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 feel so much more contempt for Milo now that I know that he knows that the Night of Long Knives happened. Jesus you would think the self-preservation instinct would kick in…but no apparently.
I did it about… three times in my time in journalism. Once when it was a highly emotionally sensitive issue with a victim (I had the victim read it); and twice or so for highly technical issues. The technical stuff I did warn them they were only allowed to *suggest* and that I may not take their suggestions into consideration. (And I didn’t, either.)
Generally reputable journalists do not do this, and if someone asks you to, the answer is no. If someone says “Or we won’t do the article,” the answer is “Oh, I see. I may have to seek alternative sources, then. Goodbye.”
@feline
I remember following that. I grew up in Oregon where there is a strong white supremacist core, so I’d try to keep my eyes on what was happening with that around the world. It has seen steady growth since the 90s and I think you’re right. It’s people’s unwillingness to either acknowledge it or treat it as abhorrent.
Remember when Laura Ingraham threw a Nazi salute at the RNC announcement of Trump? It was SUPER CLEAR and it was VERY CLEAR who it was targeting. But people refused to see it for that. They said it was an awkward wave. But the smirk on her face gives it away. Also the fact that the administration is rife with Nazis.
In the 90s I thought people were ignoring the rise of white supremacy because the signs weren’t clear enough for them. Now I see it doesn’t matter how clear the signs are. I don’t know the next step.
Admittedly it’s pretty difficult to see or hear any problems when your eyes are shut tight, your fingers are in your ears and you’re screaming ‘lalalalalala’ at the top of your lungs.
I would disagree. bell hooks (should I capitalize at the start of a sentence??) is ignored because she is currently keeping a low profile, while Jessica Valenti still has a regular column. Neither is woman is young, nor conventionally attractive, at least to manosphere crowd.
Markus,
I just used those two names as an example. Was that your quibble or are you denying that there’s a sexual component to their hatred of certain feminists. Or for that matter, their misogyny in general?
I mean…the whole point of being Nazi/Neo-Nazi/alt-right/authoritarian/totalitarian/WHATEVER is believing that you, personally, are the walking incarnation of Real Ultimate Power. That you are Mr. Numero Uno Game-Player. Obviously nobody’s ever going to play you.
@weirwoodtreehugger
No, I think your basic premise has merit, but I disagree with that example. I don’t think many of those guys have a hate boner for Jessica Valenti.
I would speculate that much of the vitriol directed at Anita Sarkeesian is sexual in nature.
“at least to manosphere crowd”. Pretty sure that their actual standard aren’t that high, despite all their conversation about the wall and HB10
Markus:
No hate for Jessica Valenti?
http://fortune.com/2016/07/31/bestselling-feminist-author-jessica-valenti-quits-social-media-after-rape-and-death-threats-directed-at-daughter/
She is back on Twitter now, where she just posted screenshots of more harrassment she gets.
I think you’ll need to re-evaluate your “I don’t think many of those guys have a hate boner for Jessica Valenti.” stance.
Wrong.
Nobody cares about your boner.
(You can couch your boner notes in “I’m totally talking about them, not me, I swear” all you like, but I’m not falling for it.)
Have you … seen a picture of Jessica Valenti?
@Markus
You dumbass. In what universe is Jessica Valenti not conventionally attractive enough for the average MRA rage boner? Paul Elam posted a video of him and his drunken buddies obsessively chanting about how much they don’t want a blowjob from her. (EDIT: The vid ninjalinked by SFHC.) Sounds to me like sexual fantasies about Valenti are pretty common among that bunch.
Also you don’t need to “speculate” over plainly obvious things.
@PeeVee
These rape threats against her and her young daughter by these assholes are abhorrent.
However, I don’t believe this means that they honestly want to fuck her and her five-year-old daughter.
@SFHC
LOL, well I care about my boner, but that’s neither here nor there.
Most of theses manosphere guys are in their twenties, and Jessica Valenti is old to them. Perhaps the older ones like Elam have a boner for her.
I see you are not familiar with the Men’s Rights Movement.
Your beliefs are not relevant to reality. When someone sends a rape threat, that is sexual by definition. I guarantee some of these dudes have elaborate rape fantasies about Jessica Valenti and possibly also her young daughter. In what world do you find pedophilia outside the realm of the possible?
To echo SFHC, nobody wants your boner update.
I’d also dispute the whole thing about bell hooks keeping a low profile. Just last year she made some headlines with her criticism of Beyonce’s Lemonade
http://www.papermag.com/beyonce-bell-hooks-lemonade-1789047140.html
The whole thing turned into a bit of drama in online feminist spaces and angered the Beyhive but despite the fact that hook’s intersectionalist critique is not only the kind of critique that the manosphere/Nazis hate but hook’s work informs a lot of the intersectionalism you see in contemporary feminism, they ignored the dust up. But hooks is not an interesting target for them. Yes, partially because she doesn’t have as much of a social media as younger feminists. But a big part of it is that she’s out of the age range of their sexual interest and the wrong color for their sexual interest. Thus the lack of rape fantasies and threats towards her* and the lack of attempts to neg her with threats that she’ll miss out on their golden Aryan sperm and die a spinster. What’s the point of writing about bell hooks if they aren’t upset that she doesn’t want them?
I also don’t think that manospherians/Nazis actually are only attracted to women under 25. I think they just say that because they want women to feel insecure about getting old and ugly and sleep with them or marry them out of fear and desperation.
Then stop bringing it the fuck up.
@IP
In no way am I defending rape threats.
But do you honestly believe these guys want to have sex with a kindergartener?
@kupo
??
I never brought it up.
Yes, you are.
1) rape is not sex.
2) do you honestly believe there aren’t people who rape children?
3) is threatening to do so somehow not abhorrent in and of itself?
I would really love to live on your planet where pedophilia is not a thing.
Do not deflect, Markus.
This is not about whether or not you think they’re serious about raping her 5 year old daughter.
This is about them feeling personally entitled to make those kinds of threats in the first place.
Everyone else:
The name “Markus”? Anyone else getting an uncomfortable flashback with that name?
They’re MRAs. So… Duh.
But rape is more about power over the victim than about sexual gratification.
These same dudes threaten to rape Lindy West. I think most people can agree she is not “conventionally attractive”. She admits this herself.
This is similar to the old trope about homophobes being closeted homosexuals.