New York Magazine Crops Out Truth With MAGA Hit Piece

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A leftist “news” reporter walks into a conservative event and omits some key details in a hit piece attacking President Donald Trump and his supporters. 

Even for New York Magazine, one of the bigger jokes in American journalism, the fact-fractured story headlined, “The Cruel Kids’ Table,” is a lesson in the excesses of the Pravda press. 

The hit job, written by the mag’s feature reporter Brock Colyar, is supposed to be a first-person account of inauguration weekend parties filled with “young, confident, and casually cruel Trumpers who, after conquering Washington, have their sights set on America.” It’s the same tired — and false — screed portraying the MAGA movement as privileged rednecks, even as the piece laments “just how big” the Republican Party’s tent has become.

It’s another bitchy liberal narrative brimming with bitterness and angst, written by a DEI journalist whose “gender identity is not that clear” —  as the dress-wearing Colyar, “assigned male at birth,” wrote in another first-person account about pronouns.  

“From an aesthetic standpoint, this new class of conservatives is willing to top off a perfectly stylish outfit with a MAGA hat, which now comes in lots of colors: red, yes, but also yellow, green, orange, or black, the ‘dark MAGA’ kind that Elon Musk wears,” the propaganda piece asserts. “Almost everyone is white.The men look like Pete Hegseth, in bow ties and black suits, with clean-shaven faces.”

But it turns out, New York Magazine had to clip the picture to make the narrative fit. 

‘Cropped All the Black People Out’

The feature photo for the piece cropped out a number of black people in the shot at the Power 30 Awards, a  TikTok-sponsored party for conservative influencers the evening before Inauguration Day. 

“New York Magazine literally cropped all the black people out of this cover photo and then complained that ‘the entire room is white,’” event attendee Christopher Barnard, president of the American Conservation Coalition, posted on X. 

The gathering at Sax, a D.C. dinner theater and lounge not far from the White House, was packed with young conservatives. “Keyboard warriors,” as described by Trump social-media strategy adviser Alex Bruesewitz, who reportedly told Colyar there would be no celebration, no joy in Trumpville, without the influencers’ amplification, particularly among Americans who as a rule don’t vote Republican.   

The piece noted and mocked pundits in attendance like Ben Shapiro, Riley Gaines Barker and boxer and TikTok power player Bryce Hall. It omitted many others, like Terrence Williams, Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas, professional boxer Gervonta Davis, and CJ Pearson, co-chair of the Republican National Committee Youth Advisory Council — black conservatives who basked in the celebratory glow of November’s sweeping Republican victories. Rapper Waka Flocka Flame, also black, performed at the party. 

‘An Accurate Impression’

Pearson, co-host of the event, said the magazine reporter made no attempt to reach out to him. 

“They had an agenda and that was to slander the MAGA movement as some white supremacist cult,” Pearson told The Federalist Tuesday in an upcoming edition of “The Federalist Radio Hour” podcast, scheduled to air on Thursday. “That narrative would have been undermined had they spoken to me.” 

“At no point did they reach out to me,” Pearson added, noting that Colyar could have just walked up to him. The young Republican was among a few speakers at the event. Pearson admonished on social media that Americans “don’t hate the media enough.” 

Rob Smith, a decorated Iraq War Veteran and Columbia-educated journalist and influencer who also happens to be black and gay, commented on Pearson’s X post that he was at the party — “as were MANY other Conservative media influencers who are Black, Latino, Asian, etc.” 

New York Magazine spokeswoman Lauren Starke defended the piece as “an accurate impression” on the “new class of conservatives.” 

“The magazine’s most recent cover story explores the new class of conservatives taking Washington by storm, through the lens of inauguration weekend,” she wrote in an email response to The Federalist’s questions. “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.”

Starke did not respond to The Federalist’s other questions: 

Mr. Pearson said that after the story published, he reached out to the reporter, who told him that there was no space available to include Mr. Pearson’s comments. Is that true? There was no space left on the Internet? New York Magazine, if I’m not mistaken, is published online. 

Colyar, the publication’s reporter, did talk to event co-host Raquel Debono, social media influencer of Make America Hot Again fame, who in the article — God forbid — criticizes DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), in an expletive-punctuated rant. 

‘When Your Enemy is Destroying Themselves’

The story, of course, is packed with unnamed sources who say the kind of things that liberals find unconscionably offensive, even as they classify people with names they don’t like and never asked for. 

“This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside Butterworth’s into a gigglefest,” the piece snips in its description of an inauguration night party. “Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a VIP section ‘like a little Mexican.’ Then she lets out a cackle. This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause. Later, a former Bernie supporter (who looked like the most Bernie-supporting person one could imagine with long, curly hair and a plaid shirt) told me the same: He wanted the freedom to say ‘faggot’ and ‘retarded.’”

Pearson said the piece and the decision to crop out several black attendees from the photo seemed a blatant attempt to perpetuate the Power 30 party as “some KKK light shindig.” That could be a potential legal problem for New York Magazine. 

Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, said news outlets can be subject to “false light” tort claims, a kind of invasion of privacy in which the accused faces allegations of spreading lies that the average person would find harmfully offensive. 

“Obviously, calling a bunch of people essentially racist in contravention to direct evidence sitting in front of you could potentially fit that category,” the attorney said in an interview. 

Suhr’s Chicago-based firm is engaged in several complaints against corporate media outlets involving an array of alleged abuses. Most recently the center filed a lawsuit against pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register on charges of consumer fraud related to the newspaper’s poll published just days before November’s election showing Trump losing in deep red Iowa. The poll wasn’t just an outlier, it was wrong by a whopping 16 percentage points. And it was used by media outlets to suggest Trump could be in trouble in key swing states. The Republican easily won the elections. 

Pearson said organizers of the Power 30 awards are mulling their legal options. 

“Right now, honestly, I think the best thing is to apply sunlight to the situation,” he said in a separate phone interview with The Federalist. “When things like this happen, it prevents people from ever trusting them again. When your enemy is destroying themselves, let them do it.” 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.