I later asked Allen why all the debaters and most of those present were men. “I think guys like to argue more than girls,” he said. “They like structure.” He continued: “Girls are here for more aesthetic reasons – they're with a guy, they're interested in the show, they want to dress up.” He noted the famous people who were present: Dasha Nekrasova, actress and co-host of the Red Scare podcast. A lawyer who recently got a job at the Ministry of Justice. A guy who worked at Palantir, the software company co-founded by Peter Thiel.
About once every two months, the James Duane Society gathers for a toast, at which members sometimes sing tunes from a special songbook. Titles range from “America the Beautiful” to the apartheid-era South African national anthem. There are also satirical original songs composed by members of the society. Take, for example, “Trump Rest You Merry, Patriots,” to the tune of a Christmas carol:
Allen told me that these songs were written as part of a debate and that the writers may not agree with the lyrics. This particular song was featured for “Resolved: The Mob Must Rule”. (The resolution failed.)
During the History vs. Myth debate, participants easily switched between provocative jokes and serious arguments. One speaker said that myths are more useful than history and that they guide our politics. He gave the example of fire trucks dousing black children with water during civil rights protests, which people laughed at and stomped on. There were jokes about women and all scientists being “stupid or gay or something.” At some point, a visitor from behind began shouting: “JEW! JEW! JEW!” (Another attendee told me it was possibly a reference to the Alex Jones meme.) The speaker was chastised for not wearing a tie and was offered a loan: what Allen called an “autism tie,” decorated with colorful puzzle pieces that are used as a symbol by the autism community. Allen described the group's penchant for provocation as a meaningful exercise in trust-building: “Prove you're not a cop. Sell that line of cocaine.” It was meta-satire, he said, a deliberate performance of liberal trolling among friends that allowed them to have more honest conversations. Matt Gasda, a playwright, formed a different impression after several visits: the people there “were not just testing the Sovereign House system – be it absolutist free speech or whatever. They were also testing whether people would like them, even if their strange, dark impulses surfaced.”
One of Allen's goals in taking a group of people from the Internet and encouraging them to create an in-person community was to overcome the culture of grievance that is so pervasive on social media—outrage and ridicule directed toward the left. However, outlandish touchiness was the local dialect, even in real life. “In the last few years, there has been a very combustible, cathartic and reactionary energy bubbling up in young people,” fashion designer Elena Velez told me. “I would even call the Sovereign House the epicenter of this release valve.”
The easiest way to visualize generational change in American politics is to study voting patterns. Fifty-six percent of men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine voted for Joe Biden in 2020, according to an analysis by the Tufts University Research Center. Fifty-six percent of men in this age group voted for Trump in 2024. Young women preferred Kamala Harris, but they also moved to the right by eight percentage points.
Sovereign House captures and complicates this trend. Some of this cohort are “Trump Zoomers,” Allen told me. (Born in 1992, he's technically a millennial, but he told me he has the “soul of Gen Z.”) However, Allen also described voting as a “meme” that unites people into pre-existing political identities, and he didn't vote in the 2024 election. “We love the fact that we have this strongman who makes us laugh,” he said. “But we understand something and we’re not going to get caught up in it.”
