A far-right publishing house that publishes the works of historical and contemporary fascists is hosting a “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., to celebrate Donald Trump’s second inauguration, featuring a guest list that’s a veritable who’s-who of MAGA influencers and so-called New Right luminaries.
Passage Press will throw the confab in the Watergate Hotel’s Moretti Ballroom on the evening of Jan. 19, the night before Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the U.S., according to an events page on the publishing house’s website.
That the event’s title refers to Trump’s inauguration as a “coronation” — a word typically reserved for the crowning of kings and queens in monarchies — underscores the anti-democratic, authoritarian nature of the black-tie soiree.
“Celebrate the inauguration of Donald John Trump,” Passage Press tweeted Monday, the four-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “Be there as NRX is introduced to the MAGA brain trust. Be there as MAGA meets the Tech Right.”
“NRX” stands for “neoreactionary” and is used as a shorthand for “the Dark Enlightenment,” a far-right movement whose adherents are often as explicit in their distaste for democracy as they are in their reverence for fascism and monarchism.
One of Passage Press’ biggest authors is Dark Enlightenment figurehead Curtis Yarvin. The former Silicon Valley programmer blogged for years under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug” before emerging as a kind of court philosopher for reactionary tech billionaires and prominent MAGA movers and shakers (including Vice President-elect JD Vance).
Yarvin has advocated for a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator” to be in charge of America. He is scheduled to attend the Coronation Ball, according to a post from Passage Press, as are Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Christopher Rufo, Steve Bannon, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova.
The publishing house later deleted its tweet listing the Coronation Ball’s “confirmed attendees.”
Hotels, particularly in the Washington area, have a history of canceling or refusing to host gatherings for white supremacists or other bigots.
Reached for comment about hosting a party whose organizers and prominent attendees have espoused fascist views, the Watergate Hotel — housed in the same building where former President Richard Nixon’s lackeys broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in 1972, precipitating Nixon’s resignation — sent HuffPost the following statement:
“The Watergate Hotel prides itself on being a luxury destination that reflects the values of inclusivity and respect. As a hotel with a long-standing reputation for excellence, we prioritize the safety, comfort, and dignity of our guests and our dedicated team of employees.”
What we know about Passage Press comes largely from a remarkable Guardian exposé published by journalist Jason Wilson last year. In the piece, he unmasked the head of the company, a far-right influencer who went by the name “L0m3z,” as Jonathan Keeperman, a former English lecturer at the University of California, Irvine.
As “L0m3z,” Keeperman accrued a following on X, where he currently has 95,000 followers, in part by posting invective directed at anti-racist protesters, queer people and journalists. He expressed support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the armed teenager who fatally shot two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, writing, “May a million Kyle Rittenhouses bloom.”
He also wrote the he was “coming around to the idea that the most powerful and effective political argument against the left in 2020 is probably simple as: shut up fag.”
And Keeperman once appeared to advocate the mass execution of journalists. “The press are in fact the enemy,” he tweeted. “They are mewling midwit scum. Sniveling liars and desperate status junkies. My abiding contempt for them is only ever confirmed.” As Wilson reported, Keeperman also posted a list of “policy proposals” that included the phrase “lamppost the journos” — an apparent call to kill reporters by hanging them.
Keeperman and Passage Press didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about these statements, nor did they respond to questions seeking further details about the Coronation Ball.
Under Keeperman’s leadership, Passage Press has reprinted “out-of-print or public-domain books by historical fascist and reactionary writers,” Wilson wrote, including works “by radical German nationalist and militarist Ernst Jünger; Peter Kemp, who fought as a volunteer in Francisco Franco’s army during the Spanish civil war; and two counter-revolutionary Russian aristocrats, White Russian general Pyotr Wrangel and Prince Serge Obolensky.”
Passage Press’ contemporary authors include Steve Sailer, a blogger for the white supremacist site VDARE. Sailer has written that Black people “tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and “need stricter moral guidance from society.” Sailer’s book for Passage Press, Noticing, is an anthology of his musings on, among other subjects, “human biodiversity,” the preferred white supremacist nomenclature for eugenics and so-called race science. (Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson provided a fawning blurb for the book, writing that “if the meritocracy were real, Steve Sailer would be one of the most famous writers in the world.”)
Passage Press also publishes a magazine called Man’s World, which is edited and run by the pseudonymous misogynist “Raw Egg Nationalist.” In the Fox Nation documentary “The End of Men,” hosted by Carlson, Raw Egg Nationalist argued that “globalists” were manipulating food supplies to lower testosterone levels and emasculate men. Before working with Passage Press, Raw Egg Nationalist published books with Antelope Hill, a neo-Nazi publishing house based in Pennsylvania.
Keeperman has also formed relationships with major figures in the MAGA movement, including Rufo, a fellow at the major conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute and close ally of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Republican governor is known for fanningthe flames of outrage surrounding “critical race theory” and “trans ideology,” which right-wing figures like Rufo claim are being taught in America’s schools.
After Trump’s election victory in November, Rufo claimed he was set to meet with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago to pitch him on policy proposals.
Rufo is listed as an attendee of the Coronation Ball, according to a tweet from Passage Press, but didn’t immediately respond to a request to confirm his attendance.
Rufo, Yarvin and Keeperman are often considered part of the New Right, a rebranding of familiar counter-revolutionary and anti-democratic politics. It’s the same ideology that animated the “alt-right,” the white supremacist movement that exploded into the public consciousness for its close relationship to the 2016 Trump campaign, only to collapse in the wake of its deadly and disastrous “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Coronation Ball hearkens back to two alt-right gatherings in Washington D.C. celebrating Trump’s election win. In November 2016, the city hosted a conference held by the now-defunct National Policy Institute, the fascist organization helmed by suit-and-tie neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Spencer finished his speech by declaring “Hail Victory!” — the English translation of the Nazi cry “Sieg Heil” — and “Hail Trump!” A viral video from the event captured Spencer’s supporters throwing up the stiff-armed Nazi salute in response.
There was also the Deploraball event in January 2017, on the eve of Trump’s first inauguration, attended by a slew of conspiracy theorists and bigots, including the anti-Muslim activist Pamela Gellar; Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent fascist street gang the Proud Boys; white nationalist Lauren Southern; Jim Hoft, founder of the misinformation-heavy news site Gateway Pundit; Cernovich, a pundit and date rape denier; and Posobiec, a conspiracist with a long history of associating with extremists.
Cernovic and Posobiec are both scheduled to appear at this month’s Coronation Ball, according to a tweet from Passage Press. They also both confirmed that they would attend in posts on X.
Posobiec’s path from PizzaGate influencer to fancy Watergate gala attendee is representative of how Trump’s ascent in politics has catapulted a coterie of once-fringe media figures into powerful positions in American politics.
He got his start as a “Game of Thrones” blogger before pivoting to promoting multiple far-right conspiracy theories, all while developing extensive ties to white supremacists and publicly posting racist and antisemitic messages online.
Posobiec nevertheless became a MAGA star and a prominent pro-Trump propagandist, appearing regularly on Fox News and at the Conservative Political Action Conference, among other forums. Last year he published the book “Unhumans: The Secret History Of Communist Revolutions (And How To Crush Them),” in which he argues that Americans with left-of-center views are subhuman while praising the violent fascistic regimes of Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. (Vance provided a blurb for the book.)
“President Donald J. Trump is waiting in the wings,” Posobiec said while promoting ”Unhumans” at the National Conservatism Conference last year. “And when he assumes office again, let me tell you, the globalists and their entire regime will be smashed to pieces and scattered to the winds.”
He then added: “We don’t negotiate with unhumans because that’s the stakes of this — humanity versus unhuman; populist nationalist versus atheistic Marxist; strength, beauty and genius versus weakness, ugliness and stupidity; civilization versus barbarism; crime and chaos versus law.”
Other expected guests at the Coronation Ball, per Passage Press, include Joshua Lisec, a ghostwriter for right-wing influencers and a co-author with Posobiec of ”Unhumans.”
Steve Bannon is set to attend, too, according to Passage Press. He cofounded Breitbart, which he called the “platform for the alt-right,” before running Trump’s 2016 campaign and later serving in Trump’s White House. Bannon was recently released from prison after serving four months for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. He is currently the host of the popular ”War Room” podcast. Bannon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he would attend the Coronation Ball, but his War Room co-host, Natalie Winters, tweeted that she will be at the event.
Two other popular podcasters, Khachiyan and Nekrasova, hosts of “Red Scare,” are also scheduled to attend the Coronation Ball, according to Passage Press. Khachiyan and Nekrasova started the podcast years ago as a nominally left, socialist program, but eventually emerged as apostles of the New Right, cozying up to Yarvin and far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel, along with the type of conspiracy theorist they used to skewer — InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Neither Khachiyan or Nekrasova immediately responded to a request for comment.
Grimes, the famous musician and ex-wife of Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and a close Trump ally, currently on a campaign of embracing Europe’s most extreme right-wing and fascist political parties — was listed by Passage Press as a “confirmed attendee,” but a representative told HuffPost she will not be in attendance.
Also listed as an attendee is Jeremy Carl, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, the influential MAGA think tank. Carl is the author of the book ”The Unprotected Class,”which ludicrously asserts that“anti-white racism is the most predominant and politically powerful form of racism in America today.” Carl didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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On Tuesday morning, Passage Press tweeted that the Coronation Ball was sold out. That tweet was deleted Tuesday afternoon, around the same time the ticket price for the event on the Passage Press website shot up from $250 to $875.