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!
Take as much time as you need, David. Just pop into the comments when you feel up to it, so we know you’re still alive.
@PeeVee It’s tempting to go back and read all his articles knowing now where his true sympathies lie.
Before he did the Columbine massacre, Eric Harris wrote an essay about the atrocities of Nazi Germany; atrocities that he actually enjoyed and that fueled his revenge fantasies, but that he spun in such a way that he fooled his teachers into thinking he was just creatively highlighting the horrors of the fascist regime.
OT. guardian article: Rape and slavery was lure for UK Isis recruits with history of sexual violence
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/07/isis-rape-slavery-british-recruits-islamic-state
Probably not a huge surprise to most mammotheers.
It’s not too surprising that Milo had his own staff and work-shopped his writings and appearances on private Slack channels with chan trolls. The more sophisticated trolls are good at testing the line between speech you can get banned for and very offensive weaponized speech that a forum’s users will tolerate. Also that meant Milo had direct access to people who felt personally “oppressed” by social justice movements, when some of the older Breitbart staff might prefer to focus on politics and think those grievances are silly (like feeling “oppressed” because someone criticizes video games you like).
@eibhear,
ohmygodohmygod sand cat kittens in the wild!!!!
*ahem*
Not sure how to embed from Vimeo, but this link will take you there.
Here’s a pic, just in case someone here hasn’t had the incredible, life-altering experience of seeing them before:
You mean like the one who didn’t understand the Pepe meme, becuase I thought that was hilarious!
Bad news to report. Richard Spencer and his fellow creeps are marching in Charlottsville again.
Christ. My boyfriend (who is black) was working a few blocks from there tonight.
@tim gueguen
Fuck. What are they planning?
(@Orion, hope your bf is ok?)
Fortunately the creeps apparently didn’t hang around long.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/10/07/richard-spencer-leads-another-torchlight-march-in-charlottesville/?utm_term=.c02cb70c63bf
OMG, leave poor Charlottesville alone.
Assholes.
They have done enough to that city.
Here’s the link to the article on Costa Rica:
https://www.theguardian.com/working-in-development/2017/oct/07/how-to-avert-the-apocalypse-take-lessons-from-costa-rica
My earlier comment about the story below on Costa Rica got eaten.
This is an interesting article. I’m not thrilled with the fact that Costa Rica accommodated US imperialism — but I also don’t know how Costa Rica could have refused our country.
Want to avert the apocalypse? Take lessons from Costa Rica
Jason Hickel
Chasing economic growth gains us nothing but global warming. We should follow the lead of tiny Costa Rica, where life expectancy is soaring
Oh, he’s fine. As far as I know nothing much happened tonight, and at any event he was/is at work on the 9th floor of a hotel half a mile away.
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy:
Eeeeeeeeeh, the cutest confused kittens!
Wait, what actually are sand cats? According to the top picture they’re made to be confused.
It’s actually curious how many small cats there are that one generally don’t know about. Big cats, sure, but the small ones? Looking at its description I actually think I’ve seen it on a nature show, but forgotten about it.
@tim gueguen:
I’ve been talking previously about how the neo-nazi playbook is consistent throughout the years and over national borders.
(It’s almost like spending all their energy fighting socialist internationalists made people miss fascist internationalism)
They keep trying the limits of law enforcement with unallowed (but generally not strictly illegal) demonstrations (and those are of course even worse than the allowed ones when it comes to their habitual stomping of marginalized people), in order for us to treat nazis marching in the streets as something that is, while regrettable, permitted and normal.
Look, when I talk about the importance of punching nazis (opinions about which previously presented are mine and mine alone, not to be used to smear others than me. Yeah, I’m looking at you) I’m talking about more than the singular nazi. These things are what I’m talking about.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be so upset about nazis marching with nazi flags on our thoroughfares, it’s not like they’re knifing people while marching.”
No, they hunt down feminists, leftists, dark-skinned people, LGBTQ people and other people they find disagreeable afterwards. With knives. Or worse, I’d guess, in the American context.
They’re all about normalizing what we should find unacceptable by bits and pieces.
Back here in Sweden we’re seeing an uptick in racism and neo-nazism. This can be (softly) traced back to the acceptance of our neo-nazi party as “a party like all others”. But it recapitulates the early nineties in a way that bothers me, because the party that spearheaded that upsurge of racism was “New Democracy” (and if that name isn’t a red flag to you now, it will be), and the majority of their failure was fueled by their chosen politicians’ inability to keep mum about their racism. The rest of was, of course, their incompetence-fueled impotence.
But the party we are demanded (by their mouthpieces) to treat as serious today were then strutting around with swastika armbands, carrying hand grenades (in mother-fucking Sweden), and doing all other sorts of hard-core neo-nazism, and were treated like the neo-nazis they were (you can tell by the court documents regarding the top echelons of the party). But apparently putting on a suit makes them not neo-nazis.
Next time I will tell you about the “Iron pipe scandal.” (Claimed by participants and their supporters to be aluminium, whereas most others claim it was most likely zinced steel, and would the materials matter when we are talking about top echelon (in their party, mind you) politicians grabbing improvised weapons from a construction site to double back and fight a drunkard who was a pisser at them?)
So, I started talking about neo-nazis (again) and vomited out a wall of text (again) filled to the brim with pathos (again). I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not convinced that I should feel any semblance of shame about it.
Though I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten some point I intended to make. Oh, well, we’ll do this again shortly.
@Feline
Thanks for the history lesson about Nazis in Sweden. I live in the USA, and this was new news to me.
This is probably only the second post I’ve made here, and IIRC the last one, like this one, was a quibble about one sentence.
Is it unethical, though? I can see a reporter putting a draft of their article in front of the subject to make sure they aren’t misrepresenting statements, opinions, or basic facts. The reporter can still decide whether to change the article based on the critique or not.
The unethical part would be changing the article to be less accurate so that the subject looks good. Or, for that matter, taking the subject’s statements at face value with no independent fact checking, like the many “reports” that simply regurgitate a press release.
Hey, Boink x 5!!
*Waves* ?
Meow?
@Frank Mitchell, if your only reason for commenting is to quibble on details, well, I hope you aren’t expecting a great reception :p Come on in and say hello at the very least! Or at a minimum give us a “hello fellow kids” or something.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt! But it’s not a great thing to do to a community, is all. Anyways!
Hi, hello!
I disagree, a journalist shouldn’t share an advance copy of investigative work with the people involved. They can certainly contact those people to confirm details of the story, but sending advance copies for comment allows them to edit to make themselves look better. Changing verb tenses from active to passive or changing word choices to more general and less guilty.
Even if the journalist doesn’t let that happen, it still lets the person get ahead of the story, preparing statements, hiding evidence, or other nefarious stuff.
There’s no reason to give an advance copy to someone in a story in my opinion; nothing I can think of in my morning-addled mind at least. Ask questions to clarify points? Sure. Give them the actual article? Heck no.
Welcome, and stay awhile!
QFT.
Dan Lyons is crying on twitter about how he’s not alt-right, he’s not, look at these totally not alt-right articles he wrote, all the while lying about apologising to Zoe and Amber.
Hi there! I’mhardly having time to write here, but reading as always. David I hope you get better soon!! Lots of hugs and kitties for you.
Well, you might see it in your imagination, but that’s not an actual practice, and in fact at least where I do excercise journalism it’s severely frowned upon.
Also, we journalists don’t usually send advance copies of a newspiece to anyone not involved in the publication of said news, except maybe someone of our extreme trust (I do occasionally exchange pieces of work with my also journalist cousin for suggestions and polishing details).
Even when it’s a piece on someone who does activism with me (most of my material) the usual etiquette is to share with them the already publish news.
Now, regarding an investigation pieces, I would say it’s openly dishonest to send an advance copy to the subject in question. Verifying details and checking data is one thing, sharing your whole work is a very different one.
I’d think the only time a journalist would send out a piece on advance to the subject of such piece, is if s/he works for something like People magazine where access to celebrities is more important than what actually gets published, and it’s a feel-good piece. And I could even be wrong about them.
Steve is in his sixties and refers to Milo as “Dude” in his emails and he also thinks Milo can save civilization.
Just think about that for a moment.