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!
If this is Mr Al, he has absolutely learned nothing in…what? Nearly 7 years since his first appearance here?
I think this may be the first time I’ve been regarded as the good cop instead of the bad cop.
I might be about to make you enter the WWTH is a meaniepants corner though. You should also know that any benefit of the doubt I might have given you is diminishing every time you post. Notice that I pointed out that you’re digging a hole. You might want to note the first rule of holes here.
If I’m wrong, say so but between the nature of your comments and your username, you seem to be a man. Do you really think that women can’t identify the sexual attraction + misogyny combo when we see it? Because most if not all women experience this stuff for ourselves at some point in our lives. I’m not sure where you get off assuming you understand misogyny better than the targets of it do. Particularly those of us who have been following this blog for a long time and have seen countless examples of the misogynist hate boner.
1. You’re kind of implying that she had it coming by engaging in ironic misandry. And please tell me we’re not going to have to explain the male tears meme to you.
2. Their anger at that shirt doesn’t mean they don’t have rage boner for her.
3. Really. What was your point here?
Nah, I wasn’t going to add the “except for me” part, but I figured that if I didn’t, someone else here would. Just trying a preemptive statement.
And no, I am not “MR AL”.
Petulant Man Child carries on with rape apologia due to his own insecurity over his looks.
Eye rolls all around, Dude.
You don’t know us very well if you think we attack anyone’s looks. I’m sure you’re used to others being dicks to you for no reason, but we don’t actually do that here.
Lol. Valenti didn’t wear that shirt because she’d already been subjected to years of hate-boner misogyny or anything. It was a brand new phenomenon to her, caused by her wearing that shirt for NO REASON
And rape threats to those he deems “not conventionally attractive” – is supposed to be some kind of compliment?
How about the little kids threatened? What if it was a little boy?
Oh, men say this shit about everyone, it’s, it’s….. locker room talk!
Funny how you don’t see too many rape threats against male children or grown males.
Another thing I thought of, in regards to these people raging against democrats, liberals, hipsters and weirdos –
When they decide to go off on the “Feminized Men”, they cough up much BS, but I’ve never seen a rape threat directed at them.
@Oh, hai Markus
Unless “so and so” refers to another dude (and even then, amirite):
http://third-bit.com/greatest-hits/img/wikipedian_protester.png
This whole thread is kind of ironic because I’m making my way through the archives and am on a post about an MRA saying that women who are the victims of street harassment are to blame because they oppress men with their sexy clothes.
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/04/18/women-who-get-catcalled-are-the-real-sexual-harassers-explains-mens-rights-redditor/
If that’s not an example of a hate boner wank, I don’t know what is.
First, sorry if the opening statement of my first comment offended. It was an implicit apology that I should have made explicit. I’m explicitly apologizing for that.
Second, hello. My name is Frank, and I’m a recovering centrist. Actually I don’t know if I’ve been moving leftward, especially this past year, or if it just seems that way because the whole U.S. is flocking to the right the way lemmings do in faked footage. I do, however, support feminism, civil rights, Black Lives Matter, Antifa (in principle, at least), and most or all of the so-called “SJW” causes. Sadly my chronic depression and continued unemployment restrict my support to occasional donations and arguments on the Internet.
Third, I’m obviously not a reporter. I was a programmer, back in the Before Time. So I clearly blanked on the half of journalism that afflicts the comfortable. I was picturing the scenarios Jarnasaxa brought up: having an expert source review a technical piece, or having a sympathetic minority subject check for accuracy. So thank you Jarnasaxa, Scildfreja, Luzbelitx, and Katie’s Minion for setting me straight.
We now return to our discussion what MRAs find attractive, which I hope is no longer in progress.
Oh good, another techbro who thinks he understands a problem better than the established experts, or at least well enough to add his opinion as if it has any weight.
Hi, Frank. This made me laugh, so thank you for that.
And, welcome.
Anti troll kitteh
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5v9ntecXB1r6bovho1_250.jpg
@Markus
Bless your heart, cupcake.
So what’s the likelihood Mark is a new Mark vs. a returning “You Feminsits Are All So Mean!” Mark?
Any bets on how long it will take Markus to explicitly state that ‘the men who make rape threats against feminists are just trolling, they don’t REALLY mean it, guys, they’re obviously not actual rapists’?
@Markus
So glad we cleared that up. Also glad that you’re arguing the minutiae of rape. That’s super appropriate with any woman in any forum — or IRL, for that matter.
Thanks so much!
Everyone thinks they can do journalism better than journalists.
It’s a never-ending source of irritation to us.
For the record, I doubt I’d ever try to be a journalist, let alone be good at it.
Sometimes I do a little fiction writing for my own amusement. A character in something I’m procrastinating is a journalist. David’s statement struck me as odd, and as I’m trying to get in the mindset of a journalist I asked a question I clearly couldn’t think of an answer for.
That’s it.
One of the difficulties I have in joining a group, online or IRL, is that existing members of the group make statements as if they’re intuitively obvious. Whether I lack the background or simply aren’t thinking clearly at that moment (or, as I occasionally suspect, whether groupthink has set in), I ask why it’s so obvious. The average response I get, from a patient explanation/suggestion for further reading to a resounding “shut up moron” determines how eager I am to stick with the group.
When people say “there are no stupid questions”, I laugh. Clearly there are, and I apparently ask them.
Frank,
You said
Can you see how framing it as a quibble and a quibble being the only reason you ever comment would read as trollish?
If you’re just writing a story with a journalist character and want some insight as to how journalists do their jobs, why not just say that off the bat?
You could’ve said something like
I’m not a journalist, but I’m writing a character that is one. Can you explain why this is unethical? I figured a journalist might put 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.
That’s a pretty big difference.
@ Frank
You did not just ask a question, you asked a question in a fairly rhetorical manner and gave reasons why you thought that there should be no reason for journalists to not give their reports to the subjects of those reports first.
There’s a difference between going:
“I’m confused, why is it unethical to provide articles to the subjects of those articles?”
And going:
Generally leading off a question with: “is it, really?” does not imply that you believe “it is”, or think that it MIGHT be, it means you’re being dismissive of the idea that it is.
Also, sometimes communities may be hostile towards others asking questions of them if the community is not geared towards providing 101 level education (and especially if people tend to ask them the same damn questions all the time), and instead has an expectation that people interacting with the community do their homework (or, you know, just go to Google with their questions. That’s kind of what it’s there for).
Perhaps this was not your intention, but your post came across as very “I know better than you”. Next time, perhaps consider if the reaction you get from “just asking questions” is because the community is just a bunch of meanie pants, or if your behavior was the reason you were shown animosity.
Or, you know, you can just leave, if you prefer. Don’t feel obligated to stay on our account. If you feel unwelcome, by all means seek out greener pastures.
EDIT- dammit, ninjad by WWTH.
Well isn’t this fascinating.
But do you honestly believe these guys want to have sex with a kindergartener?
Markus please address this statement you made. It is the one we will forever judge you by. I for one couldn’t give a fuck about what conventionally attractive is or isn’t. Do you or do you not deny the existence of pedophilia?
Does the law draw a distinction between threats of child rape done for trolling or those that are serious. No, no it doesn’t, for good reasons.
It’s already bad enough that there are people enabling abusers and rapists by running around saying “they were just joking!/well, I’VE never seen them do something so awful, how could such a nice person do that kind of terrible thing!”
We don’t need more enablers. And it’s time to start taking ALL threats of doing people harm seriously, without adding the step of needing to debate whether or not the person making the threats means it ‘for realsies’.
Andplusalso:
If the alt right racists can’t see that the old white racists like Bannon are intending to use them like the modern version of cannon fodder, while guys like Spencer are out doing Nazi parades to make it all seem…normal…
Sometimes I weep for what the future could have been. This would be one of those times.
And now I suddenly believe that you are.