Taibbi writes: "Milo Yiannopoulos, the revolting bete noire of the
Alt-Right, a person who is such a reactionary American that he's British,
seems to have made a critical mistake. Surely, conventional wisdom holds,
even Republicans will balk at being asked to equate liberty with child
molestation?"
Milo Yiannopoulos. (photo: David Middlecamp/AP)
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/matt-taibbi-milo-yiannopoulos
-isnt-going-away-w468012>
Milo Yiannopoulos Isn't Going Away
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
21 February 17
Alt-Right troll's latest scandal looks like a career-ending gaffe but
don't be so sure
Milo Yiannopoulos, the revolting bête noire of the Alt-Right, a person who
is such a reactionary American that he's British, seems to have made a
critical mistake. Surely, conventional wisdom holds, even Republicans will
balk at being asked to equate liberty with child molestation?
As onetime conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes put it
<http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-cpac-milo-yiannopoulos-tape-235
204> , "Anti-Semitism, ok. Racism, ok. Alt-right, ok. Advocacy of
pedophilia? Is THAT the bridge too far?"
Along with longtime Breitbart cohort Steve Bannon, the foppish Yiannopoulos
the co-author of the Alt-Right's unofficial manifesto
<http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-gui
de-to-the-alt-right/> has until now been extremely successful in selling
the various intellectual justifications for Trumpism.
In particular, he's been one of the main voices pushing the idea that Donald
Trump's most lurid and offensive behaviors are "conservative," because they
represent a front in the war against speech limits and political
correctness.
"He'd rather grab a pussy than be one," was Milo's pithy take on then
candidate Trump's Access Hollywood scandal.
Not all traditional conservatives bought these clunky rhetorical gymnastics,
which were designed to give Fox viewers permission to vote a Bible-averse,
model-humping New Yorker into the White House. But enough did to win Trump
the presidency.
Still, there has been a lingering unwillingness among the National
Review/Weekly Standard crew of Reagan Republicans to embrace Yiannopoulos
and all he represents. That unwillingness spilled into open conflict when
the loathsome campus agitator was named a keynote speaker at this week's
Conservative Political Action Conference.
A blog called the Reagan Battalion re-circulated excerpts of a year-old
interview of Milo by the
<https://twitter.com/DrunkenPeasants?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%
7Ctwgr%5Eauthor> Drunken Peasants podcast, in which he clearly endorses sex
between men and underage boys.
Yiannopoulos talked about how "we get hung up on this kind of child abuse
stuff," dismissing what he calls the "oppressive idea of consent."
"In the homosexual world particularly," said Yiannopoulos, who is gay, "some
of those relationships between younger boys and older men [are] sort of
coming-of-age relationships ... in which those older men have helped those
young boys to discover who they are."
When one of the podcast co-hosts suggested that it sounded like he was
talking about Catholic priest molestation, Yiannopoulous quickly co-signed,
claiming personal experience in that area.
"You know what?" he shouted. "I'm grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn't
give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him."
When challenged that he seemed to be endorsing pedophilia, Yiannopoulos then
retreated to a semantic argument.
"You're misunderstanding what pedophilia means," he said. "Pedophilia is not
a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old, who is sexually mature.
Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty."
After a scandal blew up over these words, Yiannopoulos used a technique that
Donald Trump has used often in the past two years: He simply claimed he
didn't say what he said.
Blaming "sloppy editing" for the controversy, Yiannopoulos insisted
<http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/allright-blogger-milo-yiannopoulos
-in-paedophilia-scandal/news-story/af9bcd4c6028b6a957340485cb3267d2> on his
Facebook page, "I was talking about my own relationship when I was 17 with a
man who was 29." He added, "The age of consent in the UK is 16. That was a
mistake."
This was despite the fact that Yiannopoulos explicitly talked about
"sexually mature" 13-year-olds in the context of who can and cannot be a
consenting adult. He has made similar remarks before he revels in them, in
fact. When he appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AHjsSdapI4> last summer, for instance, he
couldn't help himself when Rogan brought up the "semen warrior
<http://www.orijinculture.com/community/masculinisation-dehumanization-sambi
a-tribe-papua-guinea/> " culture in Papua New Guinea.
"These men who take these young boys, " said Rogan, "and inseminate them,
and put cum in their mouths and their asses to make them grow..."
"Sounds like homosexuality," Yiannoploulos quipped. "Sounds great."
The furor currently raging over Yiannopoulos's comments is exactly the sort
of thing this professional button-pusher relishes. Like Trump, his shtick is
to say crazy things to get attention, and then manipulate ears and eyeballs
to his advantage mid-furor.
A favored tactic is to direct his audiences toward some overemotional sap
who has made the mistake of calling for him to be banned, at which point he
triumphantly declares himself a champion of liberty, and his enemies censors
and authoritarians.
In his Alt-Right manifesto, Milo self-consciously celebrates the trolling
phenomenon as something inspired, meaningful and "undeniably hysterical."
And like all trolls, Yiannopoulos thinks his provocations are brilliant,
when actually he's just a goof with an accent and a C-minus mind who says
witlessly obnoxious things and through sheer accident of historical
circumstance gets rewarded for it.
He seems genuinely to believe that he's one of the first people ever to
notice that you can make a good living through lying and the unscrupulous
use of hate speech. With the confidence of a person who hasn't yet
discovered the depth of his own unoriginality, he leans into controversies
instead of recoiling from them, sure he can always spin things in a pinch.
One of his main affectations is a flaunting of duplicity as a revolutionary
virtue. For instance, it was predictable that this longtime critic of
<http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2017/01/20/milowhycyberbullyingisntreal/>
"victimhood culture" would cling to his own victimhood in a crisis.
"I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim," he wrote, cloaking himself in
multiple layers of the very identity politics he claims to despise. He even
used AIDS patients
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/20/milo-yiannopoulos-denies-su
pporting-paedophilia-cpac-online-video> as a human shield, which was a bit
excessive even for him, but not out of character:
"If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an Internet livestream with a crime I
was the victim of that's my prerogative. It's no different to gallows humor
from Aids [sic] sufferers."
The "oppressive idea of consent" rant seems to have created problems for
Yiannopoulos. Staffers at Breitbart, where he is a senior editor, are
threatening
<https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/02/20/breitbart-employees-threaten-walk-
out-over-milo/> to walk out unless he's fired. Moreover, he's been
disinvited
<http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/320358-milo-yiannopoulis-d
isinvited-from-cpac> from CPAC, a development he will no doubt portray as
an overreaction by a defeated and humorless Republican establishment.
Milo's obvious play will be to use all of this coverage as free PR, seeking
to come out the other side with his rebel credentials burnished. He'll
recreate himself as a Republican martyr, unfairly maligned by a corrupt
priesthood that fears the true movement.
On the outside, this looks like a mistake. The Bannonite Alt-Right crew Milo
represents imagines itself a brilliant group of intellectual danger-seekers,
but trying to sell boy-buggering to the American Conservative Union sure
seems more stupid than daring (and it's plenty daring).
After all, the success of the Trump movement depends upon a nervous
coalition of aging religious conservatives and young, race-baiting,
Internet-addicted morons the people GOP consultant Rick Wilson once called
<http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/01/20/gop-consultant-rick-wilson-to-msn
bc-trump-supporters-childless-single-men-who-masturbate-to-anime/>
"childless single men who masturbate to anime."
The link between these two groups has always been tenuous at best. Really,
it's an absurd semantic misunderstanding, a classic Americanism, confusing
the words "liberty" and "libertine."
There's a big difference between believing in limited government, and
completely rejecting all behavioral and sexual morality. But people like
Yiannopoulos and Trump have been successful at blurring these lines, because
we're not a very bright people. Also, we're inexperienced when it comes to
this kind of high-level political con artistry.
A dynamic that all good swindlers understand is that once you've gotten a
person to make one embarrassing decision, it's easier to get him to make the
next one. A person who loses 10 grand trying to buy the Brooklyn Bridge is a
good bet to spend 20 more chasing the loss. Con artists call this "reloading
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reloading_scam> ."
The Trump phenomenon has been like this. Megachurch moms and dads across the
country grit their teeth when the "grab them by the pussy" tape came out,
quietly convincing themselves that "locker-room talk" was less horrifying
than a Hillary Clinton presidency.
When they cast their votes weeks later, it was like a secret transgression
that bound them to the new leader. This counter-intuitive brand of politics
is very effective. It's why no one should be too quick to put this week's
seeming fiasco with CPAC in the Republicans' loss column.
One would think the last thing you'd want to do if your intent was to hold a
fragile Republican coalition together is pitch Milo Yiannopoulos as a
defender of family values. Why would the Mike Pence crowd ever rally behind
a Brit with frosted hair who brags about getting blowjobs from priests? It
seems preposterous.
But watch it work. A week from now, the same conservatives who are beating
their breasts about Yiannopoulos now will go crawling back into the Trump
camp to fight the hated liberals on a dozen other issues. They will look
weak and indecisive, and privately will be demoralized, while the
Trump/Bannon/Milo crew will look like poker players who won a bluff. It's
always about the next news cycle with these people.
Trolling doesn't take brains. But it works, and it will keep working, until
we learn to see through the provocations in real time.
<http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize>
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Milo Yiannopoulos. (photo: David Middlecamp/AP)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/matt-taibbi-milo-yiannopoulos-
isnt-going-away-w468012http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/matt-ta
ibbi-milo-yiannopoulos-isnt-going-away-w468012
Milo Yiannopoulos Isn't Going Away
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
21 February 17
Alt-Right troll's latest scandal looks like a career-ending gaffe but
don't be so sure
ilo Yiannopoulos, the revolting bête noire of the Alt-Right, a person who is
such a reactionary American that he's British, seems to have made a critical
mistake. Surely, conventional wisdom holds, even Republicans will balk at
being asked to equate liberty with child molestation?
As onetime conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes put it
<http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-cpac-milo-yiannopoulos-tape-235
204> , "Anti-Semitism, ok. Racism, ok. Alt-right, ok. Advocacy of
pedophilia? Is THAT the bridge too far?"
Along with longtime Breitbart cohort Steve Bannon, the foppish Yiannopoulos
the co-author of the Alt-Right's unofficial manifesto
<http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-gui
de-to-the-alt-right/> has until now been extremely successful in selling
the various intellectual justifications for Trumpism.
In particular, he's been one of the main voices pushing the idea that Donald
Trump's most lurid and offensive behaviors are "conservative," because they
represent a front in the war against speech limits and political
correctness.
"He'd rather grab a pussy than be one," was Milo's pithy take on then
candidate Trump's Access Hollywood scandal.
Not all traditional conservatives bought these clunky rhetorical gymnastics,
which were designed to give Fox viewers permission to vote a Bible-averse,
model-humping New Yorker into the White House. But enough did to win Trump
the presidency.
Still, there has been a lingering unwillingness among the National
Review/Weekly Standard crew of Reagan Republicans to embrace Yiannopoulos
and all he represents. That unwillingness spilled into open conflict when
the loathsome campus agitator was named a keynote speaker at this week's
Conservative Political Action Conference.
A blog called the Reagan Battalion re-circulated excerpts of a year-old
interview of Milo by the
<https://twitter.com/DrunkenPeasants?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%
7Ctwgr%5Eauthor> Drunken Peasants podcast, in which he clearly endorses sex
between men and underage boys.
Yiannopoulos talked about how "we get hung up on this kind of child abuse
stuff," dismissing what he calls the "oppressive idea of consent."
"In the homosexual world particularly," said Yiannopoulos, who is gay, "some
of those relationships between younger boys and older men [are] sort of
coming-of-age relationships ... in which those older men have helped those
young boys to discover who they are."
When one of the podcast co-hosts suggested that it sounded like he was
talking about Catholic priest molestation, Yiannopoulous quickly co-signed,
claiming personal experience in that area.
"You know what?" he shouted. "I'm grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn't
give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him."
When challenged that he seemed to be endorsing pedophilia, Yiannopoulos then
retreated to a semantic argument.
"You're misunderstanding what pedophilia means," he said. "Pedophilia is not
a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old, who is sexually mature.
Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty."
After a scandal blew up over these words, Yiannopoulos used a technique that
Donald Trump has used often in the past two years: He simply claimed he
didn't say what he said.
Blaming "sloppy editing" for the controversy, Yiannopoulos insisted
<http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/allright-blogger-milo-yiannopoulos
-in-paedophilia-scandal/news-story/af9bcd4c6028b6a957340485cb3267d2> on his
Facebook page, "I was talking about my own relationship when I was 17 with a
man who was 29." He added, "The age of consent in the UK is 16. That was a
mistake."
This was despite the fact that Yiannopoulos explicitly talked about
"sexually mature" 13-year-olds in the context of who can and cannot be a
consenting adult. He has made similar remarks before he revels in them, in
fact. When he appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AHjsSdapI4> last summer, for instance, he
couldn't help himself when Rogan brought up the "semen warrior
<http://www.orijinculture.com/community/masculinisation-dehumanization-sambi
a-tribe-papua-guinea/> " culture in Papua New Guinea.
"These men who take these young boys, " said Rogan, "and inseminate them,
and put cum in their mouths and their asses to make them grow..."
"Sounds like homosexuality," Yiannoploulos quipped. "Sounds great."
The furor currently raging over Yiannopoulos's comments is exactly the sort
of thing this professional button-pusher relishes. Like Trump, his shtick is
to say crazy things to get attention, and then manipulate ears and eyeballs
to his advantage mid-furor.
A favored tactic is to direct his audiences toward some overemotional sap
who has made the mistake of calling for him to be banned, at which point he
triumphantly declares himself a champion of liberty, and his enemies censors
and authoritarians.
In his Alt-Right manifesto, Milo self-consciously celebrates the trolling
phenomenon as something inspired, meaningful and "undeniably hysterical."
And like all trolls, Yiannopoulos thinks his provocations are brilliant,
when actually he's just a goof with an accent and a C-minus mind who says
witlessly obnoxious things and through sheer accident of historical
circumstance gets rewarded for it.
He seems genuinely to believe that he's one of the first people ever to
notice that you can make a good living through lying and the unscrupulous
use of hate speech. With the confidence of a person who hasn't yet
discovered the depth of his own unoriginality, he leans into controversies
instead of recoiling from them, sure he can always spin things in a pinch.
One of his main affectations is a flaunting of duplicity as a revolutionary
virtue. For instance, it was predictable that this longtime critic of
<http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2017/01/20/milowhycyberbullyingisntreal/>
"victimhood culture" would cling to his own victimhood in a crisis.
"I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim," he wrote, cloaking himself in
multiple layers of the very identity politics he claims to despise. He even
used AIDS patients
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/20/milo-yiannopoulos-denies-su
pporting-paedophilia-cpac-online-video> as a human shield, which was a bit
excessive even for him, but not out of character:
"If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an Internet livestream with a crime I
was the victim of that's my prerogative. It's no different to gallows humor
from Aids [sic] sufferers."
The "oppressive idea of consent" rant seems to have created problems for
Yiannopoulos. Staffers at Breitbart, where he is a senior editor, are
threatening
<https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/02/20/breitbart-employees-threaten-walk-
out-over-milo/> to walk out unless he's fired. Moreover, he's been
disinvited
<http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/320358-milo-yiannopoulis-d
isinvited-from-cpac> from CPAC, a development he will no doubt portray as
an overreaction by a defeated and humorless Republican establishment.
Milo's obvious play will be to use all of this coverage as free PR, seeking
to come out the other side with his rebel credentials burnished. He'll
recreate himself as a Republican martyr, unfairly maligned by a corrupt
priesthood that fears the true movement.
On the outside, this looks like a mistake. The Bannonite Alt-Right crew Milo
represents imagines itself a brilliant group of intellectual danger-seekers,
but trying to sell boy-buggering to the American Conservative Union sure
seems more stupid than daring (and it's plenty daring).
After all, the success of the Trump movement depends upon a nervous
coalition of aging religious conservatives and young, race-baiting,
Internet-addicted morons the people GOP consultant Rick Wilson once called
<http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/01/20/gop-consultant-rick-wilson-to-msn
bc-trump-supporters-childless-single-men-who-masturbate-to-anime/>
"childless single men who masturbate to anime."
The link between these two groups has always been tenuous at best. Really,
it's an absurd semantic misunderstanding, a classic Americanism, confusing
the words "liberty" and "libertine."
There's a big difference between believing in limited government, and
completely rejecting all behavioral and sexual morality. But people like
Yiannopoulos and Trump have been successful at blurring these lines, because
we're not a very bright people. Also, we're inexperienced when it comes to
this kind of high-level political con artistry.
A dynamic that all good swindlers understand is that once you've gotten a
person to make one embarrassing decision, it's easier to get him to make the
next one. A person who loses 10 grand trying to buy the Brooklyn Bridge is a
good bet to spend 20 more chasing the loss. Con artists call this "reloading
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reloading_scam> ."
The Trump phenomenon has been like this. Megachurch moms and dads across the
country grit their teeth when the "grab them by the pussy" tape came out,
quietly convincing themselves that "locker-room talk" was less horrifying
than a Hillary Clinton presidency.
When they cast their votes weeks later, it was like a secret transgression
that bound them to the new leader. This counter-intuitive brand of politics
is very effective. It's why no one should be too quick to put this week's
seeming fiasco with CPAC in the Republicans' loss column.
One would think the last thing you'd want to do if your intent was to hold a
fragile Republican coalition together is pitch Milo Yiannopoulos as a
defender of family values. Why would the Mike Pence crowd ever rally behind
a Brit with frosted hair who brags about getting blowjobs from priests? It
seems preposterous.
But watch it work. A week from now, the same conservatives who are beating
their breasts about Yiannopoulos now will go crawling back into the Trump
camp to fight the hated liberals on a dozen other issues. They will look
weak and indecisive, and privately will be demoralized, while the
Trump/Bannon/Milo crew will look like poker players who won a bluff. It's
always about the next news cycle with these people.
Trolling doesn't take brains. But it works, and it will keep working, until
we learn to see through the provocations in real time.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socializehttp://e-max.it/posizioname
nto-siti-web/socialize
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