By David Futrelle
So you all need to drop whatever you’re doing to read Buzzfeed’s amazing exposé of Breitbart’s use of conscienceless troll journalist Milo Yiannopoulos to push white supremacism into the American political mainstream (again).
Basing his reporting in part on a vast trove of leaked Milo emails, Buzzfeed reporter Joseph Bernstein is able to offer a somewhat gruesome behind-the scenes look at the symbiotic relationship between Milo and Breitbart’s Steve Bannon during the crucial months leading up to Trump’s electoral college victory.
If you thought the end product of the Milo/Breitbart collaboration was disgusting, well, it turns out that the sausage factory that produced it was even more disgusting. And lousy with Nazis to boot.
Again, you need to read the whole piece. But in the meantime, let me whet your appetite a little with what I’d like to call the 5 Nazi-est moments from Buzzfeed’s exposé of the Milo/Breitbart alt-right sausage factory.
Let’s start with:
Milo serenading a gaggle of sieg-heiling Nazis at a Dallas karaoke bar.
Roll the video;
https://twitter.com/BettyBowers/status/916146881813794816
According to Buzfeed, Milo later told them that his “his ‘severe myopia’ made it impossible for him to see the Hitler salutes a few feet away.”
Milo using Nazi references for his not-very-secure passwords.
As Buzzfeed explains:
In an April 6 email, Allum Bokhari mentioned having had access to an account of Yiannopoulos’s with “a password that began with the word Kristall.” Kristallnacht, an infamous 1938 riot against German Jews carried out by the SA — the paramilitary organization that helped Hitler rise to power — is sometimes considered the beginning of the Holocaust. In a June 2016 email to an assistant, Yiannopoulos shared the password to his email, which began “LongKnives1290.” The Night of the Long Knives was the Nazi purge of the leadership of the SA. The purge famously included Ernst Röhm, the SA’s gay leader. 1290 is the year King Edward I expelled the Jews from England.
Milo’s editors repeatedly having to remove horrible anti-Semitic jokes from his articles because they didn’t want to be quite that obvious about what they were pushing
Frequently, Alex Marlow’s job editing him came down to rejecting anti-Semitic and racist ideas and jokes. …
Editing a September 2016 Yiannopoulos speech, Marlow approved a joke about “shekels” but added that “you can’t even flirt with OKing gas chamber tweets,” asking for such a line to be removed.
Milo sending “his” now-notorious guide to the alt-right to several prominent alt-rightists for approval before publishing it
Needless to say, ethical journalists don’t generally send copies of their articles to the subjects of their articles before publishing them.
Interesting sidenote: Though Milo’s underling Allum Bokhari basically wrote the whole article, Buzzfeed reports, Milo wanted his name alone on it, telling his editor in an email that “I want the glory here.” Bokhari, wanting some credit for the article he’d written, appealed to Milo’s Machiavellian instincts by suggesting that “it actually lowers the risk if someone with a brown-sounding name shares the BL.” (Bokhari is half-Pakistani.) Ultimately, the article was credited to both of them, with Milo;s name listed first.
Milo has collaborators, just like the Nazis did!
Despite his obvious odiousness and his many ties to white supremacists and literal Nazis, Milo managed to win himself a number of liberal allies on the down low. As Buzzfeed notes:
Yiannopoulos had hidden helpers in the liberal media against which he and Bannon fought so uncompromisingly. A long-running email group devoted to mocking stories about the social justice internet included, predictably, Yiannopoulos’s friend Ann Coulter, but also Mitchell Sunderland, a senior staff writer at Broadly, Vice’s women’s channel. …
“Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos in May 2016, along with a link to an article by the New York Times columnist Lindy West, who frequently writes about fat acceptance. …
Dan Lyons, the veteran tech reporter … emailed Yiannopoulos (“you little troublemaker”) periodically to wonder about the birth sex of Zoë Quinn, another GamerGate target, and Amber Discko, the founder of the feminist website Femsplain, and to suggest a story about the public treatment of the venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who had been accused of sexual assault in a lawsuit that the plaintiff eventually dropped.
Lovely.
And these little details are merely the tip of the Nazi iceberg. You’ve got to read the whole thing.
UNRELATED HEALTH NOTE: Sorry I haven’t been able to resume regular posts just yet. I appreciate your patience and support and will get back to regular posting as soon as I can, but I don’t know if that will be a matter of days or longer. Thanks again, everyone!
@Dimmy
Ohlmann has the thrust of what I’m getting at. You’re right, they know at they’re dealing with straight-up Neo-Nazis, but my point is that they’re under some misguided apprehension that they’re the ones in control, able to gin up outrage for votes and campaign dollars when necessary, but then tuck them back under the carpet when it’s time to look good for the cameras. Karl Rove actually told a reporter once that he calls the religious fundamentalist base of the GOP (forgive the ableist slur) “the crazies” in casual conversation. That’s how little regard the Republicans has for the people that put them in power. The same game (and they see it as a game) is being played with the Neo-Nazis: gin up outrage about SJWs by leaning heavily on racism and sexism, then turn around and say you’re just a Classical Liberal in favour of the “open marketplace of ideas”, by the way, buy tickets to my next speaking gig and support me on Patreon. It doesn’t work out that way, as Driftglass’ Little Red State Fundy parable reflects.
I’m not offering excuses by any stretch: they knew who they were networking with. Like Karl Rove, Milo Y and his network of informants deserve to be fired and never let into polite society again for the forces they’ve willingly cozied up to. I want this to stick to them and follow their careers forever. At the same time, Auerbach and Sunderland were clearly able to justify their actions to themselves, and I think understanding that mentality is important in countering it effectively. Because as others said in this thread: they’re far from the only ones willing to buddy up to the worst of humanity when it’s convenient.
@Feline, going back a few days:
The New Democratic Party of Canada, which dates back to the 1960s under that name (and back to the 1930s as the CCF), thumb their noses at these usurpers of the name.
(The NDP are social democrats, heavy into union support, and still one of the three major parties in Canada.)
I hope David is doing well.
On a related note, have you seen the recent outcries against Wolfenstein II as being too political because *GASP* you’re encouraged to kill Nazis?! The reaction of outraged “Not-Nazi-White-Boys” on Reddit are absolutely delicious.
@Dimmy
As a caveat, I’ll add that to the extent that they care about control, it’s insofar as it doesn’t disrupt their own respectability. If the Pepe brigade is running amok with harassment and threats to the “SJWs”, they don’t really care about controlling them. But once they start being seen in public marching with Kekistan flags, then they become a liability and you’ll see the so-called “moderates” issuing their denials as Cathy Young did.
Awh, you guyse <3 My troll vanquishing attempts usually end up with me looking pedantic while the troll is saying horrible things that i should be addressing directly. You're makin' me better, not the other way around!
I have learned to keep in mind that every valid argument I make can somewhat elevate the statement I am confronting, so I’m more selective in the trolls I engage with now. Not sure if that’s right or not.
The coalition between the pepes/channers and the nazis is complicated. Far as I know it was basically an infiltration of the troll brigades by white supremacists, who considered them a useful recruiting ground and social media tool – and they were right. Took the trolls’ desire to break social norms and just pushed them towards fascist ideas, and it took off. Now they’re the Nazi Auxillia, to be used as a screen and sacrificed for the cause. So, yeah, just the advance wing of the garbage brigade.
Welp, I’m a little confused by this thread, because I thought it was Markus then it was Fred, but I’m still not done, so I’ll keep going, also hi Scildfreja, you are cool, and I’m glad to be posting in the same thread as you.
@Alan
A number of conservative states have adopted “Tea Party” legislative proposals that more or less allow private criminal indictment. The Nazis just had to appear before a magistrate and show that they have probable cause for an arrest.
A lot of the Tea Party legislation looks like it was written by some radical militia group filled with “freeman on the land” types.
Maybe a promising way of dealing with the anti-choice brigade?
The asbo – AntiSocial Behaviour Order
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/10/anti-abortion-abuse-women-asbo-ealing-nhs-protests
(my italics)
Sounds very appropriate to me.
I don’t remember if it’s been mentioned yet, but this Weinstein sexual assault story is sickening.
And Donna Karan totally threw women under the bus when supporting him. Essentially saying, with the way women dress what do they expect?
I read some of the allegations as reported by the NYT and they are terrifying.
ETA: OOPS looks like David just posted about this – CARRY ON EVERYONE sorry about that!
Apropos of the “don’t feed the trolls” discussion, I’ve been poking around in the archives and came on this from David in a post about twitter cracking down on harrassers (from Feb 2015):
The “don’t feed the trolls” approach that is so often advocated by those who try to minimize and/or excuse the harassment does not in fact work; indeed, “not feeding” trolls encourages them, by making clear they will face no repercussions for their abusive behavior.
“Don’t feed the trolls” FEEDS THE TROLLS.
Dreemr,
Thanks! ?
(Include yourself. You’re awesome, as the rest are!)
As an aside, I helped myself to the welcome package, as nobody extended it to me; I’m pretty used to going after what I want, lolol.
I don’t think it’s stupidity as much as exploiting people to gain power, but in a reckless, self-destructive manner. Not all that uncommon, really.
@History Nerd
Um… that’s what the Tea Party is.
@Jenora Feuer:
Granted. But I was talking about more modern issues. Which I did not make clear, so it’s my bad.
I was talking about how modern neo-nazis and their fellow travelers wrap themselves in political terms that are not theirs as though they were magical incantations. And since we’re seeing an increase in the number of numbnuts claiming that the nazis were socialists, it seems to work with the base.
@Scildfreja:
Look, you’re doing it awesomely. Period.
However, were you alone you’d be done for. It really needs people doing all things. Treating their arguments as real and shooting them down? Good. People mocking their arguments because they’re born of bullshit? Good. People savaging them because they’re obviously arguing in bad faith? Good. And so on. Having a number of people attacking them from several different angles is important, because they’re bad-faith actors, so we can’t meet them one-on-one in good faith and expect to emerge victorious (for any measure of victory).
“Dog-piling” they whine, doggedly, and they hurl “echo-chamber” as though it’d stick to people who’d be fairly described as an indistinguishable pile of fur and gnashing teeth.
Although a thing I keep wondering about, since there’s a lot of people claiming to be leftists and also having issues with this brand spanking new notion of “call-out culture”, there’s that age-old question: “Are you new here?”
I mean, I grew up with a left more splintered than the christian church, and they were like a family. Vicious like a bag full of weasels, parts of it not talking to others, that whole thing. Denunciations were hardly rare, is what I’m saying. But these days we have to get in line behind some early thirties white boy uncomfortable with minorities?
Get in line behind how the democratic party took power, eh?
Nah, this pale ass can get behind people who’re rude to me, it was never about my feelings, was it?
May I put forth a theory I just developed?
Milo thought he was one of them, but he never was. He was being used by them – a gay man of Jewish heritage openly in a relationship with a black man? You want to find a way to make identity politics work your (white supremacist) way, finding somebody who fits that description to state, over and over again, that the real reason they’re being oppressed is because they’re a white man and the real oppressors are feminists and leftists… That, right there, is a masterstroke of using identity politics to work for them while screaming against identity politics all along, of course.
Once they’d got the conversation mainstream and accepted (Trump is president, Bannon still has so much power, Nazis are marching in the street, so that’s very, very mainstream), what more use do they have for a gay man of Jewish heritage who is dating/married to a black man? Just because he was silly enough to think he was one of them? What do they need him for anymore? They’ve got what they wanted from him. You can be a white supremacist without disclaimers now. Milo was their disclaimer, and they don’t need one anymore.
So who’s surprised that the ones who orchestrated the entire thing, who organized this into a movement funnelled through Breitbart and similar, are dropping him like a hot brick? Or that all of these videos and emails are coming out now? I don’t believe all these leaks and the timing of them are coincidental at all.
He was never one of them, because he’s what Nazis hate, no matter how much he helps the Nazis, and no matter how much he believes he’s one of them without exactly calling himself a Nazi. Look how he slowly went from Bannon’s best boy to having to go through other people to get a message to Bannon!
None of this is to say that Milo is a poor misguided boy. He’s not, he’s a hateful bigot. But he’s a hateful bigot who made a serious error in judgment, as he seems to be discovering in the last few months.
Unless I’m completely wrong and they start backing him again, of course, because they find a use for him again.
(None of this is to try to excuse him. At all. He deserves none. He acted knowing very well what he was doing. It’s me trying to figure out why the alt-right poster boy is not quite the poster boy anymore, and what that means for how far the alt-right has reached towards their final goal of total white supremacy.)
@Scildfreja
There was “ironic” racism on 4chan back in 2003-2005, including using racial slurs as general insults for people who aren’t necessarily members of the racial group. A number of people archived Stormfront over the years, and users on Stormfront were aware of the “ironic” racism on 4chan and discussed the possibility of using 4chan as a recruiting tool, but didn’t at first for several reasons. The older white nationalists felt like they couldn’t work with people who called each other f-words (the homophobic slur, because the older white nationalists were extremely averse to gay people), or people who posted porn photos depicting mixed-race couples.
As people became more aware of cyber-bullying, they started to seriously advocate putting more legal restrictions on what people could get away with. Congress amended the federal anti-stalking law in 2006 with language that could theoretically mean it’s a federal felony to write posts with the intention to make someone annoyed or upset if the conduct is severe enough. There was more coverage of trolls bullying people online until the targets killed themselves, there were some high-profile arrests of 4chan users including the Sarah Palin email hacking case and the “Operation Payback” retaliatory attacks against anti-piracy groups and financial institutions that refused to process payments for WikiLeaks. To some degree, all that further radicalized a lot of 4chan users against the US federal government. At that point, a younger generation of white nationalists came in and started “converting” people to extremist authoritarian right-wing nationalism, then you had GamerGate and Milo, etc.
If you talked to 4chan users in 2010, they would describe themselves as probably radical individualist anarchists who are left-wing or center-left in some capacity. What’s important is that they were always very radically anti-government and anti-establishment, but they weren’t social anarchists with a concentration on the oppression of marginalized groups (the point isn’t really who counts as an “anarchist”). The self-interest aspect probably made it a lot easier to recruit them into far-right nationalism. If you look at channers who still claim to be anarchists or anarcho-communists in some way, they’re a lot more into Max Stirner than Mikhail Bakunin or Emma Goldman. Lots of channers also believed in Illuminati conspiracy theories already, so it wasn’t so hard to go from that to believing “teh j00z” were behind everything.
@Tashilicious
I want to %100 agree with you.
I’d also like to add that if you’re black, or any other minority, you know racism didn’t die, it became more covert. Now, we ignored it, and it’s full force in your face.
Trust me I know. Try having an old woman at Six Flags call you and your group of black friends the n word. ( I was 13)
Old Bat.
Racism never left. We’ve been so desperately trying to tell people that.
(Insert Rascism doesn’t exist quote here)