This past Sunday, after a meeting of citywide leadership to debate various resolutions and proposals ahead of the chapter’s convention later this month, about two dozen members of the New York City branch of the Democratic Socialists of America adjourned to Churchill’s, a bar in Midtown blocks away from the donated space where the meeting had taken place. I joined them, being a member of the chapter and having attended the meeting as an observer. (I was also asked to take the minutes.) We joked about the irony of a socialist cadre decompressing in a pub named for an genocidal imperialist. The ceilings were adorned with St. George’s flags and the late prime minister’s speeches were piped into the bathrooms. We even walked past a bar named for Wolfe Tone, a 19th century Irish revolutionary, to get there, over my half-hearted protest.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, disgraced reactionary Milo Yiannopoulos was in town for a booze cruise with Gavin McInnes’s Proud Boys, a misogynist band of alt-lite throwaways most active in gentrified Brooklyn. Yiannopoulos fell out of favor with his fiscal sponsors, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, following a succession of investigative reports that shed light on statements he’d made apparently supporting pederasty and his collaboration at Breitbart News with open white supremacists and fascists.
In retrospect, if there were any bar in New York City that Milo Yiannopoulos would go to for lunch on St. George’s Day, it is Churchill’s.
On Saturday night, he, McInnes, and their hangers-on performatively drank beer while regaling each other with myths of Western civilization’s greatness and the debt owed to them by the modern world. Meanwhile, DSA members held a town hall on the injustices of the health insurance industry, continued organizing with the Reclaim Pride Coalition, held a reading group to discuss Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire, and met with Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, a DSA member and Chicago alderman, to discuss electoral strategy.
At Churchill’s the next day, Yiannopoulos wandered, apparently oblivious, through a crowd of leftists who fell silent as they realized who had just walked in. After putting his bag down, Yiannopoulos and his lunch mate stepped out for a cigarette, and my fellow socialists huddled to plan an impromptu direct action. I followed Yiannopoulos outside out of morbid curiosity, a sense of professional obligation—I cover the far right—and a feeling that, as a journalist, my contribution to whatever was about to happen should be to observe, not to participate directly.
Our conversation was, ultimately, pretty dull. To be fair, I didn’t have particularly good questions to ask, because I haven’t followed Yiannopoulos particularly closely since his fall, or even before. He is and has always been a media creature, not someone who wields power himself nor even seems particularly interested in doing so. I don’t think he has anything even resembling a coherent political worldview; I think he’s a self-obsessed grifter more interested in nihilistic provocation than anything else. Speaking to him is like walking into a hall of mirrors.
Still, even if he is merely an epiphenomenon, his present activities might be instructive as to the state and status of a particular sliver of the far right, so I talked to him to see what he had to say. (Basically: nothing.) I went back inside and took some notes on my phone, waiting to see what my comrades had planned.
When Yiannopoulos and his lunch date, Chadwick Moore—himself some kind of off-brand Milo—finished their cigarette, they came back inside and were greeted by a phalanx of reds chanting “Nazi scum get out. Nazi scum get out.” (Much has been made of whether Yiannopoulos is “actually” a Nazi. In addition to being pedantic and beside the point, it seems reasonable enough to, for the sake of a slogan, describe anyone who is a demonstrable neo-Nazi sympathizer as a Nazi.) Time does odd things in these moments of confrontation, however non-violent, and what probably took less than a minute to transpire felt like five or more. In the end, Yiannopoulos and Moore’s bags were retrieved and they left. The socialists erupted into cheers and the first verse of “Solidarity Forever!” before tipping the staff and offering to buy a round for everyone in the bar whose lunch had been disrupted.
As was to be expected, this sparked several waves of reaction: First, there was glee at the small victory of having disrupted Yiannopoulos’s afternoon and having gotten under his skin. “If you don’t want Nazis in New York, join DSA,” the chapter’s Steering Committee said in a statement. “We’re building a better world, one bar at a time.”
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