Sovereign House
"The New Yorker" explains my "scientific racism."
From The New Yorker:
The Party Politics of Sovereign House
Nick Allen’s venue in Dimes Square was a popular gathering spot for right-wing Zoomers. Now he’s opening a new club called Reign, an attempt to build a lasting cultural institution.
By Emma Green
December 16, 2025
… The party was organized by Nick Allen, a thirty-two-year-old co-founder of a fintech company. For the past few years, Allen has become influential by creating new social spaces, especially for young people on the right. His most well-known venture is Sovereign House, an event venue in Lower Manhattan, where he and his friends hosted magazine-issue launches, film screenings, debates, and plays, as well as good old-fashioned parties. The space, which Allen founded in 2023, became a gathering spot for a cross-section of Gen Z-ers: crypto bros, young religious people, internet posters, literary types. Allen’s friends describe him as a Gatsby-esque figure. “Everyone says they know Nick,” one young high-level Trump Administration official told me. “But only a few people really know Nick.”
After Trump was reëlected, several Sovereign House attendees took jobs in the Administration, including in the West Wing, the Justice Department, and various other federal agencies. “Nick is in this weird role where he’s kind of like an embassy in New York for us,” the young Trump official told me—Sovereign House “was where you would go on the weekend to clear your head.” Bart Hutchins, the co-owner and chef of Butterworth’s, a Trumpworld hangout in D.C., said that “during Inauguration week, the Venn diagram of Butterworth’s and Sov could have been a circle.” …
Sovereign House was a product of the pandemic era, when many people on the right felt cooped up, censored, and marginalized. Now Allen is launching an event space and social club called Reign, in the same neighborhood, which will test whether the restive energy of the past few years can be channelled into something sustainable. “This part of the right has a lot of energy and talent, but it doesn’t have a lot of organization and competence,” Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, told me. It’s also lacking in cultural spaces—places for making friends and exchanging ideas, separate from the business of electing politicians. Allen said that the scene he’s cultivating is “for people who want to build again.” …
Sovereign House wasn’t explicitly partisan; Allen wanted the space to be intellectually capacious. He picked the name Sovereign House to signal independence from any kind of authority. And yet, the name also seemed to nod at ideas that have been gaining currency in niche right-wing circles, like establishing an American monarchy or creating independent city-states.
Sovereign House sounds like the name of a James “Shogun” Clavell novel or a James/Jan Morris historical trilogy: very British Empireish.
In reality, it was a couple of basement rooms under a Chinatown tenement that looked like some dump that the Ramones played in before they hit the big time and moved up to CBGB’s in the Bowery. (Personally, an elderly gent like myself was thrilled to give a talk to a standing room only crowd in a downtown dive that Talking Heads might have played in 50 years before.)
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