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!
I have myopia. If his myopia is so bad that he couldn’t see the Nazi salutes, then he couldn’t see to walk around the room.
@Calmdown Yes, I feel that too.
@David
OT: This is terrifying. Nowhere to go.
Prominent Antarctic Geologist Accused of Sexually Harassing Colleagues: ‘Today I’m Going to Make You Cry’
The commenters say that academia is rampant with abuse of all sorts. Sickening. . . .
https://jezebel.com/prominent-antarctic-geologist-accused-of-sexually-haras-1819228922
What I gotta ask is who the fuck would want to collaborate with Milo and Bannon?
I wouldn’t work with them for the same reason I wouldn’t eat dog shit I find at the park
@David
I hope you feel much better soon!
As an aside:
When “manliness” tends to define itself (at least in part) by it’s contempt for femininity, your society is sick beyond measure.
Not trying to derail, but can someone explain why the alt-right is obsessed with Taylor Swift?
Get well soon David and thank you for this update on the appalling pile of contaminated waste that is Breitbart, Milo and the gang.
So Lyons finally got that “apology” to Zoë.
https://twitter.com/UnburntWitch/status/916511964741779459
I read Lyons apology and it seemed pretty poor, but I don’t have a lot of context because I don’t know much about Lyons. Could anybody recommend a Nazi I could email to ask about Lyons’ genitals, in order to get to know him better?
Also, sorry to double post, but where the fuck is his apology to trans women?
*vomits*
Me too. I’m not in the slightest bit shocked that a man from a pretty dudebroish media organization is not an ally despite working for a supposedly feminist arm of that organization.
Probably because she’s pretty, thin and lots of little girls idolize her. She also IDs as a feminist despite not fitting the stereotypes of one. There’s a lot of criticisms about her brand of feminism, but that’s besides the point since antifeminists don’t actually know anything about feminism. They just know they don’t like.
Well, that looked 100% genuine and sincere. It sure did.
If he didn’t know Milo or anything about him, why would he email him at all? Even if you set aside the gross transphobia that he did not even remotely apologize for, he had to have emailed him because he knew enough to him to ask him a question in the first place.
http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/interview-with-bartender-who-kicked-milo-yiannopoulos-out-of-karaoke-9948271
@WWTH
At the risk of sounding/being cynical, that’s because it’s kind of a marketing point, personally I suspect the same can be said of at least some of the businesses that display the rainbow flag and claim to be LGBT friendly.
An idle thought I’ve had while passing some of these places can be summed up thusly: ‘Nice flag, I wonder if their LGBT support extends to hiring trans* folk?’
@WWYH,
Thanks for clearing that up. I wasn’t sure whether they were idolising her for being white, blond, and thin, or hating her for being a feminist.
By the way, sand cat kittens have been filmed in the wild for the first time. The article is in “The Independent”, but I’m afraid I don’t know how to link.
It’s both. They hate all feminists but they get the obsessive hate boners for the younger more conventionally attractive feminists. Like, they mostly ignore bell hooks but obsess about everything that Jessica Valenti does. Even though the former is far more influential in feminism
@WWTH,
Sure, and you couldn’t make it up! Don’t these eejits have lives? Meanwhile, sand cat kittens!
@Ooglyboggles
Nice animal pix. Is that a Pallas cat at the top? It’s beautiful.
I hope you feel better soon, David. I really value your work, and the whole community here at WHTM.
I almost wish I hadn’t read that Buzzfeed piece. I found it that disturbing.
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
That article about companies’ right to deny birth control enraged me, but sadly, I’m not surprised. I hope the 53% of white women voters (or whatever the figure was) who voted for Trump are happy /sarcasm here, of course.
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
I bet Viagra is still covered though.
@PeeVee – thank you for the link to that interview.
@Everyone especially Ooglyboggles – thank you for the sweet animal pics/gifs/etc.!
I am going to go look at cute animal compilations for a couple of YEARS now.
OT: An article about how anti-Trump women are seeking refuge in romance novels:
Romance still has a lot of inclusion problems – that’s changing, but at a glacial pace – but it’s probably the only genre that celebrates women and female empowerment so consistently, and the only book genre written and read overwhelmingly by women. It deserves a better reputation than it has.
PeeVee – thanks for that link. So Milo and his crew didn’t tip the bartender? Color ME surprised. My mom taught me if you can’t afford to tip the bartender, stay home and drink.
Being able to afford to tip and just not doing it is a social gaffe she probably never imagined. Granted, for this group of cholmondeleys that’s like acne on a leper.
@Rober Walker-Smith – I looked up “cholmondeley” and I’m still not sure what you mean by it here! But the word made me smile.
What did not make me smile: Milo Y pushing Breitbart to be more racist. As if they were deficient in racism.
David: First, welcome back. I’m so sorry to read about your ongoing health concerns. As someone who manages chronic illness, I know that it can (and usually does) turn your life from sugar to shit in 0.25 seconds. I really appreciate all the work you do. If you’re not averse to more…esoteric treatment/pain management, I might know some Things.
Soooooooooooo about Taylor Swift, who I never liked.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/30/article-1224117-0704AD1F000005DC-399_468x585.jpg
This pic and story were mostly swept under the rug, with Swift’s fans and p.r. saying that she didn’t know what was going on – a running theme for Swift, who optimized her barefoot-maiden version of White Woman’s Tears after that Big Mean Black Dude (you know the one…) hurt her feelings on stage! Also, she’s never dated a Black dude – Nazis like that, a LOT.
More importantly, she’s never renounced her trash racist fans. Having observed her history, maybe folks will start asking her harder questions.
What else? OH! If you haven’t bought Zoe Quinn’s “Crash Override” yet, you should. It’s REALLY good. Not just saying that cuz I’m in it.
@dreemr & Robert Walker-Smith, you’re welcome.
Here is a link about Taylor Swift, written by Mitchell Sunderland, also featured in the Buzzfeed article, and newly let go from Broadly:(Oh, the alt-right palace intrigue!)
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/ae5x8a/cant-shake-it-off-how-taylor-swift-became-a-nazi-idol
Broadly is a bizarrely misogynistic name for a women-centric site.