Weep Not for Milo...

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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 06, 2017 8:29 am

Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson
The BuzzFeed article is important: very clear Mercer is the food source for all of the cancerous shit Steve Bannon vomits out, incl Milo.



Bannon was like a *bump stock* R Mercer installed on a semi automatic assault on human rights

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby Jerky » Sat Oct 07, 2017 12:00 am

Un-fucking-believable.
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 07, 2017 7:36 am

More on the Milo story and the larger context of anti-fascist resistance, here:


Spectacle, Conspiracy, & Antifascist Resistance with Mark Bray
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 07, 2017 5:23 pm

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/brei ... nnections/

Breitbart Is Silent On Bombshell Report On Alt-Right Connections
By Jared Holt | October 6, 2017 1:52 pm

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Milo Yiannopoulos from appearance on Fox News Channel.

Conservative news outlet Breitbart News has so far avoided addressing a bombshell Buzzfeed report that exposed the website’s role in fostering the racist alt-right movement and former Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ direct connection to both the wealthy billionaires who fund Breitbart and to white supremacists, one of whom “all but line-edited” Yiannopoulos’ infamous “guide to the alt-right.”

The report reveals emails and personal messages that show a coordinated effort from billionaire conservative donors to turn Yiannopoulous into a pop culture icon, reveal Yiannopoulos’ cozy relationship with the alt-right and also reveal former White House adviser and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon’s role in the effort.

But if you got all your news from Breitbart, you would have no clue about any of this.

On this morning’s episode of the SiriusXM program “Breitbart News Daily,” host Alex Marlow talked to guests about bump stock gun accessories, the Catalonia independence referendum, a report revealing decades of sexual harassment accusations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, clashes within the Republican Party, foreign policy, job creation and efforts to pass tax cuts. But there was not a single mention of Yiannopoulous or the Buzzfeed report.

Likewise, a search of articles posted to Breitbart’s website since the publication of Buzzfeed’s report reveals the site has not acknowledged the revelations. The last article mentioning Yiannopoulous was written on September 27.

Yiannopoulos said he met with Bannon in September, giving an indication that the relationship between the right-wing provocateur and the top brass at Breitbart is still intact.
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 19, 2017 3:05 pm

What Breitbart's Email Leaks Mean for Public Perception of the "Alt-Right"

Thursday, October 19, 2017
By Shane Burley, Truthout | News Analysis


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Far-right British commentator Milo Yiannopoulos is escorted from Sproul Plaza at the UC Berkley campus after a speech.

The celebrity of Milo Yiannopoulos has always been a balance between career-end charades and headline-grabbing stunts. While tabloids were still fawning over his wedding photos, especially on the race of his new husband, BuzzFeed was preparing a feature that further demolished his defenses against allegations of white nationalism. In the story published on October 5, Joseph Bernstein unveiled what was apparently years of private emails and Breitbart memos that outlined the far-right publication's relationship with open white nationalists, including Yiannopoulos's clear reliance on them. What this revealed was how Yiannopoulos's celebrity became a tool by which Stephen Bannon engaged in an information war to "defend the West."

While the term "alt-right" was roundly used to describe Yiannopoulos as he railed against Black Lives Matter and feminism, it was always a bit misapplied. The "alt-right" has always meant white nationalism, though in a dressed-up form that would rather cite esoteric German philosophers than David Duke. Yiannopoulos, a queer Jew, did not fit that bill, and while he enjoyed denouncing Muslims and immigrants, he did not meet the ideological litmus test that white nationalists like Richard Spencer or Jared Taylor might.

Instead, Yiannopoulos led what is now called the "alt-light," a slightly more moderate sphere of angry far-right populists that have helped to mainstream "alt-right" memes and talking points without committing to their more shocking political fantasies. People like Anne Coulter, Lauren Southern, Gavin McInnes, Rebel Media and, of course, Breitbart, are all figures in this canon, and Yiannopoulos was simply their loudest and most prolific icon. Gaining fame by leading the misogynist troll army during Gamergate, Yiannopoulos was ported over the pond to work at Breitbart as a tech editor, but it was his pithy blogs going after Breitbart's favorite targets that garnered his celebrity. In 2015 and 2016, Yiannopoulos mingled with white nationalism, bringing people like male tribalist Jack Donovan onto his podcast and writing his much-cited outline of the "alt-right" for Breitbart.

What has allowed for Breitbart's and Yiannopoulos's success has always been plausible deniability. Yiannopoulos can say almost the same things as the "alt-right," but then ducks away from accusations since he effectively refused to take the final rhetorical step: He wasn't talking about people of color or women per se, just these particular people. This has been a known strategy for years as Breitbart replaced Fox News as the radical right organ of news. The email leaks show that Breitbart's connections to white supremacists were real.

In email after email, Yiannopoulos's directives came down from Bannon, who excoriated Yiannopoulos anytime he refused to hone in specifically on Muslims and those "we are in an existential war" against. Yiannopoulos, for his part, made friends with the white nationalists early on, especially with Weev, the famous troll known for his vulgar neo-Nazism and work with The Daily Stormer. Yiannopoulos's articles were shaped and edited by Devin Saucier of American Renaissance, the most prominent white nationalist organization in the country that focuses much of its time on trying to prove race differences in intelligence. Other "alt-right" figures did direct edits on stories, and far-right Breitbart investors like Rebekah Mercer of the Mercer Family Foundation filtered stories to Yiannopoulos through Bannon. While Yiannopoulos played the innocent dupe to the racism of the "alt-right," in email after email, according to BuzzFeed News, he not only understood its racism full well, but it appeared as though he and Bannon reveled in it and used Breitbart as a well-coded tool to stoke those racist feelings in readers.

The relationships of tech impresario Peter Thiel and Bannon and the Neoreactionary movement -- specifically race and IQ proponent Curtis Yarvin -- was again made explicit, but this inspired few surprises. Yarvin became famous under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, and wrote a blog outlining his opposition to equality, democracy and social progress. Moldbug's ideas have had major currency in Silicon Valley, and Thiel, as a major right-wing tech figure, was able to shelter himself from direct connections with Yarvin until the report was released.

Most damning of all, however, is likely the clip of Yiannopoulos's April 2016 Texas karaoke event, where "alt-right" leaders threw up "sieg heils," and Richard Spencer laughed in the audience. The private event was not open to the media, and presumably Milo had no intention of revealing his open admiration of the "alt-right" shown at the bar. Mike "Enoch" Peinovich, the host of the white nationalist troll-podcast The Daily Shoah, described on his show his own relationship with Yiannopoulos after the fact, admitting he was also at this karaoke event and that they had exchanged contact information.


Continues at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4231 ... -alt-right
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 25, 2017 3:20 pm

Steve Bannon says Milo Yiannopoulos is “dead to me,” but is he?


Bannon’s break with Yiannopoulos is not clean however.

Following his departure from Breitbart, Yiannopoulos has attempted to parlay his successes as the world’s most famous gay right-winger into creating a successful multimedia organization, Milo Inc. It's not gone entirely according to plan. Far from influential, the company's website currently features a calendar for Yiannopoulos “Troll Academy Tour,” where he appears at free speech rallies throughout the world, and not much else of value. Yiannopoulos also self published his book shortly after it was dropped by publishers.

Both Breitbart and Milo Inc. are connected by Trump supporter Bob Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire and his daughter, Rebekah. The conservative pair own shares in Breitbart and are a major funder to Milo Inc. The Mercers have yet to confirm whether they will cut funding to Milo Inc., in the two weeks since the Buzzfeed reports were published.

A source close to the Mercers told Vanity Fair that the family “invested in Milo knowing that he would generate negative press, knowing that he’s someone with a past, someone with controversial habits. No revelation is going to take that away.” The pair has yet to respond to Bannon and Yiannopoulos' apparent break.

“We are executing on our business model and looking forward to continued success,” Alex Macris, Milo Inc’s C.E.O., told Vanity Fair.

Bannon has not commented publicly on the estrangement or the financial ties. The spat, and the machinations behind it, do demonstrate one thing, however: When politics are so divisive that factions of the far right can split due to one-upping of each other’s outrageous behavior, it’s murky territory for mega donors who may be okay with dog-whistle politics, but draw the line when the white nationalism is overt.

Though Yiannapoulos has yet to respond to any of these controversies, he continues his crusade to become media's most odious figure. Currently, he's accusing Ellen Degeneres of being complicit in the Las Vegas Massacre.


https://www.salon.com/2017/10/24/steve- ... but-is-he/
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby SonicG » Wed Oct 25, 2017 7:55 pm

Former Milo Yiannopoulos intern who killed his own father had a strong presence in alt-right circles online


A former intern and ghostwriter for Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who first made a name for himself on Breitbart News, killed his own father for allegedly calling him a Nazi after years of frequently posting on far-right blogs, YouTube, and Reddit.

Lane Davis, 33, murdered his father on July 14 in the community of Samish Island, Washington, after an altercation erupted between him and his parents in which he accused them of being "leftist pedophiles" after becoming angered by something online, The Daily Beast reports.

Because Davis is reportedly prone to angry outbursts, when his mother Catherine Davis initially called 911, she was relatively calm, according to recordings of the call recently obtained by The Daily Beast.

"He needs an intervention of some kind here," she told dispatchers.

However, minutes later, she called again.

"He stabbed him!" Davis's mother yelled, referring to Davis's father, Charles Davis. "He's dead, he's dead, he's dead," she said after calling a third time.

Police arrested Davis soon afterward and charged him with first-degree murder, to which Davis pleaded not guilty. He is currently being held in a county jail on $1 million bail, and his trial is set to take place in January.

Lane Davis has a long and prolific history online, and as his mother told a 911 dispatcher in the calls obtained by The Daily Beast, "He just lives on the internet."

After becoming involved in right-wing circles online for the first time through Gamergate, a movement of gamers attempting to "fight back" against the influence of feminism and progressivism in the video game industry, Davis went on to posting right-wing conspiracy videos on YouTube and wrote posts that garnered thousands of upvotes on Reddit's r/The_Donald subreddit, which sprang up during the 2016 presidential election in support of now-President Donald Trump.

Using the handle seattle4truth in both forums, he spread popular alt-right conspiracy theories about child sex rings run by Hilary Clinton, the activities of deceased Democratic National Committee staff Seth Rich, and ties between liberals and pedophilia, The Daily Beast noted.

Davis was subsequently hired as a research intern for Yiannopoulos, who is also affiliated with the Gamergate community. Davis was one of the 44 interns that Yiannopoulos had hired to conduct research and ghostwrite his pieces on his behalf, managing the "army" of ghostwriters through a group called Project Milo on the Slack messaging application.

It was Davis himself who leaked Slack messages to Buzzfeed after he left the project. Screenshots of Slack messages confirming Davis's involvement were obtained by right-wing blogger Yes, Margaret? earlier this month, and Davis can be seen complaining about Yiannopoulos.

"He would promise me money for the stories i wrote... use them under his name... and then he didn't pay me," one message to a colleague reads.

Yiannopoulos released this statement to The Daily Beast about Davis: "Mr. Davis was a volunteer for me for a brief period of time prior to my founding MILO Inc. I was unhappy with his work and discontinued the relationship. I then experienced his anger firsthand as he threatened me and later went to BuzzFeed making false and inaccurate accusations."

After working for Yiannopoulos, Davis went on to write for The Ralph Retort, another right-wing blog. After news broke of his father's murder, the site's editor Ethan Ralph removed all of Davis's content and distanced himself from his actions.

"I condemn unjustified killings and political violence of any sort," Ralph wrote in a post on his site. "Mr. Davis will have to answer for his own heinous action in a court of law... Hug those around you that you love a little closer tonight, especially loved ones that you disagree with politically."

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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Sun Nov 05, 2017 8:58 am

Milo Yiannopoulos becomes latest white nationalist to write for the Daily Caller

Breitbart News thought Yiannopoulos was too disgusting — Tucker Carlson’s news site disagrees


After BuzzFeed News exposed his extensive connections to white nationalists, far-right columnist Milo Yiannopoulos became so politically toxic that even Breitbart News and its chairman Steve Bannon have renounced their associations with him. But just as Breitbart was closing a door to him, the Daily Caller was opening a window for Yiannopoulos.

The right-wing website announced on Friday that it would be publishing Yiannopoulos on a weekly basis.

The former Breitbart star has become the latest of several white nationalist writers to be welcomed by the Daily Caller. The site is owned in part by Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson although he has said he is uninvolved in the site's operations. The primary financial backer of the enterprise is said to be Foster Friess, an investor who has donated to a number of Christian nationalist causes.

Geoffrey Ingersoll, the Caller's editor-in-chief, told Salon via email that Yiannopoulos is receiving no compensation for his writing.

"He has no contract, he has no salary, he’s not being paid," Ingersoll wrote.

Founded in 2010 as a conservative response to the Huffington Post, the Daily Caller's lower profile than Breitbart News has allowed its turn toward white nationalism to receive less press coverage than Bannon's infamous attempts to make Breitbart "the platform for the alt-right."

Primarily, the Caller's reorientation has been at the hands of Scott Greer, the site's deputy editor who was revealed in 2016 as having extensive friendship ties to prominent white nationalists, including Devin Saucier, the racist editor who also is connected to Yiannopoulos. Saucier is the assistant to Jared Taylor, the founder and publisher of the white supremacist website American Renaissance. Greer was also found to have regularly associated with the Wolves of Vinland, essentially a racist fraternity for the post-college set which also enjoys animal sacrifices.


Continues at: https://www.salon.com/2017/11/03/milo-h ... ly-caller/
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby Jerky » Mon Nov 06, 2017 3:01 am

He lasted less than 24 hours.

Both Milo and the editor who hired him were given the heave ho by TheDailyCaller shortly after the first public announcement that Milo was going to write for them.

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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Sun Nov 12, 2017 9:56 am

https://thinkprogress.org/breitbart-chi ... 9ca50891c/


Breitbart would rather defend alleged child molester Roy Moore than lose an election

Editors for the site are downplaying allegations that the Republican senate candidate undressed and fondled a 14-year-old girl.

ADAM PECK
NOV 10, 2017


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Former White House strategist Steve Bannon speaks at a rally for U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017, in Montgomery, Ala.


In February, white supremacist online forum Breitbart parted ways with their star provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos after a video surfaced of him defending pedophilia.

“Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody who is 13 years old and sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty, who do not have functioning sex organs yet, who have not gone through puberty,” Yiannopoulos explained (falsely) on a podcast. “In the gay world, some of the most important enriching, and incredibly life-affirming, important, shaping relationships are between younger boys and older men. They can be hugely positive experiences very often for those young boys.”

At the time, Breitbart staff condemned Yiannopoulos’ comments and called for his dismissal. “I don’t wish anybody badly, but do I kind of hope Milo goes away?” said Lee Stranahan, a writer for the site. “I think I do. I think that would be best for everybody. . . . Because he’s not adding to the brand.”

In the intervening months, though, it seems the Breitbart staff had a change of heart on the brand implications of sexually assaulting children.

On Thursday, the Washington Post published a lengthy story detailing Republican Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore’s physical relationships with children—some as young as 14 years old—when he was in his 30s. Republicans in Congress expressed disgust at the allegations (though couldn’t help but couch their condemnations by suggesting the women might be lying), but one piece of the conservative apparatus was notably staunch in its unequivocal defense of Moore: Breitbart.

The site’s top executive Steve Bannon was asked about the revelations during an event in Manchester, New Hampshire on Thursday night, and compared it to the Access Hollywood tapes of Donald Trump wherein he bragged about “grabbing [women] by the pussy.” In both cases, Bannon didn’t attack the men in question; he attacked the media.

“The Bezos-Amazon-Washington Post that dropped that dime on Donald Trump, is the same Bezos-Amazon-Washington Post that dropped the dime this afternoon on Judge Roy Moore. Now, is that a coincidence?,” he said, according to CBS News.

Bannon’s response is pulled straight from the far-right playbook on how to withstand allegations of impropriety or criminality. Step one: Move quickly to portray themselves as victims of a hostile press.

Bannon acolyte Joel Pollak, a Breitbart editor, appeared on MSNBC hours after the story first broke and proceeded to step two: downplaying the allegations. He said that the allegations aren’t serious because three of the four women featured in the story were between 16 and 18 when Moore—then in his mid-30s—began pursuing relationships with them.

“The 16-year-old and the 18-year-old have no business in that story, because those are women of legal age of consent at the time,” Pollak told host Ali Velshi. “The facts could come out differently, but as far as we know, there’s only one relationship that’s been alleged that’s problematic.”

The relationship Breitbart diagnoses as “problematic” is a 32-year-old man undressing a 14-year-old girl, groping her, and forcing her to touch his genitals over his underwear. If the allegations are substantiated, Moore would be guilty of sexual abuse in the second degree under Alabama state law. As Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) pointed out on Twitter, there is no statute of limitations in Alabama for sexual abuse of minors.

The details of these allegations line up remarkably well with the hypothetical relationships that Yiannopoulos defended. And yet while the mere mention of such relationships was deemed too toxic for Breitbart’s audience, the site continues to advocate for the election of a man accused of actually engaging in a predatory relationship to the United States Senate.

The difference, of course, is that cutting Milo cost the site nothing in its pursuit of a political agenda. Roy Moore, meanwhile, is Steve Bannon’s handpicked candidate to fill Jeff Sessions’ old senate seat. To watch Moore’s candidacy go down in flames is to watch Breitbart’s political influence go down with it. That’s the political calculus that Breitbart has made: defend a child molester in order to save face.
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 27, 2017 8:40 am

Milo Yiannopoulos Comes To Melbourne : December 4, 2017

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Next Monday, December 4, professional troll and Trump fanboy Milo Yiannopoulos is coming to Melbourne to talk shit. Milo’s tour is being sponsored by Penthouse magazine, with fellow trollumnists Andrew Bolt and Mark Latham lending their support as MCs. While writer Roxane Gay memorably described Milo as being responsible for propagating ‘racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies … transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’, publisher Damien Costas has even compared Milo to ‘Martin Luther King Jnr and the freedom riders in the 1960s’. (True story!) The media troll has also been invited by another (proprietarian) troll, David Leyonhjelm, to speak at federal parliament — which is about par for the course.

While promotional material for the tour cites Forbes (in 2012, Milo was ‘digital media’s Citizen Kane‘ according to Jennifer Kite-Powell), as Richard Cooke writes, ‘In so many ways, Milo Yiannopoulos is unremarkable. He is just one of a long line of conservative grifters making hay in Australia.’

Obviously, neither Milo’s endorsement of man-boy ‘love’ (child rape), nor his role as errand boy for neo-Nazis and fascists, has prevented him from being adopted as a mascot by local trollumnists and the AltRight; a fact which, given that they operate according to a very similar modus operandi, is perhaps not that surprising. Certainly, the Buzzfeed article by Joseph Bernstein (Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled [sic] Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream, October 6, 2017), which documents Milo’s function as a useful idiot for the AltRight, has been ignored by local fanboys. The dox charts the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.


More at: http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=42075
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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Sat Dec 02, 2017 9:29 am

The Mercers Wash Their Hands of Milo, Rosie Gray, The Atlantic, November 2, 2017 (‘The conservative billionaire distances himself from the right-wing provocateur, whose reputation has been sullied by reports outlining his ties to white nationalists’):

… Mercer did until recently give financial backing to Yiannopoulos, who has made a career of provocation on race, gender, and other identity issues. BuzzFeed’s recent story included a video of Yiannopoulos singing in a karaoke bar as the white nationalist “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer and others give Nazi salutes. The story also reported that Yiannopoulos’s passwords included references to Kristallnacht, the 1938 anti-Semitic German pogrom that historians mark as the beginning of the Holocaust, and the Night of the Long Knives, the murderous 1934 purge of Hitler’s onetime allies by Nazi paramilitaries.

A source with close knowledge of the relationship between Yiannopoulos and the Mercers said the email leak had been a last straw.

It “showed a complete lack of professionalism,” this person said. Yiannopoulos had already been damaged by his ejection from Breitbart News earlier this year after comments he made defending pedophilia surfaced, and by a failed attempt to hold a “Free Speech Week” on the UC-Berkeley campus. “I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” this source said of the Mercers’ cutting Yiannopoulos off.

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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 05, 2017 9:26 am

Ned Resnikoff

Great White Hype

A rising pundit class makes Bannonism sound respectable

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From Platform to Pedestal
But as the news media has consolidated and the role of thought leader has fallen even further out of most writers’ grasp, something strange has happened: new publishing platforms and editorial strategies have made it easier for even the most status-poor journalist to play at thought leadership. For that, you can thank the advent of blogging and, later, microblogging on Twitter.

By making it possible to find an audience and publish content without the oversight of an editor or employer, blogging platforms created a whole new set of professional incentives. Once, journalists could only build a professional reputation once they were employed in the field; now they can cultivate a following, establish a valuable brand, and, with luck, convert that asset into a job.

Given the right combination of hard work, canniness, and luck, it is possible for a journalist to graduate to thought-leader status.


The most effective brand curation tactic involves finding a unique “voice”: a set of distinctive stylistic markers and personalized opinions.

Thus the game that thought leaders have always played in order to magnify their own influence has turned into a strategy that lay practitioners can use to secure recognition or employment in the knowledge economy. At the same time, more publishers and entrepreneurs came to realize that “voice” was among the news industry’s most cost-effective traffic drivers, especially when it wasn’t confined to the opinion pages. In some cases, a compelling voice and an hour of work could yield more unique impressions on a post than weeks of dogged reporting.

This shift has proved crucial, for one simple reason: blogs and social media have changed how journalists conceive of their audience. It turns out that on platforms like Twitter, the most powerful way to disseminate content is by getting “influencers”—usually other journalists—to share it with their considerable followings. This leads journalists to write, essentially, for each other. The profession has long had an insular, guild-like quality to it, but competition to gain retweeted renown within that insular network has now become a de facto business model for any journalism outlet seeking to maximize its traffic. For an aspiring thought leader, the ideal product is a tweeted aperçu that cements his own intellectual credentials while also providing some second-hand reputational benefits to colleagues who retweet it.

This is where the tacit social contract of Bannonite co-dependency comes into play. The challenge for a journalist who aspires to thought leadership—besides persistent economic insecurity—is that he (and here again, it is, with depressing predictability, almost always a “he”) usually doesn’t have the expertise to critically engage with difficult subjects, much less craft novel arguments about them. He’s best served if he can attach himself to the work of others, and position himself as someone who can interpret that work for a wider readership. In that way, he demonstrates his mastery of the source material to his bosses and colleagues alike, who will then use his content to bolster their own positions within the knowledge economy.

The thought leader, and especially the mystical philosopher, is at the center of this project. He provides the material that journalists can rework to their own purposes, in a social dance that assumes a handful of different forms. A journalist might try to present himself as a sympathetic equal of the mystical philosopher or a devoted apostle. Alternately, he might cast himself as the mystic’s worthy nemesis. Or he might simply endeavor to explain the thought leader’s gnomic pronouncements, as if he alone is learned enough to unpack them. In any case, he draws intellectual capital from the mystical philosopher in exchange for popular recognition and the credibility that accompanies it. The journalist holds up a flattering mirror to the thought leader; and then he flatters himself by pretending to see his own distorted reflection in his subject.

Watching this dynamic play out is tedious, but it also has the potential to be genuinely dangerous. When journalists treat men like Bannon as if they are serious thinkers, they lend undeserved public legitimacy to a racist, conspiratorial, anti-democratic ideology. Intentionally or not, they allow themselves to be used as a white nationalist recruiting tool. And in the process, they inadvertently empower thugs like the man who murdered Heather Heyer during last summer’s “Unite the Right” protest in Charlottesville.

A key part of fascism’s appeal is its aura of mystique: the sense that its adherents have won some esoteric knowledge about the way the world really works. By fitting Bannon into this mystical philosopher trope, journalists implicitly testified to the truth of the sales pitch. To his all-too-genuine political influence, they added an intellectual allure that was never anything more than clever branding.

The Milo-High Club
Usually the transactional nature of these exchanges is discreet and implicit. So credit is due to Buzzfeed’s Joseph Bernstein, who in October published a series of emails between Bannon, his crypto-fascist-chic protégé Milo Yiannopoulos, some overt Nazis, and a handful of ostensibly more mainstream journalists like Mitchell Sunderland, then a senior staff writer for Broadly, Vice’s section aimed at women readers. (Sunderland was fired not long after the Buzzfeed story went live.) Bernstein’s story was a tremendous piece of reporting; it demonstrated how Yiannopoulos solicited ideas and editorial input from outright neo-Nazis, diluted it enough to merit publication on Breitbart, and cultivated the affection—or at least approval-seeking acquaintanceship—of wannabe thought-leaders at outlets with liberal readerships. Yiannopoulos, unlike Bannon, can’t convincingly feign blinding genius, so he relies more on bad-boy insouciance; but in most other respects his emails with reporters at Broadly, Slate, and elsewhere were emblematic of how people like Bannon seduce the intellectually insecure. And of course, the emails in Bernstein’s story show Bannon behind the scenes, shaping the efforts of Yiannopoulos to translate white supremacist ideas into something that can slip into more respectable publications.

More marginal figures like Richard Spencer have also had some limited success at this game. Though he could never match Bannon for good press—his more overt white nationalism foreclosed that option—credulous journalists nonetheless treated him like a far more influential and serious figure than he actually is. His vanity project, the National Policy Institute, routinely gets described as a “think tank” even though it appears to have virtually no staff.

Even more insidiously, the warm glow of mainstream praise can provide some major hatemongers with bona fide crossover appeal, provided they’re savvy enough to limit their white nationalist pronouncements to dog whistles.

When journalists treat men like Bannon as if they are serious thinkers, they lend undeserved public legitimacy to a racist, conspiratorial, anti-democratic ideology.


Thus, in an ill-timed flourish of hate-enabling, the center-left pundit Peter Beinart wrote a piece for The Atlantic in July that applauded Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show as “extraordinary” and “intellectually interesting,” even as the cable news host was going out of his way to air commentary that earned the approbation of white supremacist figures like David Duke. Given Carlson’s vile response to the bloodshed in Charlottesville (“What will [the left] feel empowered to destroy next,“ Carlson thundered after a historically illiterate survey of slave ownership in the West), one wonders if Beinart still finds him extraordinary. Neither Spencer nor Carlson is a mystical philosopher in the strict sense, yet they both aspire to a certain amount of intellectual cachet, and find their efforts rewarded with alarming frequency.


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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby American Dream » Sun Dec 10, 2017 3:46 pm

Australian Jewish Democratic Society : Statement against fascism and Milo Yiannopoulos in Kensington

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Around the world, and around this country, there is increasing support for far-right politics, fascism and neo-Nazism. At Milo Yiannopoulos’ talk on Monday night a group of around 40 far-right people, including some known neo-Nazis, gathered outside the talk to incite hatred and violence. As well as racist language and attacks on Muslims, a number of those present chanted the names of concentration camps at a young Jewish woman who was there with a group from Jews against Fascism.

Some people in line waiting to hear Milo were filmed doing Hitler salutes. One group of fascists violently assaulted three protesters as they were trying to leave. More reports are emerging of those who attended Milo’s talk assaulting residents of the Kensington Housing Estate. As Jews we know too well where such violence and hate speech leads. Dissidence and active resistance to the mainstreaming of these ideas is vital.

Although there are some who argue that Milo and his associates are not Nazis, we believe that attaching that badge is accurate and important. Milo and Avi Yemeni, who was with the far-right camp, deflect the idea that they are Nazis as preposterous because they are Jewish or have Jewish ancestry. Yet, they nonetheless organise with and alongside Nazis who espouse violent racist views which are clearly informed by, and continue a history of, those offered by the Nazi regime in fascist Europe. These gangs adopt the superior race Nazi ideology, provoke violence, and the use of Nazi references and imagery is always within arm’s reach. This is what we mean by Nazis. Buzzfeed, whilst exposing Yiannopoulos’ enthusiasm for working with Nazis, has also exposed that Milo has used passwords including Kristallnacht and other antisemitic references. One needn’t look far to discover the horrific and vitriolic things Milo has said and done, including being an apologist for paedophilia.

It is widely known and reported that Yemini has said he would be antisemitic if he weren’t Jewish. It’s time we in the Jewish community stopped letting these men and their supporters hide behind the façade that they cannot possibly be Nazis because of their Jewish identities.

We send our solidarity and support to the residents of the Kensington estate, many of whom are refugees, and a significant number of Muslims, who faced with bravery and resilience vile fascists using verbal and physical abuse, behind the protection of Victorian Police. Victoria Police, in turn, have a long recognised history of systemic racism, racial profiling, and harassment of this community, which came out on the night through their use of provocation, racial slurs, and intimidation.

In Australia at the present moment we can also clearly see the effects of racism on Aboriginal people, refugees, people seeking asylum and other marginalised peoples. There is a rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism. We send solidarity to all peoples facing the brunt of the rise of racism and fascism.

This solidarity can only be made tangible by us, as well as other Jewish groups and individuals, making clear our public opposition to fascism and neo-Nazism. As we are witnessing the rise in far-right politics, we are seeing a corresponding wave of active resistance and supportive networking, to which we are firmly committed. We look forward to working alongside other Jewish and non-Jewish organisations and peoples in order to oppose this fascist violence and change the discourses which currently dominate our society.


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Re: Weep Not for Milo...

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 28, 2017 5:40 pm

Court Docs Reveal Brutal Editor’s Notes On Milo Book Nixed By Publisher

As evidence for why Simon & Schuster did not want to move forward with publication of self-proclaimed far-right “troll” Milo Yiannopoulos’ autobiography “Dangerous,” the publisher has offered up the manuscript itself—annotated with a litany of scathing notes from one of its top editors.

The draft was included in court documents the publisher recently filed in New York State Supreme Court to defend its February decision to cancel a publication deal with Yiannopoulos worth $225,000. Yiannopoulos sued for $10 million in July over a breach of contract.

Manuscript notes from editor Mitchell Ivers show the impossible task Simon & Schuster faced: prodding an individual who built a career at Breitbart News off of demeaning Islam and using the word “lesbian” as a slur to produce a book suitable for mainstream publication.

Over and over, Yiannopoulos’ characteristic self-aggrandizement, penchant for ethnic smears, sloppy logic, and lack of humor are criticized by Ivers.

“Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke,” Ivers writes of a line about “informing cab drivers that curry is not a deodorant.”

“Don’t start chapter with accusation that feminists=fat. It destroys any seriousness of purpose,” he notes on a section titled “Why Feminists Hate Me.”

“If that headline is hate speech, THIS WHOLE BOOK is hate speech,” he implores on a section about a piece by Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti titled “Feminists Don’t Hate Men, But It Wouldn’t Matter If They Did.”

The “superficial and nonsubstantive” quality of the work is what ultimately prompted Simon & Schuster to cancel the book contract, Ivers said in a sworn affidavit. The decision to do so came at around the same time that Yiannopoulos was forced out from Breitbart and dropped from the Conservative Political Action Conference after a video surfaced in which he appeared to defend pedophilia.

Though Yiannopoulos was permitted to keep his $80,000 book advance, he sued the publisher in July. A New York Supreme Court judge in October rejected Simon & Schuster’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

But Yiannopoulos has otherwise had a spectacularly bad year. His effort to organize a “Free Speech Week” fell apart after he neglected to actually inform the slated speakers that they were invited. And in October, BuzzFeed published an explosive exposé on Yiannopoulos’ successful campaign to “smuggle” Nazi and white nationalist ideas into Breitbart’s stories and the broader political discourse.

It’s unclear why Simon & Schuster thought Yiannopoulos—whose views on women, gay people, minorities, and Muslims were well-known long before his concerted attempts to mainstream white nationalism were uncovered—was the best person to author a “serious work addressing political correctness and related free speech issues,” as they referred to the initial publication deal in a court document.

His contract was with Threshold Editions, a Simon & Schuster imprint aimed at a conservative audience, and Ivers has personally edited books by President Donald Trump, conservative shock-jock Rush Limbaugh, and Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe. At various points in his notes, Ivers praises Yiannopoulos’ “well argued” points about why Black Lives Matter has failed as a movement, or how the left abandoned white working-class voters.

But the notes by Mitchell, which circulated on Twitter Thursday, elucidate how the book failed to live up to what Simon & Schuster ostensibly thought they’d signed up for.

“Delete entire chapter”

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“No need to drag lesbians into this!”

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“I will not accept a manuscript that labels an entire class of people ‘mentally ill.'”

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“If that headline is hate speech, THIS WHOLE BOOK is hate speech.”

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“The way you casually bring up the KKK makes no sense”

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“Stupid ethnic joke diminishes any authority”

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“Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke”

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“This entire paragraph is just repeating Fake News.”

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“Three unfunny jokes in a row.”

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Read the full annotated manuscript below.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... -dangerous
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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