Six Thousand People Attend Crooked Con in Washington

“The bigger the tent, the closer to God,” hung from a blue ceiling in downtown Washington on Saturday, where six thousand people descended on Crooked Con.

Jubilation filled the venue with Beyoncé and Chappell Roan on the playlist as attendees paid two hundred bucks a ticket. Between panels like “Making Liberalism Cool Again” and “From Anti-Trump to Pro-Something” in the MS Now Lounge, speakers headed to the Take Center where event organizers encouraged creators to publish à la minute.

Phone tripods sat in front of branded Crooked Media backdrops that read “Freedom and Content for All.” Barrett Adair spent most of her day at the Take Center.

Crooked Con was launched last November, coming after the AmericaFest gathering established by Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer who died last year. But Adair added that by and large, opponents are not inherently better, they just invested in the infrastructure earlier.

Breeze Wood and Bri Dineen agreed with that assessment. Wood and Dineen believe alternative perspectives still have space to grow, even though conservative personalities like Alex Clark deliver popular programs such as Wellness Apothecary that secure spots inside the top ten health-and-fitness charts on Apple and Spotify.

“Like, you’re tradwife-adjacent,” Wood said to Dineen, “but not a tradwife.”

“That’s kind of where my whole account popped off. Like, I make sourdough.”

Politicians are also learning to function as creators.

“What this says to Democrats is, ‘Congratulations, you’re free now from being beholden to special interests,’ right? Whether it’s Lockheed Martin, whether it’s AIPAC, you can win if you have an organic following,” Chi Ossé said.

Morris Katz, a partner at Fight Agency, took a bite of a cookie while discussing changes in media. Morris Katz recently worked on ads for Gina Hinojosa and is best known for his work on Zohran Mamdani’s successful mayoral bid in New York.

Lis Smith thinks there is still a role for the traditional press in political media.

Smith pointed out that legacy journalism outlets broke numerous major political stories during this election cycle, including the reporting concerning Kansas Senator Roger Marshall taking legal action against constituents over unpaid medical bills.

As the sun began to set outside, Megan Chopra sipped a glass of white wine and puffed from a blue vape while her friend Scott F. Blue II sat across from her drinking a Maker’s Mark and soda.

“I didn’t want to be the asshole ordering an old-fashioned at the Crooked Media thing,” Blue said.

Chopra, a political-media strategist and content creator who posts online as Megan Thuy, felt conflicted about the day’s festivities. She and Blue had joked about going to the event to lib out, but she felt the party’s establishment and the mainstream media should not take credit for the work of grassroots organizers.

Blue agreed with that sentiment.

And yet, “if we don’t make meaningful change, it’s going to swing back even harder the other way.”