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!
They did not just go away in the 90s. They remained and became emboldened by being ignored and grew to what we see today.
^^^^^THIS
A good policy is to just argue with people. It doesn’t really matter if the person doesn’t change his or her mind (which is extremely rare for bigoted adults anyway). It sends a message to the troll that you won’t allow trolls to bully or manipulate you or other people. As people pointed out already, most people who visit a blog, subreddit, or forum are lurkers. There’s a significant psychological impact if it’s clear that people speak out against racists and fascists.
Awwww what’s wrong with shoulderpads??
http://www.harkavagrant.com/nonsense/powersuitsm.png
😉
Oops no website/artist name. That’s Hark! A vagrant by national treasure Kate Beaton.
Source: http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=297
Kate Beaton is a national goddamn treasure
Love Kate Beaton. Knew immediately that it was her work. ?
Everybody is of course allowed to engage anybody else – within whatever policy parameters – for as long and as passionately as they’d like to. I get it. Everybody’s limits are different. For me a day-long comments record scratch on child rape for the sake of not allowing a garbage-ass monster person’s garbage-ass opinions have the final word would be e̶x̶c̶r̶u̶c̶i̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ a lot. That’s just me.
@Fiqah, you ok?
No one is saying that every individual should take up arms to fight against it. Just like how no one is saying every individual should go with Antifa on the front lines.
What we are saying is that the plattitude of “Don’t feed the trolls” is a trash general rule.
*YOU* can chose to not engage because it affects you directly, and emotionally. What we are saying is don’t tell people who do chose to do it that they are wrong and to stop. Because they are not, and they should not.
@Mish: I’m fine. Volunteer peer counselor for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I’ve been trained to spot invisible cultural enablers, so I see “fucked up” where many do not. I should’ve made that clear immediately.
Well it’s weird how the more of s reaction there is to Milo the bigger he gets. I long for the day when it was Milwho?
Now he just seems to thrive on the attention and get offered speaking gigs, book deals as a result. He basically had to show himself to be a paedophile before the attention he got reduced…somewhat.
@Schildfreid
Oh yes! That’s what I mean – less completely ignoring them – but the outrage /firestorms /attention is what Narcisissts like Milo crave.
I don’t see why he is treated as anything more than the immature and childish troll that he is.
Steph says:
Maybe he’s a canary. The coal mine sort. Like, he’s getting backing and being given exposure not for the value of his own vile antics, but as a way for the more covert fascists to measure where society’s current tolerances are for fascism and at what point the attention given someone as obvious as he is turns into a drawback.
In which case, consider the message it sends to those holding his cage if liberals would rather dismiss him as nothing more than a clown than confront or oppose him.
The Nazi scumbags (tautology?) have been at it again. As far as I can tell this is magistrates warrant. So in effect it’s the Nazis themselves who’ve initiated this; like how you start a private prosecution. So just harassment basically.
Comments policy inhibits further comment.
Anyway, you can see for yourselves. Warning ⚠ Picture of actual victim in article.
http://www.wcpo.com/news/national/charlottesville-police-charge-black-victim-of-parking-garage-beating
Just a note on something @Ohlmann said
I have never, ever encountered a troll (or online shit-slinger, whatever we’re calling them) that was competent at debating.
Replying sensibly has always resulted in them devolving almost immediately into name-calling, shifting the goalposts, etc. That, as much as anything, shows the unseen audience just how shaky the troll’s position really is.
Yep, they’re all bravado. They confidently treat their assertions as facts. When we treat those assertions with contempt or demolish their opinions, the whole facade crumbles fast.
But an authoritative sounding assfact can easily trick people. So it’s important to not let it stand when it’s something harmful.
Personally, I am a fan of watching them melt-down into raging histrionics about how everyone but them are special snowflakes seeking special exemptions and how we all need thicker skin while literally sputtering about how oppressing it is to call them Nazis.
Love watching them be demolished, though I’m torn on which method I prefer – the flat out FU snark, the bombarding with actual facts, or the “let them dig their own hole deeper” approach. All are equally elegantly done here.
I followed some of the Twitter discussion on this (in my opinion) critical Buzzfeed article over the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend and one of the best analyses came from Katherine Cross in The Establishment:
https://theestablishment.co/we-warned-you-about-milo-and-youre-still-not-listening-947dad4a8400
Not sure if this article’s been linked elsewhere in the thread, but if it hasn’t been, I highly recommend reading Cross’s take because she underlines two important ideas that are key to understanding the dynamics of the “opposition” for lack of a better word:
1) Those willing to exploit hatred do not understand the forces they’re dealing with.
Cross’s multiple paragraphs devoted to Cathy Young just underscores a notion that Driftglass articulated very artfully all the way back in 2005.
I see the 4channers and GGers and their Neo-Nazi ilk as a 21st Century Little Red State Fundy. But rather than stuffing envelopes to send to judges about abortion, they’re circulating Pepe memes about gas chambers and quote-unquote “ironic” Nazism in an attempt to mainstream their hate. Having mobilized with GamerGate, they were ripe for exploiting by the likes of Milo and Bannon and the Mercers. And it’s all fun and games at first: those adorable little basement-dwellers feeding you stories and even writing them for you, all the while you go on your little tour and get your ego boosted by resentful losers. The only victims are those blue-haired feminists and trans people, which you don’t care about anyway. Even when your buddies start sporting 1488 Twitter handles, there’s still enough plausible deniability to cover your ass with. You got a book deal and a national spotlight and more appearances to follow.
But then their Troll-King gets elected President. Now it’s not so much fun any more. Now the 1488 crowd are serious about their ethno-state desires and see it in arm’s reach. Now all those people that were so fun to mock are turning out on the streets in record numbers and showing up at town halls because you’ve put their lives in danger. Now all those stories about how SJWs control everything get a little harder to maintain. Then you have the new Little Red State Fundies angry at you, not for being wrong, but for making them look bad. And a video clip of you supporting pedophilia looks particularly bad. Then you’re a liability to everyone’s goals and they’re cutting you loose. Because there’s truer believers out there without your baggage.
And then when you have a dead woman’s body on your doorstep… that’s a really bad look.
What I found more appalling was that ostensibly “liberal” journalists were willing to feed Milo gristle for his mill in the form of society’s most vulnerable. Which brings me to takeaway number two.
2) No matter how polished somebody’s politics may be, the willingness to exploit privilege is present in all of us, and if their desire is somebody’s hide, they’ll do it.
That the Harvey Weinstein story blew up now couldn’t have been more illustrative of the disconnect between privilege and politics. You can support all the left-leaning causes you want, appear with the right people, fund the right organizations, but if there’s somebody you want to possess or feel is too “uppity,” you’ve got the power to ruin them, or you know somebody who does. Mitchell Sunderland used Milo to “get” Lindy West. David Auerbach fed Milo stories about people he thought were worth siccing a mob on. Or as Cross writes:
And that’s where they found a connection. That’s where they found kinship. That’s how Little Red State Pepe gets its poison from 4chan to the mainstream. “You people are getting in our way with your loudness, so we need to teach you a lesson.” This is the thread that ties Cathy Young to the GamerGate young and keeps them working in concert.
I think this is a watershed moment in the public consciousness and we can keep it there, maybe more journalists can be pressured to see the alt-right as they really are.
As for tactics, I do use @ScildFreja as my guide many times. I try not to go STRAIGHT for mockery, and I refrain from calling names (usually!) or being condescending. I try to simply state the facts in a friendly manner, and to call them by their name.
Now, if/when that fails, I do sometimes go in for a “Bye Felicia”-style mock but many times I don’t have to, as they’ve already dissolved into a sputtering, raging mess by then.
@Gussie Jives:
Sorry, but I have to disagree here. If you’re alive after World War II — and particularly after that one scene from Cabaret in the beer-garden — then you understand exactly what kind of force Nazis are. You don’t get in bed with that unless you intend to get some of it on you. There are no doe-eyed innocents here.
You’re making excuses for people like Milo. Stop it.
Oh, and in case you missed it, it looks like GarbleGorp 2.0 is struggling to rise from the grisly ashes of its former “glory”.
@dreemr
Didn’t they already try resurrecting it once with metalgate?
(and yeah, @ScildFreja is one of the best – and the person who gave me my welcome package! I do think PI is the most devastating anti-troll though, when they’re on a roll)
@Dimmy : you’re partly right, but I think they aren’t truly aware what the WW2 is.
I mean, I think Milo don’t truly understand the grizzly fate that await him if nazis win. He have all element to understand it, but he don’t realize.
I do agree that it don’t excuse any part of his behavior. I tend to call that “terminal stupidity” when people do things who are against their interests, who that they have every reasons to think they are against their interest, but they still do it.
@ShadowPlay
We have incredibly amazing Troll Vanquishers here.
I mean, I use @ScildFreja as my guide but @ImaginaryPetal, @weirwoodtreehugger, @Policy of Madness, @PeeVee, @Axecalibur, @Mish @Dalilama, and @weird eddie (and probably others I can’t think of off the top of my head) have ALL influenced me with their skills.