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!
This main craves attention, CRAVES it. And it really saddens me to see him get it.
Who Milo? Yeah he is a poo-poo head and I’m sure it makes him feel all big and special. But ignoring him isn’t an option. The alt-right won’t ignore him and it’s quite hard to ignore a man who turns up at your university to give talks/offence.
No, the nazis won’t ignore Milo. Though since he just married his boyfriend, I’m waiting to see what sort of attention the nazis give him. Bannon isn’t going to back him at all if the wind shifts – he’s a creature of the mob (and no more a leader of the mob than anyone ever is).
The Mercers – don’t know. Don’t know over much about them.
Oh and on what planet of “perfect expectstions” is Jessica Valenti not conventionally attractive?
She most certainly is and most of her attackers in the manosphere know that. Which is what makes them angrier.
@misophistry –
I disagree. I think ignoring him was an option. The reason the alt-right fêtés him / he is invited to speak at campuses is solely because of the reaction he illicits. It’s sickening that somebody who is essentially just a professional troll has any form of media attention.
@Shadownplay do you believe those pictures were real.
Milo is an out and out racist who can barely hide his contempt for black people despite his much famed fetishisation of black cock.
I doubt he would marry a black man – I think those photos were staged.
Didn’t think about it much, TBH. Just noted it as a headline in passing when it happened (detest the little shit, so try to read about him as little as possible)
Also I think it doesn’t really matter if it were real or staged – nazis aren’t terribly good at thinking (the evidence is fairly overwhelming, to put it mildly) and will go with their hate every time.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m letting my dislike of both him and them colour my expectations. 🙁
Pffft. I notice you say it ‘was’ an option. At what point was it an option? If only the telegraph had ignored him instead of hiring him as a journalist Or maybe we should have ignored him when he got the job at breitbart? And in what universe could you persuade the entire internet to ignore an outrageous hate peddler with published articles. For me he arrived fully formed, by the time I had heard of him it was way past ignoring time. Yes he thrives on attention, but the negative attention he generated got him fired, banned from twitter and lost him his book deal (lol).
If only his mother had ignored him, but he was an innocent then and none of this could have been predicted.
@Misophistry,
He was around for years before he was big. Literally years. He learned trolling was the way to increase his fame and he was right.
If people had ignored him as much as thy did when he had more “conventional views” he’d still be a nobody.
Or, the ignore the trolls attitude we’ve been hearing for the past 20+ years is what normalized online hate speech and allowed bigoted ideology to thrive. Milo being treated as a serious person is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Ignoring trolls does nothing.
scratch that
ignoring trolls does worse than nothing, because it gives them a playing field to do and say what they want unnoposed and to make it appear like they are the people who are the most populous and the rightest.
Fuck ignoring trolls.
Eat them. Fight them. Make it cost for them to continue to spew, make it harder for them to win the field.
That’s why I’m for demolishing troll’s terrible opinions, using them as a chew toy and then banning them if they don’t melt down and flounce first. Instead of just banning them immediately.
The phrase “little troublemaker” perfectly encapsulates the problem with (and my anger at) these sympathizers and collaborators who claim to be centrists or social conservatives, etc.: They think it’s harmless and even funny!
For them, Milo outing trans students and being a nazi is worthy of a 50’s sitcom dad chuckle and a “oh, you little scamp!”. I am done thinking of them as misguided. I hope they all step on Legos and that their chumming up to Nazis cost them their jobs.
OT (well, sort of on-topic in that it’s about the links between “contrarianism” and white nationalism a la Milo Y), but link to very interesting article on the path to neo-Nazism followed by “Mike Enoch”, one of the organizers of the August Charlottesville march.
@Frank,
I’m glad you understand the difference! No problem, and many congratulations on your realization that centrism is a whole pile of hot garbage.
I find the left-right axis to be mostly flag-waving nonsense. It maps to a center of self gradient, though, which is a lot more useful. Most left-wing people, feminists, intersectionalists, civil rights activists, etc. are concerned about people. They want policies and societies that help people live well, grow, and be happy. They consider themselves as one person amongst many, with no special privilege of perspective.
As you move away from this centre, you get progressively more and more selfish, until you’re a Nazi screaming about every minority and group but the one you belong to – and how you just happen to be the one with the perfect perspective. The sense of self shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until it’s entirely within you. And yes, I’m talking about empathy here. Calling this an Empathy gradient is just as good.
Looking at it that way, a centrist is someone whose empathy has started to collapse – the circle of who they consider fully human has shrunk. I mean, sure, they want everyone to be equal and happy, but they put that on the same footing as being able to get their Sunday coffee from Starbucks without being perturbed by protesters or the high price of fair trade coffee. They say empathetic words but they don’t actually care enough to follow through.
This isn’t to say that it’s easy to do! That’s why you’ve gotten sort of a rocky reception here, I think, Frank, even after your admission. “Leftists” have a reputation for being fractious and infighting, but it’s because we care and we want to get it right.
I hope you recognize that you got something wrong when you showed up, and that’s what the reaction is for. Seems like you do! Take your lumps, learn, and keep chatting. Empathy’s hard, and it’s inherently a path of self-destruction. But it’s very rewarding, too.
Best of luck, and welcome!
I would also add that what is now called “left-wing” encompass the globality of the political spectrum of 20 years ago on a lot of aspect. I have been said to be to the left of the french *SOCIALIST* party by my insistance on basic stuff of capitalism economy, like asking for anti-cartel regulations, for financial transparency, and for allowing customers to be well informed
Note how *none* of thoses points are about peoples. It’s just the basic need to respect *capitalism*. That’s considered left wing now, because it’s not “maximizing profits for category X”. The exact category allow to categorize if you’re a centrist, a right wing guy, or a centrist-left guy, but if you care about changing anything other than profits, then you’re left wing.
(racism is a case of “not changing anything”, hence centrist or right wing)
@Steph
How well is he doing NOW?
How have his shit-stirring ways helped him out in the long run?
I thought “don’t feed the trolls” was another way of saying that it’s pointless to argue with trolls, not that they shouldn’t be banned. Reddit banned content it considered hate speech for its first five years of existence. In almost all cases, the speech being banned didn’t involve any arguments because it’s coming from people who just like to complain about socially disadvantaged people. Any “arguments” were rehashed from whichever elements of some really specific far-right or far-left ideology that happened to be popular among contrarians at the time.
“Mike Enoch” claims that his fascist positions came about as part of a type of logical process. But he probably just realized he could get away with justifying his personal prejudice. There’s lots of evidence that “edgy humor” can make you more bigoted over time even if you’re being “ironic” at first.
What people now call right libertarianism was originally part of a “left” movement that opposed control of politics and the economy by hereditary nobles. The arguments were later appropriated by millionaires who wanted to avoid paying taxes, but the abstract ideology in itself isn’t workable under modern economic conditions. If we’re going to use the left-right spectrum for sake of having a shorthand, we need to define it primarily in terms of social and cultural issues and moral reasoning.
@History Nerd
It’s not pointless to argue with trolls, though. If you leave their statements uncontested, you implicitly validate them. By arguing against them, you show anyone reading that their comments are, in fact, utter shit. This is important.
This^
Always keep in mind, you have an audience.
When I’ve engaged with transphobic trolls, I already knew that they were, 99.9999% of the time, a lost cause. Everything I said was for the benefit of that audience. If at least one person left that conversation/thread/etc. with a better understanding , then as far as I’m concerned, it was time and effort well spent.
Arguing with trolls has a small chance of changing their ideas, but can help shape the ideas of others who are reading this, but not commenting.
It also helps show that these ideas are not accepted her, for x y and z reason when someone is reading this thread later.
And it shows people in vulnerable groups that commentors here have their back, and will pushback when someone says something shitty, which helps open up a space for them.
“Don’t feed the trolls” means ignoring them, and lets them grow and fester. If the social price of acting like a shit is high, less people will act like shits.
Or at least, they won’t act like shits *here*, which is all anyone can ever manage.
Eta: ninja’d way better by Jesalin! High fives, if wanted! (Also this is now at the end of the comment, sheeesh what a day.)
@Rhuu
Thanks 🙂
High five
Re: troll ignoring
What y’all said! Also, I don’t believe Milo wants attention. He wants 1)to hurt people he doesn’t like (which seems to include himself, btw) and 2)to get validation for doing so. People arguing against him and shutting him down gets attention, but what he really craves is the ability to take that attention, show it off to his sycophants, and have them defend him/agree with him/emulate him. The attention is just the currency he uses to exchange for having his ego fluffed. He hates having his checkmark taken, but loves having assholes say Twitter only did it cos something something shitlibs yadda yadda triggered
Also troll and nazi aren’t mutually exclusive. Can’t be said enough
@Jesalin,
Though you also have to consider what’s the audience (if there even is one). The unfortunate thing about these kinds of asshats is that they are like roaches: the moment you see one, you should assume that there are at least 20 more hiding close by.
******
The problem with fuckers like Milo is that they are at a level where is a catch-22. When he does his intentionally instigative visits, you can’t ignore him because that lets them get away scott free and feeds his ego, but if you disrupt or protest him, he will claim be is being persecuted and feeds into his “dangerous” mythos.
I think that the only thing you can really do is try to one up and make him and the rest powerless. The best example i can think of is when somebody confronted Steven Spencer in public and he tried to pretend he want Spencer or that one time somebody brought him over to an interview (forgot the name but it was i think on the Oprah Channel) and just straight up railed and contradicted him.