted to the piece on X.
She invited the reporter and other journalists to the party to cover it, knowing that the mainstream media would likely not give them a fair shake. Particularly Colyar, who uses they/them pronouns, majored in gender studies in college, and previously interned at the feminist magazine Ms.
In 2022, Colyar dedicated thousands of words to a piece on whether it has been useful to make it a standard to ask others for their pronouns. In that column, Colyar writes about being “a little proud to say that my generation was the one that forced — finally — the entire world, or at least the good-intentioned, progressive part of it that I am fortunate enough to reside in, to acknowledge something many queer people (and feminists and restless square pegs of many varieties) have long sought: freedom from the bright-line tyranny of gender and its accompanying expectations.”
“This all seemed very exciting in the Trump-tainted years,” Colyar adds in the 2022 article, “during which I was a gender-studies major in college, determined, as one is at that age, to find themself and stick it to the toxic Man.”
Debono, for her part, doesn’t regret her decision to invite Colyar to cover the party.
“I think he had to change some of the article because it made us sound too fabulous. But I don’t know at the same time, I’m not sure why everyone is so surprised because I knew that this would be the outcome,” she said.
But it was another party, the All American Inaugural Ball, that caught a harsher lashing from the magazine:
Inexplicably, the room smelled like corn. “Sexual Healing” was playing. “Have you noticed the entire room is white?” an older woman in an updo and a silver sequined gown asked me, though it wasn’t entirely clear whether she thought that was a good thing or a bad thing. The Laken Riley Act was a popular topic of conversation.
Organizers for the All American Inaugural Ball did not immediately respond to a request for comment from National Review.
Still, despite the article’s repeated insistence that the MAGA crowd is homogenous and cruel, several paragraphs in the story give away how diverse the movement has become – as evidenced in November, when Trump made historic gains with black and hispanic voters.
Beyond race, the article acknowledges the diversity of thought, interests, and demographic within the movement. “They are crypto nerds and influencer girlies and recent MAHA converts and gays of all stripes, plus your standard-fare Rogan-listening bros.”
And in fact, Charles Moran, president of the gay Log Cabin Republicans, told New York magazine the group wasn’t throwing it’s own ball this year because, “We’ve been included to the point were we don’t need to have our own tables; we’ve been invited to everybody else’s.”