If you haven’t already read Laurie Penny’s brilliant and unnerving account of her surreal evening as Milo Yiannopoulos’ guest at the Gays for Trump shindig he held in Cleveland earlier this week, stop whatever you’re doing and read it now. Then come back and discuss.
If you need more persuasion: It’s a sharp and scary analysis of “how trolls took the wheel of the clown car of modern politics,” as Penny puts it, and it’s full of weird details about the event and Penny’s strange non-relationship with Milo, whom she describes as “a charming devil and one of the worst people I know” and someone she simply can’t convince she’s not actually friends with.
Perhaps the oddest part of Penny’s piece, though, is her description of her encounter with a fellow we all know too well: Roosh Valizadeh, whom she describes all too accurately as a “headline-hunting nano-celebrity in the world of ritualised internet misogyny.”
“He asks me what I’m doing here,” Penny writes. “I ask him the same question.”
It’s a good question, given that Roosh is a raging homophobe who bans gays from commenting on his sites.
The interaction that follows is the most surreal episode in a deeply surreal evening. Roosh is tall and well-built and actually rather good-looking for, you know, a monster. I have opportunity to observe this because he puts himself right up in my personal space, blocking my view of the room with his T-shirt, and proceeds, messily and at length, to tell me what my problem is.
Number one: my haircut, and he’s telling me this as a man, makes my face look round. This is absolutely true. Number two: I seek to destroy the nuclear family, and disturb traditional relationships between men and women. This is also true, although I remind him that the nuclear family as it is currently conceived is actually a fairly recent social format. He insists that it’s thousands of years old, and asks me if I truly believe that it’s right for gay men to be able to adopt children. I tell him that I do. He appears as flummoxed by this as I do by his presence at what is supposed to be a party to celebrate Gay republicans. He’s here for the same reason I am: Milo invited him.
So, yeah.
For what it’s worth, I think Penny overstates Milo’s “weaponised insincerity.” He’s certainly a cynical enough opportunist, who jumped aboard GamerGate and then on the alt-right car of the Trump Train not because he gave a shit about any of the alleged issues involved but in order to promote himself. But he’s hardly the boy with the “fewest f*cks to give.” He actually gives a lot of f*cks, at least about himself. Like most narcissists, he’s acutely sensitive to slights and lashes out at anyone who pierces his vanity — much like his adopted “daddy” Trump.
But if you want to know how we got to this weird place we’re in now, Penny’s piece offers some invaluable insights.
PoM said
The majority of the press behave this way because to risk Trumplethinskin’s (thanks to whomever I stole that from) ire is to risk loss of access to him. To lose access is to shoot one’s self in the foot, professionally speaking. That’s asking a lot.
That said, I wish it would happen anyway because it’d be great for the monster Trumpenstein to lose some of his free publicity. I’d love to see a bunch of reporters get themselves banned just to watch the scramble to get alternative media to fill the coverage gap. The campaign can’t live on what little media oxygen they’d get from Faux News alone. Watching the alt-right fringe try to go mainstream all of a sudden would be a horriblefunny spectacle.
Milo might not believe his own horseshit but if the America these fools are pushing for comes to pass, well its hard to see how he’ll escape the goon squad. He’s not famous (or rich enough) to be saved as a “token.”
POM: That implies the journalists and the corporations that bought them off would risk losing their biggest money maker in a long while. Journalistic integrity means nothing there.
TYT, Secular Talk and other new media outlets are alot more critical and nuanced. They can get away with their words and get paid for being honest and intelligent about the subjects they speak of, without worry that someone is going to choke their funding.
It’s basically an unspoken rule that a candidate will receive mostly positive press during their party’s convention. It’s silly, but it’s how it works. It’s the same every election cycle. Expect a small bump in the polls that will be erased immediately following the DNC.
Well, that was a trip.
Well, there’s your problem. You can’t control the alt right; they can’t even control themselves.
Great article. Somewhere in Gonzo heaven Hunter S. Thompson is giving a thumbs up.
nvm
@WWTH
*Sighs with world fatigue*
^^^^^
There’s a not dissimilar thing here. New Governments are given a 100 day ‘honeymoon’ period before the press (or indeed the Opposition) start putting the boot in too hard. Sort of lets them ‘bed in’ and find their feet.
@Alan
They haven’t won yet! They’re trying to win! When else are you gonna give em the business if not the convention? Candidate speeches, the party platform, comments about subgroups. Oh, I bet the press is gonna put Trump thru the ringer come December!
Meanwhile, Obama’s 1st 100 was wall to wall, to quote Roy Zimmerman, ‘I’m not saying Barack Obama is a foreign born, Islamist puppy eater. I’m not saying that… I’m saying you decide.’
Milo Yiannopoulos’ name appeared in a major Swedish newspaper the other day and gave me a bit of a start. Apparently he’s been invited as a speaker at “Järva Pride” – the “alternative” pride parade arranged by people with close ties to nationalist party Sweden Democrats, as well as the kind of “alternative” news site that uses the word “cultural marxists” a lot.
(Järva is an area in northern Stockholm with high unemployment and a large percentage of immigrants. The parade is widely regarded as part of an agenda to position homophobia as a uniquely Islamic trait and the LGBT+ community is, to put it mildly, not amused. Last year’s parade gathered all of 20 participants.)
@joekster
I’ve seen it before and if they are being honest about it it’s a tell for people that just follow the group with no introspection or effort to think about why they do what they do, until the costs of the behavior affect more than other people. Then I’m torn between empathy + teaching moment or rubbing it in.
Axecaliber is correct: the election campaign is the time to vet the candidates in the media and give them a serious-business stress test. It’s not the time to soft-pedal them and let them find their feet.
I know. Leastwise, I know that intellectually … I just can’t seem to internalize it the way I need to do. It’s such a failure of journalism, such a mockery of what “freedom of the press” is supposed to mean, that I can’t seem to “get” it on a visceral level.
They give local government hell around here for inadequate board and commission diversity (an important problem!) but take a stone-faced non-position on the topic of Trump saying he wants to extort money from NATO or he’ll kick them to the curb (a literal WWIII-level problem).
@ axe
Yeah, should have made clear that ‘moratorium’ here only applies to the post election period. Putting the boot in at party conventions is very much fair game (apart from after the Brighton Bomb when they held back a bit; still criticised but it was a tone thing)
@ POM
We have special rules here under our Representation of the People Act so parties can’t deny access to the press at conventions. (There are also obligations on the press and media to provide certain amounts of coverage)
Of course, the parties still have leverage in terms of giving preference of access to private ‘briefings’ and exclusives outside the main hall.
ETA: the NATO thing is a bit of an issue. Under the treaty the members are supposed to contribute at least 2% of spending to defence; but there are better ways of adressing it though!
If anyone was curious, here’s that song I mentioned:
@ Alan
The 2% GDP military spending is actually just a guideline, not a strict obligation. Also, the 2014 agreement was that member nations would hit that target by 2024. Hilariously, it seems Greece was one of the few members to reach that goal last year. Maybe there were better things to focus on?
@ Bakunin
Heh, yeah. Didn’t Greece get embroiled with some kerfuffle about the EU? Thank goodness we Brits would never succumb to that.
But of all the things for Trump?! Nice way to alienate all the allies he’d need in any future coalition, scare the shit out of the Eastern NATO states and get Putin ordering new tanks.
Related, although a month old now: Empire of Loathing’s Your Fuhrer Is a Yam, a pretty good family tree of the alt-Right that attempts to connect the dots between, say, Milo and Roosh, and also meaningfully denies them credit for the Rise of Trump.
Wow…I’m not much of a reader, so I usually just skim through things, but I’m so glad I read that word for word. I didn’t intend to at first, but she’s such a great writer, it really sucked me in, and depressing as it was, that was one of the best things I’ve ever read.
@Mike Hisandry:
Very interesting read, that link. Thanks!
I just saw this via my Twitter feed this morning:
http://thebaffler.com/blog/laurie-penny-self-care
It’s also by Laurie Penny; not about Trump/Milo etc. but about the care of the self. She sums up the problematic way that neo-liberalism presents self-care as panacea (similar to Marx’s view of religion), but then she goes further and argues that we nevertheless need to hang on to a certain kind of self-care. From the end of the piece:
Apologies that this is not 100% related to the current thread – I thought some of you might appreciate it and it seemed the best spot to share 🙂
… Ew.
Well, that’s a massive overestimation of his influence. As usual. Even among LGBT users, he’s a blip on the radar. I mean, he did somehow manage to get more followers than Dan Savage, but let’s look at some numbers:
Milo Yiannopoulos: ~330k followers
RuPaul: 749k (2.25x more)
Rosie O’Donnell: 882k (2.67x)
George Takei: 1.81m (5.5x)
Jane Lynch: 1.91m (5.8x)
Alan Carr: 5.19m (15.7x)
Neil Patrick Harris: 25.4m (77x)
Ellen DeGeneres: 60.9m (184.5x)
@repentantphonebooth
Correct.
Even though, to paraphrase, the unexamined life is a miserable one.