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By David Futrelle
Professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos — reportedly heavily in debt and with his once enormous social media presence whittled down to a small account on Telegram — is apparently trying to raise a fashy furry army.
Last month, evidently hungering for some attention and possibly casting about for a new grift, Milo announced that he would be attending Midwest FurFest this year as a snow leopard, an announcement which (predictably) caused more than a little outrage in the furry community — and which probably would have stirred up similar outrage in the snow leopard community, if snow leopards had access to the internet and could work computers with their big furry paws.
Today, the Midwest FurFest organizers announced that they were refunding Milo’s ticket, banning him from the event and all their future events. “Hate is not welcome at Midwest FurFest,” an organizer said in a official statement.
In a post on Telegram, Milo says he’s planning to crash the convention along with some of his “friends.”
He followed this up by suggesting that the organizers were a bunch of pedophiles.
Then he revealed what might be his real reason he’s interested in hanging out amongst furries, other than garnering more media attention for himself: He means to win Wimbleton.
No, sorry, that’s a Monty Python reference. The real reason, I suspect, is that Milo wants the relatively small contingent of fascist (and fascist-adjacent) furries to break off from the rest of the furry community and, presumably, follow him as their new furry ruler.
At least that’s how I read this Telegram post:
Who knows what’s going to develop from all this. The only thing that’s clear is that it will be a real shitshow, as is everything Milo touches.
H/T — Left Coast Right Watch for tweeting about Milo’s plans to crash the convention
@MK
I was thinking how lit that was going to be, because they won’t need to cover their faces if they are already in a full body fur suit.
Maybe (as his t shirt says) he should just stop being poor.
There’s a Mac OS X joke in here somewhere…
Install it, and you get annoying pop-ups that refuse to go away.
Late to the party: why are furries reviled/ targeted for abuse?
It seems like a harmless hobby to me.
@ Sarity:
I’ll, also, be hoping for the safety of everyone who attends… UNLESS Milo attends, then I’ll be hoping for the safety of ALMOST everyone who attends….
@Hippodameia
POP… corn….!!!!
Oh, come on. No lifeform should have to suffer being compared to these human skidmarks. :p
That goes double for the poor turtles who get branded by comparisons to Mitch McConnell.
Anyway, hope the attendees of that con will be safe.
Bit O/T but I suppose it’s related to internet content which is sort of how Milo got (in)famous.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/revealed-catastrophic-effects-working-facebook-moderator
@Susan
The furry community has significant amounts of both PoC and LGBTQIA+ members. Often furry hate is an easy form of socially acceptable hate for those two groups.
I was exchanging some posts on Wonkette with another fur (likely one older than me) about the history of “Altfurry” and apparently it goes much further back than I knew. I only arrived to the fandom in 2003, when I was 17, but in the early days of the internet, there were altfurry chatboards that were rife with dickbags trying to convert the fandom to something far more sinister around 1994, 1995. So this isn’t a new thing.
It’s particularly rich for Milo to try to get into the furry community after bashing them in the digital pages of Breitbart:
http://archive.is/YUpIO
@Talonknife
It’s also hard for people to wrap their brains around. This kind of costuming is often seen as “juvenile” or something to be grown out of when it’s far more fundamental to our identities and understanding of ourselves.
@Schnookums
It’s funny, I had never heard of 2_Gryphon until he became infamous as an alt-right dipshit. Where did he come from?
It also have the usual “non mainstream so have to be ridiculed” .
I am curious to see if european furries have more or less troubles than american ones. I have seen anti-furry jokes and scorn in american medias, but not in european one, similar to how jocks and cheerleaders and what not are a mostly american phenomen. But while I have been an european high schooler, I never was a furry, and prejudice is harder to see when you’re not the target, and all but impossible to see if you don’t know any target for that prejudice.
Totally OT, and I hope the regulars will understand why I’m reaching out.
My oldest cat decided she wasn’t quite done yet after all, but about half an hour ago I got a call from my manager at work.
As of next month, I won’t have a job.
<3 to your cat.
Grrrr to your employer (started to type "your manager" but they may just be the messenger).
Goddammit, word is spreading in various furry FB groups I follow and it’s way more contentious than I’d have expected. Some admins have had to turn off commenting because threads have gotten out of hand.
Really, really unsettling and disappinting to see how many in our community are showing up to defend this dipshit’s actions and pity him as some poor politically persecuted victim because he won’t be allowed to come bully us in our spaces. Though the pushback securely outweighs the pro-jackass support, it appears this turd is unfortunately not wrong to see fertile open ground in our community. We need to stay vigilant in keeping this shit unwelcome here.
@Katamount
I understand 2 Gryphon is a comedian in the fandom who had a popular performance slot at Anthrocon until he came out as a hateful jackass against some of the fandom’s most vulnerable groups. He’s also apparently seeking a way to interview the douchecopter to get his side of things, which doesn’t surprise me.
https://mobile.twitter.com/2_gryphon/status/1173777685912281089?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Two narcissistic gay-so-I-obv-can’t-be-hateful shocky jockey freeze peach absolutist transphobes sounds like a match made in heaven.
Furries are hated because anything that deviates from what a society deems as “standard” is written out as undesirable; and I imagine they must catch a lot of heat of so called liberal circles as well because, like with any other group of people, there are always some very vocal assholes mixed in, which give the group a bad reputation.
I’ve experienced it in every single fandom. There is always a toxic element present there that will try to derail the whole thing and make it about their insecurities, and it seems furries are not exempt from it.
Nazis try to infiltrate everything from Nordic lore and anime, to European history and fucking MLP; no topic or art form is exempt from their attempts to influence and hijack it.
Oh Vicky; thats such a double blow. I wish there was something practical I could do to help; but please know I’m thinking of you. 🙁
@VP : that’s a sad news. The second part of it at least. I hope you will find a replacement soon 😡
I’ll be really disappointed if his fursona doesn’t turn out to be “Jacob Wool”.
At this point in his career, Milo is probably better off getting a loan for a stamp and an envelope and trying to revive the art of the chain letter.
When Milo says he’ll crash in and “bring some friends”, I assume he means a few of his nazi fur acquaintances will be attending anyway. Milo himself might or might not actually show up.
Thanks, everyone. I’ve managed to ask two people to put out some feelers for me re a new job, which is pretty much all the coping I can bear to do right now on the job front.
On the cat front, my poor old girl is definitely more feeble than she used to be, but she’s eating, and making her wishes known when it comes to time in the favorite sunbeam.
@Sarity
Thanks for the explainer!
@Ohlmann
Europe always seemed a lot more chill with offbeat things.
I mean, it was France, specifically Orangina, that gave us this marvellous ad campaign:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/the-strange-sexy-furry-orangina-ads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbvOS_xSZfg
The one at 1:20 is still my favourite.
@ Vicky P
I’m so sorry but I misread the news about your cat! (TBH I skipped over it because I’m a bit soft over stuff like that). Phew, that at leats is she comfort I guess.
@VP:
Today is my second day without a job, though I was aware I would lose it since the end of August.
The last days were a chore; nobody wanted me where I was but I had to be there.
A friend told me: “Getting sacked always has something liberating”. It’s a situation of great uncertainty, but I trust I can face whatever lies ahead.
Good luck and I hope you have a very satisfying future!
@Alan
I wondered if you had, but I don’t really trust my brain right now, so I didn’t want to bring it up. Miss Bossy Buns (her nickname, not her call name or her secret ineffable names) is indeed still with us and will be cherished unto the end of her days.
The morning after what I thought would be her last day, she trotted into the kitchen and announced that she’d like breakfast now, please.
Yeah, this has caused the two halves of my twitter world to collide in interesting ways.
I’d known that a comic artist in the fandom had created a fursona for Milo, but I didn’t realize that same artist’s comic was published by Vox Day’s Castalia House.
I was also curious, is there a large overlap between furries and adult MLP fans (bronies/pegasisters)? Because I have a few friends that are both, and I was wondering if that was common.
Well, yes and no.
Furry fandom seems to be rather fond of MLP, because, well, they’re ponies after all. To the average furfan it’s easily accepted as another potential aspect of the anthro community. There’s not a great deal of conflict there.
Bronydom is… generally accepting of furry fandom, but most don’t consider themselves furries. The brony focus is on MLP:FiM, after all, not the wider anthro scene. Really, they’re less into the aspect of “They’re ponies” and more into “It’s a damn good show that has ponies as a focus”. Story, animation music– oh, so much music– and the MLP universe as a whole are central to the Brony community, while the wider Furry fandom is peripheral at best. Then again, a major philosophy of the Brony culture is “Love and Tolerate”, and a lot of Bronies try to live by that philosophy somewhat. Thus, there’s not that much strong feelings about Furries– rather “They’re doing their thing, we’re doing ours, sometimes they intersect– cool”.
So, Bronies are less a subset of Furry fandom (And a lot of people think that they are that, but no) and rather a separate fandom that lightly intersects with the Anthro scene.
Also, Twilight Sparkle is Best Pony.
Had to point that last out.
@Robert Haynie
Sounds about right to me. Mr. Dakry is a brony with no interest in the furry fandom and those are the reasons he likes the show. That and he has a major weakness for cute things. I show him a picture of tiny kittens just so I can watch him make strangled noises and devolve into baby talk. 😉
And yet somehow he doesn’t feel his masculinity threatened, How odd.
@VP
Glad your kitty is feeling better!