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!
Doesn’t matter in the least. Plus, in all likelihood the total audience would be at least 10 times that. On the internet conversations/arguments are like icebergs, the spectators vastly outnumber the commenters and are essentially invisible.
I can echo the fact that on most forum, about 90% of the traffic is invisible and don’t even have an account. Most people just read, they don’t comment.
@Jojo Mojo : I would also add, debating with someone who is really better than you at rhetoric or discourse can backfire even if you have a sensible position and not him. It can be better to jauge just how persuasive someone is before writing something. In most case, that being said, it just mean asking a bit for help for a thoughful answer and not write while enwrathed.
Always argue with trolls. That’s my policy. I eat troll for breakfast.
@ P.o.M.;
yeah. Thanx for this!!
@ Markus;
No. That’s not where it comes from. Please stop while you’re only hopelessly behind.
It is absolutely brilliant when you find yourself in a place where trolls get short shrift, where their blithering gets comprehensively cut to shreds. It’s refreshing and wonderful.
(parenthetically, @Ohlmann, I hope you don’t mind my saying … “enwrathed” is rather awesome. It’s such a satisfying and beautiful word and so rarely used.)
crumbly and dry… and not very filling.
QFT
RE: WWTH’s link to old WHTM post about street harassment
I remember reading an article about a survey done of women who regularly used Paris’ metro. Anyway, the gist of it was that 100% of the women surveyed had been subjected to unwanted sexual attentions from men while using the metro. Some of the acts described: Men rubbing up against women; men invading a woman’s personal space; indecent exposure; crude remarks. I wish I could remember the article’s title, or where I read it.
That ‘100%’ figure really threw me. I’m a rural-dwelling person, so I have very little experience using public transportation, especially in big cities. A few times on the Washington DC metro; also, in the Netherlands as a tourist 15 years ago; that’s about it. All those times, my spouse accompanied me.
So, I think this is an illustration that a woman’s appearance, or age, or how she happens to be dressed, is beside the point, in regard to sexual harassment.
Always argue with trolls.
As for the whole issue shown above, the “ignore him and Milo wins, confront him and Milo wins” argument-
Mock him.
That’s what the showboating edgelords absolutely can’t stand. They desperately need to be taken seriously, or their whole act falls apart. We take them seriously, they say it was a joke and make us look emotional and angry – that’s their script. Milo needs to have someone follow him around with a tuba, making fun of everything he does.
They have no good ideas. If we take their ideas seriously by confronting them or ignoring them, they get to look like a legitimate opinion. Mock them.
(I am really bad at that tho o god pls halp)
Troll is best marinaded in hotsauce, then grilled or roasted. If you own a tenderising hammer you should use it on the troll to soften it up. Do not season, trolls are salty enough on their own.
Just nth-ing the value of arguing with trolls because of the audience.
I do it (when I have the energy) and I have even been thanked a couple of times by lurkers (literally twice lol so it’s not common AT ALL. Still, it was nice). So, FYI it works.
Sure, you don’t change a troll’s mind, but there are people reading who are still open.
I hate the word troll. It’s a cheap euphemism to get away with racism, misogyny, homophobia and the like.
Let’s be the fuck honest. These people imagine themselves enlightened beings because of their superior ability not to be offended by:
– Racist jokes, despite the fact they’re White.
– Sexist jokes, despite the fact they’re men.
– Homophobic jokes, despite the fact they’re straight.
– Transphobic jokes, despite the fact they’re cis-gender.
– Islamophobic jokes, despite the fact they’re Christian.
I guess it’s hard to see why they’re not offended[/sarcasm]
@History Nerd
No, no it wasn’t. Right-libertarianism is derived from what’s now called Classical Liberalism, which in turn was a movement to, essentially, replace mercantilism with modern capitalism, which was, and is, a far more efficient means of extracting value from subject peoples and local proletarians and concentrating it in a small group of people. Not the same small group who’d previously been in charge, but that’s not really an important distinction to anyone who isn’t part of either small group.
There was no later, it was like that from day one.
For values of ‘workable’ that include a decent standard of living for everyone, it never was.
Say what? Removing economic concerns from the left is precisely why our economy is in such a shitty state, and our infrastructure is falling apart (also racism, but for all its alleged concern with social issues, the mainstream American ‘left’ is pretty fucking unwilling to actually work on dealing with racism seriously, so, yanno).
It’s just so hard to watch someone like Milo be so successful. I have a hard time keeping my cool enough to really think about how best to deal with him. He’s by far my least favorite of all of the alt-right figures. I see the value of mocking him, especially for the sake of the audience. I can recall times when I was part of the audience that learned something from a troll argument. However, part of me still want to ignore him, but only because I think it would make him angry. That’s just an emotional reaction that I have, I don’t know that ignoring him would help anything. That seems to be what much of America is doing with people like Milo, and it doesn’t seem to have worked very well.
The truth is I’m not that good at dealing with trolls or with making arguments against them. Therefore I personally might choose to ignore them and let more skilled people destroy the trolls. That doesn’t mean I don’t fully support those who choose to engage. Eat a troll for me. 🙂
Nothing wrong with that. The problem is when people chide us for engaging. I’m not sure what they hope to accomplish, honestly, other than helping the trolls to win. What does someone gain by reciting the tired, old “don’t feed the trolls” line, anyway?
A feeling of superiority, mostly!
I think, as Milo ages, he’ll fade from popularity. At least, I hope so.
For example, how often do you hear the name Andrew Dice Clay these days, anyway? I’m willing to bet, it’s a rare under-25 year old who knows who Clay is. Maybe even under 30 years old.
My point is, relying on shock appeal/offensiveness has a very limited shelf life.
(Andrew Dice Clay was an American one-note “comic” whose one note was misogynistic “humor”.)
OT, but.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/10/a-flint-official-was-just-charged-with-involuntary-manslaughter-in-the-citys-water-crisis/
Off-topic:
A few threads ago, I mentioned I’d gotten a new kitten, Sassy. I took her to the vet today, for the first time. She bit and scratched the hell out of my spouse’s hands, while we were trying to herd her into her carrier. I should have dug up the leather gloves beforehand.
She was OK once she was in the pro’s hands, tho’. She was like a feline Jeckyll and Hyde. The vet said she would eventually calm down.
Early 30s here, and I barely know who he is, through second-hand exposure. Yep, it’s not a ticket to lasting influence.
N+1th-ing this. More than once, I’ve had to make clear that I don’t believe my debating opponent is arguing in good faith or likely to change their mind, but I’m refuting their position for anyone looking for actual reliable information on the subject. It’s also a good way to keep a clear head – I can get a bit heated when someone’s being nasty, but treating it as a job to do without engaging with them personally takes the edge off.
Andrew Dice Clay seems to be trying to make a comeback with a new show, don’t know if it will work. I hope not.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4688512/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_3
Chiming in re troll-smacking here – the audience isn’t just people who might be persuaded by the troll. Sometimes the audience includes people who have been hurt/bullied/offended by the troll but those people haven’t spoken up, for whatever reason. Smacking a troll lets those other people know that they are not alone.
@calmdown
Uuuugghh…talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel! Dice Clay should REMAIN in the 1980s, along with crunchy Ramen mall hair, shoulder pads, and parachute pants. It’s bad enough he had one go-around.
Nothing, lately.
Back in the olden days (by which I mean the late 90s), one could actually vanquish trolls by ignoring them, because they would get bored and go away.
That doesn’t seem to work anymore.
@Axe “Danger” Calibur:
Indeed, it seems more and more that there’s rather a significant overlap between the two.