The thing about the movement formerly known as the alt right—a far-right subculture whose anarchic ideology is inseparable from the Internet—is that its inhabitants are, by and large, painfully, haltingly awkward. They could be neo-Nazis, gleeful that Donald Trump disparages immigrants and minorities; they could be Internet trolls who while away their evenings making anti-Semitic Pepe the Frog memes in MS Paint. They could spend their time angrily fighting with Black Lives Matter on Twitter or flooding a woman’s DMs with rape threats that they’ve rebranded as jokes (irony, after all, is a useful tool in the proto-fascist playbook). But for the most part, they’re computer-dependent outcasts who find social satisfaction in watching far-right celebrities rant on the Internet. With very few exceptions, many of the attendees at Mike Cernovich’s party last weekend would never have made it past the door on a normal Saturday at FREQ, a Hell’s Kitchen nightclub regularly reserved for electronica parties.

But they did last Saturday night, courtesy of the man known as Cerno. The former club child and lifestyle guru, whose strident views on masculinity (and Pizza-gate) inadvertently led him into the Trump-era political-media complex, now commands a following of Internet trolls who excuse his conspiracy-minded leanings as long as he picks vicious Twitter fights with mainstream celebrities and journalists. And though the Night for Freedom party had been planned long before Fire and Fury’s release, Cernovich’s MAGA-sphere was all too eager to fill the power vacuum left by Steve Bannon. Seven hundred troll-army members showed up to do so; middle-aged libertarian intellectuals, dressed in suits and spangled dresses, mingled with neckbeards in uncomfortable formal jackets; drunken Proud Boys screamed behind Gavin McInnes about the virtues of straight white men; and Gateway Pundit writer Lucian Wintrich’s spiffy metrosexual posse bitchily dished on people they considered traitors to the movement. Stefan Molyneux, the men’s-rights radio host, decided to come out for the bash—an event in itself, given his years as a recluse—and spent the entire evening being bombarded by the young white men who worship him. College Republicans were manning the door, and Michael Flynn Jr., Twitter’s favorite conspiracy theorist, whose alleged misdeeds might have facilitated his father’s decision to cooperate with the Robert Mueller probe, stood in awe of the talent by the stage (surrounded by other far-right types who in turn stared in awe at him).

Sprinkled throughout the crowd were several paranoid, newly minted bitcoin millionaires who had been invited to party with the troll army for the first time. “There’s a lot of crypto here, people who are really influential and deep in the game,” said a middle-aged man standing next to the speakers, who refused to give me his name but offered his opinion that the financial industry is full of crooks. “This is about trolling the establishment and breaking it up,” he explained of the disparate crowd. “This is about triggering people, and social engineering, and stuff.”

As the far-right D.J. duo Milk N Cooks spun 90s hits, punctuated by Jack Posobiec performing spoken-word poetry by Johnny Cash, Cernovich drifted around the periphery of the dance floor, wearing a pale gray suit, greeting guests, and anxiously keeping an eye out for anything that screamed MAGA—an errant Nazi, a pro-Trump hat, a schlubby T-shirt with a slogan. Perhaps aware that suits would serve as a social lubricant for his protégées, he enforced a dress code—cocktail attire or business wear. (Coat check was required.) No one was allowed to get belligerent, and the guests, who had paid up to $300 to attend, got three free drinks with their tickets. (The sponsors, largely said bitcoin millionaires, had access to an open bar, and it showed.) There would be NO fighting—armed goons hired from Bo Dietl’s security firm would see to that—and as little drama as possible. A friend of Cernovich’s who owns a security firm volunteered background checks on attendees’ e-mails, even employing facial-recognition software to weed out uninvited members of the press or Antifa protesters.

Before he became involved in the strange Internet world of MAGA, Cernovich told me, he was a party animal, constantly raging in nightclubs in Cabo and Vegas—a pursuit that would seemingly have bewildered the majority of A Night for Freedom guests. The event brought to mind a tame high-school prom, had that prom been populated by men’s-rights activists, cryptocurrency anarcho-capitalists, and Gorilla Mindset fanboys, and featured intense drunken jeering against identity politics, liberalism, and select members of the Fake News Media (whom Cernovich, in all his calculated generosity, had invited as well). The night’s only hiccup occurred when a BuzzFeed News reporter spotted recently announced Maryland Senate candidate Chelsea Manning. The N.S.A. whistleblower was hovering at the party’s edges having a drink, trying to remain off the record, and quietly talking to Internet provocateur Cassandra Fairbanks, a former liberal who’d drifted to the right. Her appearance, tweeted out by Charlie Warzel, led to a heated online debate over whether she was attending as a guest, or whether she’d crashed the event and was trying to cover her tracks.

Manning and her liberal supporters insisted that she’d crashed, with one pointing to McInnes’s speech mocking trans people as proof that she’d never go to something like this. But two people in Cernovich’s camp told me that Manning had willingly showed up, and, weirdly enough, had been welcomed. “I just need a picture that will show what it was like,” Posobiec said later. “Just to show everyone that yes, she was here, and yes, everything was fine, and cool, and that was it. I didn’t even notice when she left. It was almost a non-event.” (Never mind Manning, many attendees insisted to me. The night’s major news was that a 56-year-old man had been assaulted by the handful of Antifa protesters who’d shown up outside the club, beaten severely enough that he was sent to the hospital, and why wasn’t anyone covering that?)

After a year that included Charlottesville and the near election of Roy Moore, the event seemed designed to be as inoffensive as possible, a bonding experience that swept the national turmoil—and their own role in bringing it about—under the rug. Fringe freaks having a normal night in New York City: that was the weirdest part.

Cernovich’s party could not have come at a more complicated time. The far right is still reeling from a string of high-profile failures. Weeks earlier, Steve Bannon, their most high-profile ambassador to mainstream America, had been branded a traitor by Trump and drummed out of Breitbart by its shareholders. (It didn’t matter, several people at the party thought; Breitbart wasn’t that relevant to them anyway.) Prior to that, Milo Yiannopoulos, its culture-war enfant terrible, had crashed in a spectacular fashion: he’d been dismissed from mainstream consideration for his jokes about pedophilia, then scorned by the far right after his much-hyped Free Speech Week, his own attempt at a nationalist bacchanalia, failed miserably.

Absent Bannon and his protégé, Cernovich was the last person on the right with the influence to pull off a convocation of trolls. The reclusive Molyneux had only agreed to come, Cerno said, because he was the host; Wintrich, Ali Akbar, Posobiec, and the rest had all eagerly followed him to New York, hoping to score a speaking slot. But when the venues he’d booked began to pull out less than two days before the party, his own reputation was thrown into limbo. It was one thing for his foray into mainstream media, bolstered by the takedown of John Conyers, to die after he promoted a document falsely accusing Chuck Schumer of sexual harassment. It would be another if he let down 700 people, many of whom had traveled across the country to attend, and embarrassed himself in the eyes of the far right. “If he couldn’t find a venue, he could have scored a political victory and held a happy hour,” said Akbar, one of the speakers at the event. “But he wanted a cultural victory.”

When the first venue canceled one day before the party, Cernovich immediately pulled out his phone and began streaming his furious walk down the halls of Jack Studios in Chelsea, toting his infant daughter and venting to his fan base about how he was “set up” and the owners were suppressing his speech. But underneath the facade, he was terrified. After the stream ended and he left Jack Studios, trailed by a documentary crew from The Atlantic, he stumbled onto the pavement and began dry heaving.

When the second venue canceled the next morning, a desperate Cernovich called in every single favor he could muster to find some venue, any venue, to make the event happen. His crew delivered. Akbar told me that he’d called “every rich Republican woman in Manhattan,” while Posobiec tried shaking down his contacts to get to the far right’s own prince and Manhattan real-estate mogul, Donald Trump Jr. (he never heard back). The caterers, whom he’d already paid $45,000, kept calling him from Long Island, asking exactly where the party would be. “Just start driving towards the city,” Cernovich recalled saying to them. In the end, it took $20,000 in cash, which Cernovich withdrew from a Wells Fargo account and delivered to the owners of FREQ, a camera crew filming him the entire time.

“Everyone wanted me to fail. And that’s why failure wasn’t an option,” Cernovich told me later, referring to the mob of journalists and Internet foes who laughed at his travails as they unfolded. “If this event hadn’t happened, it would have destroyed—people would have understood and forgave me, but I don’t want people to understand and forgive me. I want people to know that if I’m gonna show up and make something happen, we’re going to make it happen. I don’t want forgiveness.”

While the far right celebrated its Night for Freedom, more profound questions loomed over Cernovich and his compatriots regarding the future of the movement. With Bannon in the White House, and then back at Breitbart, the Internet’s far-right misfits had a sense of organization, marching orders, and, most important, a vision for their political ascendance in the Trump era. Now, they are once again searching for meaning, and leadership, on the periphery of power. At one point last year, Cernovich had planned to launch a super PAC, along with two of his close allies, Jeff Giesea and Posobiec, to channel the energy of his online fan-base into a real-world political organization. Trump, after all, had elevated their station. Two months later, they shut it down, writing in a statement that they were too busy with other projects to see it through. On Saturday night, MAGAworld settled for a bar mitzvah, instead.

“Mike's branding—and his on and off attempt to pivot into mainstream respectability—depend on regular doses of media attention,” explained Will Sommer, the campaign editor for The Hill and the author of the Right Richter newsletter, noting some of Cernovich’s recent setbacks. “The problem is that, judging by the event's speeches, plenty of the leading New Right personalities aren't ready for Fox News, much less the mainstream media. Flanked by Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes went on his vile rant against trans people. Mike himself kept recurring to his obsession with supposed global pedophile networks—not exactly the stuff that gets the party going!”

Cernovich himself was more upbeat, as were many of the party’s attendees. As he was about to fly back to California, Cernovich told me that his “proof of concept” had worked; that there was a demand for these events, and that he and his silent partner had even more ambitious plans. His next party will be in D.C., on the same day as Reaganpalooza, CPAC’s hottest after-party hosted by college-aged right-wing activists. Or, as Cernovich called it, “the most boring party.”

“Not everybody is a party boy or was a party boy like I was,” he conceded. “But that’s the idea. I want people to know we throw real parties. We don’t need more boring libertarian or conservative conferences.”