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, "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 – 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 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 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 last summer, for instance, he couldn't help himself when Rogan brought up the "semen warrior" 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 "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 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 to walk out unless he's fired. Moreover, he's been disinvited 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 "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."

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.

#WhiteHouseSoWhite: "I Am Not Your Negro" Illuminates America's Ongoing Race Problem

By Sophia A. McClennen, Salon

20 February 17

 

The Trump administration is the whitest in decades. "I Am Not Your Negro" confronts both past and present racism

bout two years ago April Reign decided to encapsulate her frustration at yet another slate of white Academy Award nominees by launching the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. The hashtag turned into a rallying cry for increased diversity not just in Oscar nominations but throughout the film industry.

And yet last year’s slate of nominees similarly lacked diversity in the four major acting categories, and people of color were virtually absent from all the other categories as well. That led to a new hashtag: #OscarsStillSoWhite.

When a number of celebrities considered boycotting the Oscars, President Barack Obama decided to weigh in. His remarks reinforced the idea that the Oscar nominations matter because they are part of a larger network of social institutions. Obama said the key question is “Are we making sure that everybody is getting a fair shot?”

While in many ways the Obama presidency disappointed those of us who had hoped that the election of the first African-American president would signal a significant change in U.S. race relations, there is little doubt that his White House helped raise needed attention to issues of racial injustice in this nation.

Now in a weird reversal of fortune, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the most diverse slate in history of nominees for the 2017 awards at precisely the same time when the United States has the whitest White House in decades.

For the first time ever, four black directors have been nominated to receive the best documentary feature award. Meanwhile the Trump administration has the most white and the most male Cabinet since the Reagan era.  Even more disturbing, the story of the Trump team is not just one about a team that’s white, male and heterosexual; it is also about a slate that is perhaps among the most openly racist we have ever seen in our nation.

As Time reported shortly after the elections, Trump has been “choosing people who have shown hate toward immigrants, people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people and women. And he’s giving them a huge amount of power to act on that hate.”

Today racism is running rampant in the White House, as evidenced in the ideologies of several Trump senior advisers, but also, as Matthew Rozsa has reported for Salon, the behavior of his staffers.

While it may seem uncanny that #WhiteHouseSoWhite has now replaced #OscarsSoWhite, there’s little doubt that several major media figures are performing an important civic role in the Trump era. We have numerous examples of celebrities helping draw attention to the bigotry of the Trump presidency, from Meryl Streep’s calling out Trump at the Golden Globe Awards to Michael Moore’s reminding citizens that the Electoral College originated with racism.

What makes the Oscar nominations special in this regard, though, is the fact that a number of the films nominated for awards deal explicitly with race and race relations in America. Ava DuVernay’s “13th” focuses on mass incarceration in the United States and Ezra Edelman’s “O.J.: Made In America” covers the football star’s criminal trial through the lens of race. But if there is one film on the list of nominees that should be required viewing in the Trump era, it is Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro.”

A. O. Scott’s review of the film explained that there’s no better movie for pondering the question “is everything about race?” The film combines lyric beauty and brute reality as it forces viewers to confront the uncomfortable history of U.S. race relations and the structural inequalities that still persist in America.

In 1979 James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing a work in progress, “Remember This House.” The book was intended to be a radical, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends — Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. By interconnecting their stories, Baldwin hoped to create a book that could paint a picture of race in America. When he died in 1987, he had finished only 30 pages.

Peck’s film takes Baldwin’s text and uses it as the basis for a film that examines the uncomfortable history of racism in the United States. He blends the words of Baldwin, as spoken by Samuel Jackson, with footage of Baldwin. But rather than create a typical documentary (about Baldwin), Peck’s film is an artistic blend of Baldwin’s words and images of race relations throughout U.S. history.

As Andrew O’Hehir wrote in Salon, Baldwin was a unique voice: He was a “brilliant, exasperating and endlessly erudite black writer who belongs on any short list of the most important American intellectuals of the 20th century.”

Baldwin refused to fit into preconceived molds. He didn’t hate white people and he rejected the racial politics of the Black Panthers and the Black Muslim movements. He wasn’t a member of the NAACP because he associated it with the black upper class. He also focused close attention on the role of capitalism in racial inequality. As he put it, “White is a metaphor for power and it is simply a way for describing Chase Manhattan Bank.”

Baldwin confessed that when he was growing up, all his heroes were white. Such individuals were all he ever saw in movies. When he did see black men, they didn’t have anything in common with his father. They were completely unrecognizable. Pulling no punches, he said that this simple fact should be held accountable for decades of cultural violence whereby black citizens had virtually no positive representation in Hollywood of any kind. For Baldwin, the white-oriented culture industry in the United States fed a fantasy, one that led to an emotional poverty that he described as “bottomless.”

One clip in the film shows Baldwin when he appeared in a TV documentary called “The Negro and the American Promise.” Baldwin points out that the problem of race in America is the problem of America itself, of its inability to come to terms with a system that depends on marginalizing large classes of people.

“What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place because I’m not a nigger. I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it,” Baldwin says. “If I’m not a nigger here and you invented him — you, the white people, invented him — then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it’s able to ask that question.”

That was in 1963. When Peck started researching his film nearly 10 years ago, he realized that America still had not been able to answer that question. So he took Baldwin’s words and his insights and blended them into a statement about America’s longstanding refusal to deal with the persistence of racism.

That is why the film doesn’t trace a linear history. While it offers viewers a rich archive of material from the civil rights era, it does so by blending it with images of the present and the deeper past. The film layers images from slavery to the civil rights movement and #BlackLivesMatter and asks us to recognize U.S. history not by how much it has changed but by how starkly things have stayed the same.

Alongside ’60s-era words suggesting the “Negroes” are making progress, Peck puts up photos of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. Peck shows us photos of lynching, intercut with clips of Doris Day.

Peck’s artful editing exposes the deep hypocrisies in the rhetoric of historical progress. It forces the viewer to not just see the persistence of pain and suffering but also how the myth of a great America has been its greatest downfall.

And that is how the film derives its urgent relevance for the Trump era. Shot well before Trump was elected, the film references Trump only once in a series of superimposed images of U.S. political figures. We hear Trump’s voice say: “I’m sorry I did this to you, but you’re going to have to get used to it. It’s one of those little problems in life.”

While the film leaves the quote there to hang, the viewer surely feels a deeper sense of discomfort than Peck could have ever imagined.

The quote comes from a 2015 interview Trump did with Chris Wallace on Fox News in which he “apologized” to the GOP saying he knew he would get the nomination: “I’m going to win. . . . You know, I’m not one of these other guys that goes down. I don’t go down. I go up.”

When Peck chose Trump’s quote to insert into his film he couldn’t have known that just as his film would be hitting U.S. theaters, Trump would be installing an administration into the White House that was set to undermine everything the civil rights movement stood for.

Peck imagined that his film would use Baldwin’s insights about the assassinations of Medgar Evars, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as a way to investigate his “experiences of racism and intellectual violence.” Little did he know that his film, which depicts King’s struggle for voting rights in Selma, would be released as Jeff Sessions, a man who once said the Ku Klux Klan was OK, called the Voting Rights Act “intrusive” and doesn’t think voter ID laws are a problem, would now be attorney general.

Time reported that “Sessions first became nationally known for prosecuting three black civil rights workers for voter fraud.” It further noted that Sessions opposes not only undocumented immigration and a path to citizenship, but that he has called for a fadeout of legal immigration.

And then there is Steve Bannon. When Bannon, who rose to fame as executive director of the alt-right Breitbart News, was named chief White House strategist by Trump, David Duke, former head of the KKK, called the appointment “excellent.”

Added Duke: “You have an individual, Mr. Bannon, who’s basically creating the ideological aspects of where we’re going.”

Time reported that Bannon’s appointment also brought celebration from neo-Nazi groups, white nationalists and anti-Semitic people.

Bannon was the force behind Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations. He now sits on the National Security Council.

And those are just two of the most horrifying examples of the Trump administration’s racism. Trump’s entire team is infested with a racism the likes of which Peck could never have imagined would be the political environment for his film’s release.

What perhaps makes “I Am Not Your Negro” so powerful is the way that it combines a sense of urgency with a sense of wonder. There is so much beauty in this film about a reality that is so terribly ugly. The film is raw and sensitive, brutally honest and visually stunning. It doesn’t let you look away, but it doesn’t leave you desperate, either.

At one point in the film Baldwin explains that even though he refuses to whitewash the brutality of U.S. race relations, he remains an optimist. He is an optimist, he tells the viewer, because he is alive and refuses to give up. In this way, decades after his death, Baldwin offers viewers a model of optimism for the Trump era. It’s an optimism that’s rooted in reality, in seeing things as they are, and in asking the hard questions no one wants to hear.

As Baldwin wrote. “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”  It is hard to suppress the feeling that if we don’t heed his words, things could get a whole lot more terrible.

“I Am Not Your Negro” is currently showing in theaters across the nation.