Matt Pegas neatly arranges stacks of books atop the red tablecloth at the reception table in the front yard of the house party. Surrounding the books is a tableau of candles, rose petals, a tarot deck, and packets of wildflower seeds, which guests are encouraged to take home and plant. Midnight will mark the spring equinox, and the pagan decor is meant to celebrate a rebirth, because, they say, after years of being tacitly driven underground, the “anti-woke” arts scene in Los Angeles is ready to blossom in full view.

“We have been in hibernation. We have been in the cold. We’ve been hiding. Now we’re out in the open,” says party organizer and emcee Adem Luz Rienspects, clad in a white linen shirt and pants.

The function, held in a single-family home in L.A.’s Lincoln Heights, is, at a glance, your standard collection of Eastside scenesters — nebbish guys in glasses; handsome bros in black leather jackets; guys with long Seventies rocker hair; doughy, bearded guys in ball caps, accompanied by women several magnitudes hotter than them; a man in a tweedy three-piece suit; a woman who’s a dead ringer for Naomi Watts. Several women wear lacy white dresses and flower crowns, in accordance with the theme. The requisite amounts of woo woo and pretension. Nearly everyone is white.

Tonight is no mere house party, though — it’s a literary salon hosted by New Ritual Press, an independent publishing label founded by Pegas and fellow indie author Dan Baltic. New Ritual Press just released its first book, the short story collection An Odyssey of Dingbats by Omar King, one of several pieces featured in tonight’s readings.

More generally, the event is an act of defiance against “wokeness,” which, these critics say, has for too long stifled free expression, at the expense of creating quality art. 

One of the primary reasons why Kamala Harris got thumped in the election is that a number of the Democratic Party’s core constituencies have grown disillusioned with the party and drifted rightward over the past several years. Black, Native American, Hispanic and, young voters all voted Republican in greater numbers in the 2024 election compared to 2020. Culturally, too, there has been a shocking shift to the right among traditionally leftist groups, such as crunchy, health-conscious women, who are enamored of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his vaccine skepticism and promotion of alternate wellness theories; young people converting to Catholicism in droves; and, apparently, a bunch of young creative types in a large, deep-blue coastal city.

“There’s a massive cultural pushback against millennial moral censorship,” Chris Zeisscheig, a former porn performer turned indie novelist, tells me while watching the party crowd with removed awe.

Dan Baltic, a co-founder in New Ritual Press and one of tonight’s readers, remembers being reprimanded in 2019 in a writing workshop by a woman who was appalled by the alt-right protagonist of his debut novel, Nutcrankr. “The class liked it, and one woman said, ‘It’s obvious you’re a very good writer. Why would you choose to write this?’ That comment really took me aback. The answer obviously is because I wanted to write about it. Seemingly, she appreciated it aesthetically. In my sense, the story did its job. The better question to ask is, ‘Why would you ask that question?’” The answer to that question being that all art should adhere to certain liberal principles and never dare offend them.

The backlash in historically liberal cultural circles has been deemed the Vibe Shift, a term coined by Substack writer Sean Monahan in 2021, and later adopted by the mainstream press, to describe the growing number of young people rejecting the “woke” identity-based politics largely embraced by the contemporary Left. Wokeness first rose to prominence during the Obama years and went mainstream after the gender reckoning of #MeToo, the racial awakening of Black Lives Matter, and the anti-Trump Resistance of his first term. 

For a while, woke had a positive connotation — co-opted from Black communities, it had come to mean being awoken to the historical wrongs perpetrated against women and people of color. At first, this was a welcome development, a long overdue correction to the racial and gender inequities in artistic endeavors. But after a while, a backlash started brewing, one that felt wokeness was overly censorious and punitive of anyone who dared challenge identitarian political ideals. To them, woke became synonymous with Cancel Culture, people being publicly shunned for their political views, and in some cases losing their career opportunities and social connections over them. To be woke, they believed, was to be scolding and off-putting. That anti-woke movement exploded into public view in recent years, culminating with Trump’s re-election last fall.

“I watched the 2020 election completely alone,” says Isaac Simpson, founder of WILL, a conservative-friendly advertising and PR agency and an informal leader in the alt-lit scene. For the 2024 election, however, Simpson rented a mansion and celebrated with more than 100 L.A. creative professionals, some of them Hollywood executives, to celebrate Trump cruising to the White House for a second time. “The biggest population is recent converts, dudes who have come to Trump in just the past six months.”

At 10 p.m., the readings start. A candlelit walkway leads attendees to the backyard, where a makeshift performance space has been erected. Tarps drape over an A-frame structure, and rows of folding chairs face a small wooden platform adorned with faux ivy. Center stage is a two-foot-high Roman column, with a cauldron precariously balancing atop it. A woman plays a dirge-y tune on an organ. Several of the flower-crowned women carry lit Tiki torches, forming a procession. Tragedy nearly strikes when one of the women dips her torch down to light the logs and a propane tank falls into the open fire. Luckily, a man in the audience pounces, removing the propane tank with his bare hands, and no one loses their face.

Pegas speaks first, sharing a piece from his self-published short story collection The Black Album, about a viral video of a man being tortured by a Mexican drug cartel. The tormentors administer an adrenaline drip to keep their prisoner awake and maximize pain. Earlier, Pegas told me his two biggest literary influences were Bret Easton Ellis and David Foster Wallace, and his story combines Ellis’ gratuitous violence with Wallace’s postmodern fixation with mass media. “The internet is a desensitizing, or consciousness expanding, or innocence destroying agent, most fundamentally,” Pegas says of the story.

It’s tempting to dismiss anti-woke literature as young artists so desperate for attention that they resort to trolling, a claim Simpson doesn’t exactly deny. “Every great art movement is troll-ish,” he says. “All great art unearths something unseen in its period. If somebody painted a Monet today, we wouldn’t care. But in that era, he was unearthing something unseen. Gangster rap, punk rock — something that wasn’t allowed to be said or from a community that was shut out.”

In this way, the alt-lit is part of the cyclical nature of pop culture. A school of thought (woke) takes hold, becomes popular among a certain set of creatively-minded young people, becomes so popular that it becomes uncool, only to be replaced by a counter movement (anti-woke), restarting the process. What is transgressive, indie and anti-woke today will one day be normie, derivative, and cringe.

The woke backlash is a manifestation of the horseshoe theory of politics, which posits that the poles of the political spectrum are more alike than different, Pegas says. “The post-Trump Right and the post-Bernie Left merged around creative disaffection somewhere around 2020, 2021,” he tells me before his reading. “Culturally, it’s about getting rid of woke and the censorship therein.”

Pegas was a former Bernie Bro himself, supporting the Democratic Socialist candidate during Sanders’ failed bid for the Democratic nomination in 2016. Pegas studied English at Cornell and was, in many, a quintessential coastal liberal elite. But he gradually inched rightward after the 2016 election. He became a fan of Sam Hyde, the troll comedian who lost his Adult Swim show amid accusations of racism, homophobia, and misogyny; and Red Scare, the culture podcast that is often credited as the primary catalyst for the Vibe Shift. He later discovered online writers like Robert Stark and Twitter personality Bronze Aged Pervert and was drawn to their “aristocratic radicalism,” he says. “It was right-wing in terms of being individualistic and non-egalitarian, but with a more refined, cultured, and aesthetic bent that you couldn’t really find within the American right.” 

Pegas voted for Trump in 2024, completing his conservative transformation. “Trump represents an alternative to just more managed decline,” Pegas says. “There’s not really a bright vision for the future, coming from left or right, outside of Trump.”

This literary scene is dominated by men, unsurprising considering no demographic has moved the right as drastically. The shift has created one of the most profound partisan gaps between the sexes of the past 25 years, prompting endless calls for a “Joe Rogan of the Left,” someone who can reach young men who feel alienated by the left Democrats and recruit them back into the fold.

Nor do today’s young men have their own Hemingway, Kerouac, or Bukowski, a generation-defining writer who captures the plight of men in all of its rugged beauty and brutish toxicity. The circumstances are ripe for such a writer to emerge as it is, regardless of your politics, a fascinating and fraught time to be a man. The Left urges men to ditch their so-called toxic masculinity, which alienates them from their feelings and pits them in an endless competition with themselves and others to succeed at all costs. Instead, they should adopt a more evolved masculinity, one that is strong, yes, but also loving, empathetic, forgiving, and emotionally aware. The right has gained traction by saying the left is emasculating you, feminizing you, making you a “cuck.” Denying your primal, masculine nature will only leave you weak and unhappy. It’s only by harnessing that energy that you will succeed, professionally, socially and romantically, the right says.

“We need to make literature seem cool,” Reinspects says. There’s the Dimes Square scene in New York, but that’s all “girls and gays,” he says, referring to the right-leaning reactionary arts scene in Lower East Side Manhattan. “Who’s the male genius who has come out of Dimes Square?”

IF ANYONE HAS THE ABILITY to make literature cool among young men again, it might be Reinspects.

Twenty-six, handsome, and charming, I got the impression he was sleeping with half the girls at the party, though he claims it’s only two. He insists we meet in a cemetery — “It’s a good place to think” — and we chat sitting in the front row of his black 1997 Ford Mustang. “I used to have a nicer car,” Reinspects says. “A 2020 Camaro. But I totaled it doing donuts.” He smokes three hand-rolled cigarettes over our hour-long chat. Prior to moving to L.A., he bummed around Paris for several months. “The greatest tragedy of my life is that I’m not European.” When he notices a headstone engraved with the name “Macbeth,” he immediately breaks into the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” soliloquy that closes the play.

Reinspects is cagey about his personal details. Reinspects is a pen name — a lot of alt-lit writers use pen names — and he refuses to tell me specifics about his life, other than to say he’s from the Southwest, is the son of Slavic immigrants, and went to a Waldorf school, a “child-centered” educational philosophy that emphasizes a child’s holistic well-being. In 2020, he graduated from a state university with a political science degree. He only lets me photograph him from the neck down to avoid getting “face doxxed.”

This is about more than just cultivating an aura of mystique. There’s a degree of self-preservation in remaining pseudo-anonymous. For all their talk about rebirth and shifting vibes, new beginnings and bringing this underground scene out into the open, members of the alt-lit scene are acutely aware of the danger of getting canceled for their beliefs. While reporting this article, one of the salon attendees had her Twitter account doxxed to her employer and was in fear of losing her job. (She wasn’t fired.)

Reinspects sees the literary salons, and alt-lit more broadly, as an antidote to political polarization and our collective tech-addled disaffection. “There needs to be a new consciousness that emerges that’s post-political, anti-tech, anti-stimulation,” he says. “There’s so much ugliness on the right. So much cheap attention online. Men and women have grown estranged from each other. I’m trying to bring culture to the real, tangible world.” He “begrudgingly” made a Twitter account because he saw that’s where his peers congregated online.

Despite his reluctance for self-promotion, Reinspects is one of the few alt-lit writers to receive critical acclaim. His 2023 novel Mixtape Hyperborea — a guys-being-dudes novel about a group of high school seniors who cruise the mall, smoke weed, lie about getting laid and call each other gay — was positively reviewed by Mars Review of Books. “The louche or unabashedly noxious young man has mostly vanished from contemporary American fiction,” the piece notes in its opening line. But the unnamed narrator also has a tenderness to him, evident in his spiritual connection with nature, his genuine affection for his friends and wistfulness for his rapidly evaporating youth. “Contemporary novels don’t seem to do adolescence well; there’s a certain shyness writers have about how teenagers, particularly boys, actually speak to each other. For anyone who came of age in the 2000s, Mixtape Hyperborea will ring especially true,” the review notes.

FOR SOME IN THE SCENE, being outside the mainstream is an advantage. 

“I hear so much bitching about how, ‘Oh, we can’t get a publishing deal, blah, blah, blah. And I don’t think it’s a constructive way for these younger guys to think,” alt-lit writer Delicious Tacos says of the publishing industry. “This is the hand we’re dealt. It’s also never been easier to get your work read by fucking millions of people.”

If you saw the man known as Delicious Tacos at your local dog park, playing fetch with his girlfriend’s pug, as I did, you would likely clock him as an ordinary, gray haired, middle aged, middle class Angeleno, and probably not assume he writes highly sexualized, racially insensitive transgressive fiction and is arguably the most successful, most well-respected figure in contemporary alt-lit. 

A recovering alcoholic and a sex addict, Tacos describes his work as part memoir, part fiction, with the occasional topical riff. It is aggressively masculine, a peek inside the depravities of the unchecked male id. While that gaze is no longer popular in mainstream literature, many readers have found Tacos’ writing to be refreshingly honest — to others, needlessly offensive. His books have at times cracked the top 10 list on Amazon for American fiction and he’s sold 26,000 books across his titles, making him the breakout star of indie literature. A selection from his most popular, 2016’s The Pussy, details how the protagonist wants to be a “human hose … permanently coupled to a never ending mountain of ovulating 13 year old Asian schoolgirls. Perpetually blasting hot yogurty goo into impossibly tight wet adolescent cunts.”

Despite writing passages that make Lolita’s pedophilia look tame by comparison, Tacos rejects the idea that he’s being edgy just to attract attention. “The top Substacks and podcasts are political/culture war, shilling stock tips, or business/entrepreneur stuff,” he tells me via text. “If I wanted attention I’d talk about politics.”

Aside from supporting Bernie in 2016, Tacos says he’s mostly apolitical, and he brushes aside the idea that leftist thinking is somehow censoring writers. “I don’t see wokeness as anything new, and I’m not really bothered by it myself,” he says. “It’s certainly more mainstream, but it’s always been the same shit. Feminists have always been mad at horny guys writing. I don’t see myself oppressed by the woke cathedral.”

“WE’RE NOT JUST LOOKING TO PUSH white guys. It’s about making space where there’s not that level of censorship,” Pegas tells me at the literary salon.

To his point, the salon is primarily a showcase for Omar King, a neurodivergent person of color whose folksy demeanor belies his raunchy writing style. Mexican, Salvadoran and autistic, King unironically uses phrases like “gee golly’ and “hunky dory” in conversion. The selection he reads from Any Odyssey of Dingbats, an anthology of short stories and original artwork, is about Barb, an aging former Hollywood starlet who used to give blowjobs to land movie roles. The crowd erupts when King says “fag” and “sucking cock.” Other stories in the collection feature scatalogical humor and a crayon suffering an existential crisis.

“When I talk to people who are in it, who are Gen Z, they’re mostly on the right, which I find surprising,” Zeisscheig, the novelist, tells me. “I still don’t understand what to make of it, but I’m looking at it from an outsider.”

Zeisschieg says he’s not part of the immediate scene, but came because of his appreciation for King, whom he met through Twitter. Zeisschieg first became aware of the conservative shift in the alt-lit scene last November, just days after the election, at a party for the reissue of his 2020 book The Magician. The party was held at the (literally) underground venue Sovereign House, a rallying point for Dimes Square. 

There are female readers, too. “Classy” Fred Blassie, popular for her comedic X account, opened the proceedings reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 — “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie.” Fellow e-girl Gabby Sones shared an essay about liberating yourself by embracing life as a normie. Both declined to be interviewed for this article.

The last reader is Baltic, who shares a passage from Nutcrankr 2, the sequel to his 2022 debut novel. The original Nutcrankr is a satire about Spencer Grunhauer, an antisocial, pretentious, friendless loser who is convinced he is the only one who can save Western civilization from the “Davos daddies” trying to impose global Marxism. The character is the exact kind of Trump-loving manosphere figure that the Right has upheld as our nation’s saving grace and that the Left has been conditioned to fear. Nutcrankr 2 is a roman à clef about Grunhauer ingratiating himself in a Dimes Square-like literary milieu in New York.

A lawyer by day, Baltic (not his real name) says he studied creative writing at an Ivy League school (he won’t say which) and now writes fiction in his spare time — another alt-lit writer who only feels comfortable being transgressive behind the safety of a pen name. “I knew from the very start, regardless of the politics of my writing, I would, as a professional, not want to be linked to whatever I want to write about,” Baltic says. “If someone looks up your name and sees, ‘This person I’m hiring is the author of Nutcrankr?!’”

Baltic shopped Nutcrankr around to large publishers, but none were interested in a novel about a terminally online neckbeard type who believes the state should force women into marriage. Baltic joined IndieThinkers, a members-only, subscription-based online forum for literary-minded dissidents, which is where he met Pegas and Tacos. Pegas and Baltic started The New Write, a literature podcast with a MAGA bent. Indie publisher Terror House Press eventually put out his book, and Baltic was so encouraged by its reception, and the community he had found on Twitter, that he started a press of his own.

“I was looking for fiction I wanted to read. A lot of the fiction that was being published was very ideologically consistent. It serves a political agenda instead of serving a narrative or aesthetic agenda. I began to look for fiction that, however unpolished, has an element of authenticity,” Baltic says.

The good news for people in underground lit is their ranks are larger than ever. Simpson remembers being astounded by the number of people who turned out for a Delicious Tacos reading in Los Angeles in 2022. “I thought it was gonna be five dudes, you know, sitting around,” Simpson recalls. “I show up and it’s 150 on the roof of the Ace Hotel. Attractive people — hipster, scenester girls and artsy guys. The scene became cool.”

The challenge facing alt-lit is, how does a countercultural movement proceed once the culture it was railing against is itself no longer popular? For years, the anti-woke scene has defined itself in opposition to the mainstream left. But wokeness is in retreat, a punchline even to progressives, forcing the alt scene to create a persona on its own terms.

“A new outsider coalition will be formed that merges some of the cooler left- and right-wing groups together, perhaps under the banner of anti-corporatism and anti-techno feudalism,” Simpson predicts. “The smart people on the left will abandon identity politics and that will make them a natural ally of the anti-globalist right.”

Simpson also wants to institutionalize the underground scene by creating a publicity apparatus — through podcasts, literary journals, and social media — powerful enough to mint mainstream careers.

Pegas, though, isn’t interested in having his contemporaries’ work subsumed by the Penguins and Random Houses of the world. “It’s not just wokeness that makes mainstream publishing inaccessible,” Pegas says. “Everything is measured in social media. Publishers are resistant to picking up work by people that don’t have a big following. And the books that do come out aren’t even fiction. Everything is an extension of influencer culture.”

What’s happening with indie literature mirrors what’s happening with every artistic medium — the monoculture has been replaced by atomized communities built around niche interests and specific creators. The idea of a mainstream press, or a mainstream anything, is an outdated one. And with Amazon making it easier than ever to print books, more indie presses will fill the void. “The time is ripe for DIY publishers of all stripes,” Pegas says.

“I’d rather have a tiny audience that feels like a club,” Rienspects says. “Mainstream success is a little bit uncool.”

There is one book burning during the festivities: After he reads, Pegas throws a copy of The Black Album into the cauldron, but it’s more of a creative choice than a political statement. “I did it for the visual effect,” Pegas says. “That book is a year old. I’m ready for the next thing.”