Weep Not for Milo...

[Jerky]

“Glibness and superficial charm. Manipulation of others. A grandiose sense of self. Pathological lying. A lack of remorse, shame or guilt. Shallow emotions. An incapacity to feel genuine love. A need for stimulation. Frequent verbal outbursts. Poor behavioural controls. These are just some of the things that social media are encouraging in all of us. They’re also a pretty comprehensive diagnostic checklist for sociopathy – in fact, that’s where I got the list.”

***

Under protest and against my better judgment, I suppose I should write a few words about Milo Yiannopolous and his catastrophic disaster of a week. Under protest, because the full Milo saga is so twisted and byzantine it defies attempts at chronological narrative presentation. Against my better judgment, because as a non-invested observer who thinks Milo and his antics are a pox on our culture--not a serious pox like smallpox mind you, more like chickenpox: irritating, ugly, and in rare cases dangerous--I'm probably not the best person to be writing his story.

I'm also not too keen on having to deal with Milo's fans trying to White Knight for him by exercising their l33t trolling skills against me and my paltry little hobby blog, the way I've seen them do to others, especially on Youtube, where defending Milo has become a sort of click-bait cottage industry. Anyway, hesitation aside, I guess I do have a couple things I want to say about this controversy that I haven't seen anyone else say yet, so there's nothing I can do but press on.

First things first, for you lucky few who have yet to run across Milo in your online meanderings, USA Today has a decent bio, whereas a more in-depth (and judgmental) primer can be found in James Kirchick’s excellent overview for Tablet Magazine, titled“Donald Trump’s Little Boy is a Gay Half-Jew with Jungle Fever”. Published in June of 2016, the first two paragraphs provide an accurate and fairly definitive snapshot of Milo's carefully groomed public persona, as well as some insight into his political leanings, insofar as these bear assessing:

Milo Yiannopoulos is a fervent supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Referring to Trump as “Daddy,” the ostentatiously gay British media personality provides a camp component to the presumptive Republican nominee’s fan base. What seems to excite Yiannopoulos about Trump is what seems to excite most of the tycoon’s voters: a brash, take-no-prisoners attitude. When I recently asked Yiannopoulos to name the Trump policies he favors, he replied with a very revealing answer. Trump supporters don’t care about the man’s policies, he said. “They want to burn everything down.” Suddenly Yiannopoulos’ Twitter handle, @Nero (followed by more than 200,000 Twitter users), made all the more sense.
Simultaneously vacuous and sinister, equal parts nihilist and narcissist, Yiannopoulos is the model Trump advocate. And as Trump comes under increasing scrutiny, Yiannopoulos, who writes for Breitbart.com, has gone to great lengths defending the worst elements of his campaign. Shortly after our encounter, which took place this March over brunch in Washington, Yiannopoulos published a long article championing the “alt right,” the largely Internet-based, populist movement that has surged to prominence on the heels of Trump’s success. Among its various constituencies, the alt right is comprised of mens’ rights advocates, pseudo-intellectual “race realists,” technocratic authoritarians... and outright neo-Nazis. Speaking of the movement’s “intellectuals,” the bulk of whom write for avowedly racist and anti-Semitic publications like VDARE and American Renaissance, Yiannopoulos and his co-author described them as “dangerously bright.”
At this point, just over half a year after this article was published, some updates are required. First, and most famously, Milo had his Twitter account permanently revoked after starting an online fight with Leslie Jones, one of the stars of the much-maligned all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Secondly, he no longer works at Breitbart.

Which is where things get complicated.

You see, the reason for Milo's very bad week is because of some things he said during two lengthy online interviews:a Joe Rogan Podcast from July of 2016, and a Drunken Peasants Livestream from roughly the same time period.

During both appearances, sandwiched between his boilerplate "fabulous supervillain" shtick--including rampant misogyny, belittling of rape, anti-trans rhetoric, gay self-loathing, elitist classism, anti-Muslim bigotry, racist fetishization of the Black male body, evangelical Catholicism (yes, really), Trump apologetics, and countless other grotesqueries--he slipped in a defense of sex between grown men and young adolescent boys, saying it was no big deal, and that it could even have a salutary effect on the youth.

Barely anyone noticed. Even fewer cared. Months passed without incident.

Then, on Thursday, February 17, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the news, Milo was announced as the keynote speaker for 2017's annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), perhaps the most important "marquee" cultural event in the entire American conservative social calendar. His address was going to focus on his "experiences in America battling feminists, Black Lives Matter, the media, professors and the entertainment industry."

The next day, a cadre of anti-Trump conservatives known on Twitter as the Reagan Battalion were made aware of a short Youtube video featuring select portions excerpted from the videos mentioned above, highlighting Milo's questionable comments about how the "notion of consent" is "arbitrary and oppressive", how grown men having sex with 13-year-old boys does NOT count as pedophilia because the latter have fully functioning genitals, and how he's grateful to "Father Mike" for teaching him how to give great head.

The video had already been viewed thousands of times, but when the Reagan Battalion tweeted about it, asking whether it was acceptable for a self-described "conservative" institution like CPAC to be associating themselves with the likes of Milo... all Hell broke loose.

In short order, Milo was disinvited from CPAC. He took to Facebook to defend himself, claiming that the video had been deceptively edited to put him in a bad light. Then his quarter million dollar book deal with Simon & Schuster fell through. Back at Facebook, Milo's updates took on a tone of barely contained panic. “I do not support pedophilia. Period,” he wrote. “It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst. There are selectively edited videos doing the rounds, as part of a coordinated effort to discredit me from establishment Republicans, that suggest I am soft on the subject.”

Unfortunately for Milo, it was all too easy to check for oneself and discover that his words were not only not "selectively edited", but that they were even worse in context. That's around the time a number of employees at the alt.right propaganda organ Breitbart--where Milo enjoyed celebrity status as the site's Chief Tech Editor, despite his "reporting" mostly consisting of his "Dangerous Faggot College Tour" appearance transcripts--were threatening to quit en masse if he wasn't fired.

72 hours after the storm began, Milo held a press conference in which he apologized (but not really), tried (and mostly failed) to defend himself against... um... himself, and "resigned" from Breitbart. Kind of like how Michael Flynn "resigned" from the White House.

While all this was going on--and please forgive this digression--one of the most entertaining sideshows involved watching how this right-wing super-troll and his far right fan-base reacted in real time to his being exposed by conservative activists, leading to his being dis-invited from a right-wing convention and fired from his job at an alt.right website.

This image sums it up quite succinctly:



Yes! That's right! They blamed it all on that viscerally despised boogeyman, those loony left socialist MSM Democrat beta SJW cuck LIBERALS!

Even more hilariously unhinged was the sprawling conspiracy theory concocted by goofy, lisping alt.right weirdo (and serial false pedophilia accuser) Mike "Gorilla Mindset" Cernovich, who lays out his insider knowledge of the insidious, multi-million dollar, years-in-the-brewing, anti-Milo plot in this magnificently cringe-inducing Youtube video:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/cWZuMx10XaQ[/youtube]

It's sort of amusing, in a way, watching two leading PizzaGate promoters--who based much of their idiot claims of a Satanic child sex-and-ritual-sacrifice trafficking ring on the fact that billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was known to have slept with teenage girls--passionately defend Milo's assertion that adults who are attracted to 13-year-old boys aren't "technically" pedophiles. They truly, literally know no shame.

Okay, fun time is over. Now let's get back to that press conference, which is very much worth watching in its entirety:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/xsBZeU9sAII[/youtube]

It's one for the ages, isn't it? At turns self-pitying, self-loathing, and self-promoting, Milo expresses delusions of grandeur and persecution, all while putting on a clinic of pitiful whining prevarication, as the whole thing soaks in the flop sweat of rank hypocrisy.

I could literally go line by line through his statement and, at each line, point out where Milo was lying, or being hypocritical, or being insufferable. For now, however, I will spare you that tedium. This blog post is already too long. Suffice it to say that the irony of Milo petulantly demanding that his words be given the kind of nuanced, sympathetic parsing, and that he be granted a level of compassion, empathy, and basic human decency that he has continuously proven unwilling to grant to anyone he deems--by dint of ideology, identity, and sometimes just ethnicity--to be somehow lesser than... well, it's rich enough to give an Iron Man Triathlete instant diabetes.

Unfortunately, irony isn’t merely another factor in this debacle; it’s the prevailing paradigm. Because it's ultimately irrelevant whether or not Milo was a victim of predatory pederasts. The same could be said of the vast majority of pedophiles currently stalking playgrounds, or rotting in jail cells. The nature of evil is that it conducts through flesh, down through generations, like electricity through wires. A victim becomes a villain who creates new victims, who in their turn become new villains.

These cycles are difficult to shake. It's why it's important to have compassion. It's also why it's important that our compassion have limits. And it's why Milo’s so-called apology is so obviously bogus. Because it’s totally in keeping with his previous, "shitlord" behavior. There's no contrition there. Shame? A little bit, perhaps discernible in his downcast gaze. Embarrassment? Maybe that's what all that bobbing and weaving was about. Annoyance? Oh yes. A ton. But otherwise, he's got nothing to give but justifications and rationalizations, with a ready-made excuse for everything.

Consider the bolts in Milo's traditional quiver of rhetoric:

“I can say homosexuals and transexuals are defective, broken perverts because I’m a gay man!”
“I can make up crazy, hateful shit about Black Lives Matter because I love slurping on black dong!”
“I can say Jews are the root cause of civilization’s decay because my mum’s got a Jewish grandmother!”

Now, post #MiloGate, the game has changed somewhat. Originally, he felt fully entitled to gleefully declare: “It’s okay for 13-year-olds to have sex with adults because I had sex with adults when I was 13 years old, and it didn’t do me any harm!”

Post-scandal, however, he has to declare: “I can say that it’s okay for 13-year-olds to have sex with adults, and also claim that I don’t really mean it, because I’m a victim of pedophilia, and HOW DARE YOU try to police how I navigate my trauma?!”

It gets worse.

In defending himself and donning the mantle of victimhood, Milo has the temerity to bring up, as a point in his favor, the relentless mass harassment campaign he helped to wage against prominent GamerGate critic Sarah Nyberg. First he mis-genders Nyberg, who is trans, before going on to list her as one of the three “pedophiles” he's “outed” in his “journalistic” career.

I urge everyone--including those of you who think you know the full story behind all this--to read Nyberg’s account of what Milo and his troll army put her through, just because she voiced an opinion that ran counter to theirs, putting a torch to the delusion that the alt.right has anything whatsoever to do with "free speech". As you read Nyberg's account, keep in mind that, in his "apology", Milo was using this as an example of the good that he's done in the world.

The irony here is that even her fiercest critics tacitly acknowledge Nyberg’s youth was steeped in real trauma, even if only because they use the details of that trauma to viciously troll, humiliate, and harass her. And yet, despite this, every indication points to her worst transgressions being confined to an online fantasy world of role play. Milo's self-confessed antics--which include attending parties where underage “twinks” serviced sugar daddies while he looked on, presumably laughing and snorting fat rails of cocaine all the while--are an order of magnitude worse.

As for the notion that being gay automatically precludes you from being a fascist, a Nazi, or a sympathizer/enabler of those ideologies, that's a dangerous and naive delusion. In this age of #Pizzagate and "OMGIlluminati!!!" panic over every Super Bowl halftime show, it’s easy to forget that there is a long tradition of masculinist gay fascism, and that a sadistic contempt for sexual consent, regardless of gender, has largely been a phenomenon of the political right, to which the endless stream of Republican and conservative Christian sex criminals attests.

There are so many people in this world more deserving of our sympathy, our empathy, and our assistance than Milo Yiannopoulos. If he had shown one ounce of contrition--just a smidgen--I would be far more sympathetic. But he hasn't even begun to atone, to make things right with all the people he's attacked so viciously over the years.

Milo is going to have to earn his healing. I have a feeling a "fearless moral inventory" lies somewhere in his near future. Will he be up to the task? He's off to an awfully bad start, so personally, I doubt it. Odds are he'll fake his way through and, in time, fool just enough people to win back his crown as the Right's favorite "dangerous faggot" (patpend).

But who knows? Allow me to be more generous to Milo than he has ever been to any of the targets of his hateful bloodsport rhetoric by admitting there's a tiny, microscopic ghost of a chance that he may end up surprising us all.

But I won't be holding my breath.

***

At the beginning of this blog post is an unsigned epigram. It is the first paragraph of an essay entitled "The Internet is Turning Us All into Sociopaths", written in 2012... by Milo Yiannopoulos. I leave you now with the last part of that same essay:

"So perhaps what’s needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. But if the internet, ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others. Isn’t it time we did the same to trolls?"

[JackRiddler]

Excellent stuff.

[American Dream]

There is really great material here. Jerky, you make a really valuable contribution here!

[liminalOyster]

This is a really nicely written piece.

I'm slightly uncomfortable with how easy you go on Nyberg. Have you seen these (potentially triggering) chat logs? Or this? Here's an excerpt from the latter:

[T]he defense against Sarah Nyberg is what is continually changing. The first reactions I saw to the log leaks were “these logs are faked and Sarah did nothing wrong” which then became “the logs are real, but that’s not really Sarah” which then became “Okay, the logs are real, and that’s really Sarah, but she’s only roleplaying or being edgy” which became “at worst in 2015 she is a closet pedophile who no longer publicly supports CSA in which case we thank her for her restraint” while still sticking to the “roleplay” angle. An even weirder defense of Sarah is that all of her inappropriate talk about children (and linking to photos of nude children) was merely a byproduct of “the complexities of a trans woman’s relationship with the idea of childhood.”

I find it tough (assuming that these positions are more or less reflective of what was actually said) not to start comparing the manifold defenses of each figure by their respective allies on either side of the spectrum. Tabling momentarily Milo's obvious yuckiness: Nyberg and Milo are close in age and both digital natives (indeed, even social media natives pretty much.) And both have made weirdo commentary about the same speculative link between pedophilia and homosexuality that lies at the heart of the paranoid pizza flu. Both are transgressors of one sort or another. Both are ultimately discardable. Not sure what all this means, but it's the aspect of the story that interests me most.

[American Dream]

lO, what if Nyberg is a really problematic individual- worse than recognized in some quarters? What are the implications of that, to you?

I'm not trying to be dense, it's just not clear to me what you might be suggesting with regards to all this.

[liminalOyster]

Nyberg straight up claimed to be a pedophile, shared explicit images of kids, as well as more "innocent" images and fantasies about a younger relative etc. She was indeed harassed mercilessly by Milo and others. But her apparent pedophilia has been whitewashed because of later mistreatment. The implication to me is that she and Milo have alot in common, albeit perhaps with different presentations thereof and I suspect that there's something in the water between them these days that is important, compelling and under-reported. I tried to avoid making a strong statement about it (and may well have failed) given that I haven't quite sorted it out. But the similarities between them and the difference in moral judgment applied to them (not in the OP necessarily) really fascinates me.

[American Dream]

It would not be surprising from a psychological standpoint that two people with unresolved childhood issues that have something in common, would get "hooked" in some kind of way. If there was/is a particular audience that treated essentially similar cases in a disproportionate way, I would want to unpack who that audience might be- and what biases they might be perpetuating. Given the nature of the beast, those biases are likely to abound.

As someone who mostly wasn't paying attention during the height of Gamergate, I imagine that there are many others like me who were/are kinda clueless about various aspects of the scandal. Some of it must be the polarizing nature of Internet controversies generally, with the inflammatory addition of organized harassment and abuse. Likely there is more, too.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Thank you for this, Jerky. I appreciate you elaborating on what a flaming hypocrite Milo is. I had never really heard of him until earlier last year and hadn't seen him speak until watching portions of the Bill Maher show. Watching the dialogue that was just between Milo and Maher, I thought that while I disagreed with him completely, his stance seemed to be coming from a principled position, however warped it was. Then watching him interact with the other panelists, I saw it was all a hypocritical ruse - there are no principles in his arsenal.

[Jerky]

Thanks for the warming welcome back, guys. I always appreciate your kind words of support, and promise to try and keep my temper and sense of outrage separated and in check.

As for Nyberg, I'm not going to defend what she did as a teen and young adult, over a decade ago - and neither does she - but I WILL ask you to consider two things.

First, the horrific milieux from which she emerged (both IRL and online). And second, the lengths to which she's gone to make things right - up to and including attempts to bring places like 4chan and 8chan to heel, precisely because of the child pornography being spread through those channels.

You know the old adage "it takes one to know one"? Well, if Nyberg is such a case, a reformed edgy online anarchy absolutist come in from the cold... then that's all the better for society.

It strikes me that the "I was being edgy and outrageous on purpose" defense is no more credible than the "I was investigating the phenomenon for myself" defense (aka the Pete Townsend gambit). I will point out that, having read her mature writings, she certainly seems to have outgrown those proclivities, and seems far more credible and willing to own up to past mistakes than her "critics" (mostly of the scorched earth alt.right hate squad variety) are willing to grant her.

In any case, Nyberg was not the main focus of my essay. Regardless, I think Milo's treatment of her, considering his own admitted behavior at Hollywood parties where underage "twinks" were used like tissue paper and tossed aside, is worse than just hypocrisy... it borders on evil.

That's just my two cents, anyway.
Jerky

[American Dream]

Why the Far-Right Hates Freedom & Loves Bullshit

But the rich still expect us to be grateful of everything “they give us.” When Trump was asked if there was anything that he sacrificed or gave up to get where he was, he replied that he in fact sacrificed and gave up everyday – by paying his employees. By this Trump means, that it is by his good graces that he gives his employees benefits, wages, and jobs at all, and that in return they should be grateful for what he agrees to do for them.

It is this relationship, and this perspective, that seeps into all aspects of our lives. “You’re lucky to have this apartment,” even though it costs more than half of your rent. “You’re lucky to have this job,” even though you work over 40 hours a week, never see your friends and family, and also are still broke. “You’re lucky to live in this city,” even though it takes a hour to go anywhere, you never see any of your friends because everyone is working, and a burrito costs $13.53.

But grabbing more headlines than the continuous class war of everyday life, is the continued rise of the far-Right who rode the Trump wave; made up of big media moguls like InfoWars, Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, and Mike Cernovich, the militias such as the Oath Keepers and the III%ers, and the Alt-Right, which includes white nationalists and neo-Nazis.



These movements largely gained a foothold in part of the wider culture during the Obama years, as a new generation of (largely) young men came of political age on the internet and rebelled against the neoliberal and interventionist regime they perceived as being “politically correct” and “Leftist.” This rejection of politically correctness, which neoliberalism developed as a way of shielding all the bad shit it was actually doing, allowed for a host of ideologies that embraced actual fascism to come in. Moreover, the far-Right learned from this ‘multicultural’ neoliberalism, and stocked their movement with personalities like Sheriff Clarke, Milo, and Ann Coulter as a means of deflecting being labeled outright neo-Nazis and white nationalists.

But when one actually gets down to what the far-Right actually believes, when you match the rhetoric with reality, especially to the real needs that everyday people have, you begin to realize how full of shit these movements actually are.

But moreover, you begin to understand that rational thought, logic, and facts don’t actually matter to the far-Right. Instead, what the Right learned from liberals, is that it can instead invert every criticism of itself back onto its enemies. “Antifa are the real fascists! They hate free speech!,” claims the Alt-Right, as they murder people of color and attack places of worship across the country. “Anarchists are the shock troops of the Communist, Democratic Party, and are funded by George Soros!,” proclaim the militias and right-wing biker groups, as the cosy up with billionaires and career politicians. “Feminism is a cancer! It oppresses men!,” write the Men’s Rights Activists and neo-reactionaries, who in turn, promote everything from rape to pedophillia.

Read at: https://itsgoingdown.org/why-the-far-ri ... -bullshit/

[MinM]

I was just thinking about this story -- specifically How and Why? -- these guys like Milo became speakers on the college circuit. Here's a snippet from one of the links below...

Dow is big funder to universities which house three of these public television stations. WCMU is at Central Michigan University, 30 miles from Midland. In 1978 DOW’s President withdrew money from CMU after Jane Fonda spoke there on economic democracy.

“[It] will not be resumed until we are convinced our dollars are not expended in supporting those who would destroy us.'” CMU got the message. It’s new “Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow College of Health Professions” touts Dow even though DOW only gave $5 million, MI taxpayers gave $37.5 million...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/04/18/ ... -michigan/

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

@dicktofel

Hard look at the academic-industrial complex behind merger approvals. Will Trump stick to his guns on $T-$TWX?

These Professors Make More Than a Thousand Bucks an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers
The economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price.
by Jesse Eisinger and Justin Elliott, ProPublica
November 16, 2016

https://www.propublica.org/article/thes ... ga-mergers

The suggestion that there's something intelligence-related behind the near-demise of Antioch is interesting. An old friend of mine who I haven't seen in a few years is very highly placed in Antioch's administration. I have to think that my friend would gladly have exposed and fought anything like that. But who knows? Perhaps my friend was coerced in some way to keep silent. I sure hope not...

Business as usual?

My guess would be that no coercion would have been necessary. This synergy between between Institutes of Higher Learning and the Military-Industrial Complex seems to be the standard operating procedure.

Kowtowing to Dow

A few years ago I read a piece by the author of this piece -- Brian McKenna: Dow Chemical Buys Silence in Michigan -- which was called 'Kowtowing to Dow'. In it he lays out the sort of compromises colleges make everyday to secure funding.


rigorousintuition.ca :: View topic - "USC Marketing Class Helps CIA Recruitment"

http://www.cia-on-campus.org/msu.edu/msu.html

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ings-ohio/

[American Dream]

There surely are conspiracies within conspiracies in the milieu which Milo inhabits. That said, the reactions of university administrators seems to be more in the realm of bureaucrats spinning PR and whatnot more than actively welcoming in such presences of the far-Right.

Now the student groups on the other hand that support such fascoid presences, I'm sure we can expect much more from in the future- and the privilege politics of the neoliberal university today provides them with an easy foil...

[American Dream]

Meme Streets.





Few writers have scoured the sewers of chan culture with as keen an eye as Angela Nagle. Martin Leen sat down with the writer who is making a name for herself the world over as the definitive voice on the internet subcultures that have given life to the alt-right.



You are working on a new book tentatively titled Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars From Tumblr to Trump. Would you be able to give us a crash in what it’s all about for those of us still in the dark on these online culture wars?

Kill All Normies refers to an expression used on the online alt-right and chan culture, ‘normies’, and I’m also using it to refer to the breakdown of the mainstream in terms of media and politics that has created a vacuum for this kind of subcultural far right youth politics. The book is an analysis of the culture wars that have gone on online over the last eight years or so and looking at how you can only understand the rise of the alt-right and alt-light figures like Milo by understanding also the virtue-oriented online movements that they represent an extreme reaction against. The cycle is that the right wants proof that society is falling apart due to multiculturalism and feminism and gay rights and the online tumblr liberals supply them with seeming evidence for their moral panic.

In fact neither represent anything like the real world that exists outside our front door but they exist in constant response to each other. They each get to see what they want to see – that society is either a multicultural disaster on the brink of collapse or an oppressive white cis male hetero-patriarchy. Each proves to the other that their worldview is accurate and that the need to ramp things up to appropriately respond to the other.



Why do you think that misogyny is so rampant amongst the so called beta-male of 4chan?

Some nerdish right wing forums are openly self-mocking about being betas, others obsess about overcoming their beta status through the gym and using social darwinian thinking to trick females into being sexually attracted to them. They’re very confused and angry because they hate sexual freedom because of their low ranking status in the sexual social hierarchy due to female choice but also exist in a very porn fuelled culture so sometimes they express puritanical ideas about hating sluts, in the same breath they’ll express their feeling of entitlement to the sexual availability of women.

The more interesting thing is that sexual choice and the breakdown of monogamy really has created a sexual hierarchy among men – they’re not imagining that. Now you have this angry online army of celibate men who believe this is part of a civilisational collapse brought about by feminism, which they see themselves as the victims of. Of course in reality these changes were a product of the sexual revolution which men were very active agents, not passive victims, of and in many ways feminism was split over factions which produced a critique of the sexual revolution and those that embraced it but wanted it to go further.



Is there anything society can do to address the insecurities that are causing this so called “crisis of masculinity”?

I think many of the concerns brought up by men’s rights activists are actually quite fair. The problem is that often the men expressing them online, which is where most people are going to be introduced to new ideas for the first time, are so hateful and off putting that nobody listens to them. But for example, men’s health and suicide deserve attention and a lost sense of purpose in the world that has accompanied de-industrialisation really has left many men in a bad place and a fair society should take those concerns seriously.

Certainly letting these things fester in the dark corners of the internet and calling anyone who addresses them a misogynist is not helping anyone. I try to use that word only when it very literally and clearly applies. We are living in a time of huge chaos in terms of gender roles with greater levels of celibacy among the young I think due to a kind of alienation and it’s certainly not all positive.



There seems to be so much irony involved in all the barbs that are thrown around in these culture wars that it is hard to know when people are serious or not. Why is this? Is it some kind of tactic?

Irony is undoubtedly used as a way of protecting oneself against easy interpretation online. It’s also a classic feature of subcultures to be exclusive through ever more niche distinctions and complicated internal slang and references. In that one sense the online right really is the new punk – both are tediously obsessed with minute niche internal distinctions in their own subcultures.

What you have are two opposite but mutually reinforcing cultures – one is ultra sensitive and constantly Twitter mob-shaming people for minor infringements against liberal sensitivities, the other is anonymous and revelling in breaking liberal taboos and being offensive for the fun of it. The problem is that at some point the performative irony became real and those who started posting funny un-PC memes actually got sucked into far right politics.



How do you feel about criticism of Sanders and Corbyn from various online feminists as being proponents of “brocialism.”?

Well it tells you everything about why irreverent troll cultures have emerged online on the right. While the cultural left is busy out-doing one another in woke righteousness and purity and constantly purging anyone on the left with a sense of humour or connection to the real world outside of tumblr politics, the far right online is allowed to look like the funny transgressive alternative.

Bernie would have been better for American women than Hillary, genitalia aside. Online feminism’s more absurd turn in recent years and its involvement in witch hunting, silencing any and all dissent and online mob behaviour has benefited the right immeasurably among younger people. The jokes just write themselves really.

I have more in common with men who share my material concerns – job precarity, unaffordable rents, poor social services etc. – than with ‘women’ as a category. So I’ll take a Berniebro (or the Irish equivalent) any day over the liberal Hillary loyalist types (and their Irish equivalents) who cooked up the agenda-driven caricature.



In terms of recent US elections and the election of Trump, how much of him getting elected was down to material things such as economic issues and how much was influenced by the alt-right and the hatreds of political correctness, feminism, immigration, the welfare state and the cultural left that Trump and his campaign latched on to?

I think it was economic concerns for most people. That’s what the polls suggest. And yet this isn’t unconnected to the culture politics. Advanced economies are about to lose massive amounts of jobs to off-shoring and automation. And interestingly the most easily automated jobs are the male dominated ones. Trumpism is a last attempt to stem the tide of the social changes that will come from that. For young people who have grown up online then the meme culture of online right wing forums provided a language and a cool and made being on the right acceptable in a way for young people again. To them, being a Trump supporter was a way of rebelling against your liberal teachers and parents. I think adulthood brings much more material concerns to the centre of your politics, so the cultural stuff was more part of his young fan base.

Continues at: http://www.rabble.ie/2017/05/30/meme-streets/

[American Dream]

The alt-right’s new turn

The movement that began as a collective of trolls and anti-feminists is changing again

Patrick Freyne


Milo Yiannopoulos at an alt-right rally in May. His time is over says Angela Nagle: ‘The problem is they didn’t actually have any ideas.’

“Every time I look on my phone and see a lot of activity on Twitter I think: ‘right, this is the moment when they come for me’,” says Angela Nagle. She’s talking about the army of Pepe-the-Frog-avatared trolls who often bombard female writers with offensive messages and threats.

Nagle is the author of an excellent new book Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump.

Seven years ago she began tracing the evolution of a range of weird and offensive online communities, from the nihilistic trollish denizens of 4chan to more bitter anti-feminist communities scattered around the internet. Back then it was a niche interest. “When I explained to people what I was writing about they always seemed baffled and thought it was such an obscure thing to be interested in.”

More recently, however, she has watched as these groups adopted anti-immigration ethno-nationalistic obsessions and coalesced into a Trump supporting “alt-right” (many accurately observe that they should be called the ‘far right’).

Their view was basically that ‘irrational female brains’ were like systems they could hack. It’s a short journey from that to racism.

They have developed a surprisingly high profile. Mainstream columnists use their terminology when they discuss “Social Justice Warriors” and “Generation Snowflake.”

Trump parrots their talking points (his concern with migration in Sweden, for example) and has gone so far as to hire the head of Breitbart, one of the alt-right’s online hubs, as a key adviser.

Transgressive tactics

Nagle’s initial interest in these groups, she says, was piqued by their style of engagement, which utilised the sort of irony-filled transgressive tactics formerly associated with left-wing counterculture. “They were to the right but they didn’t have any conservative politics. They trolled and pranked people and were good at making funny memes and using shock tactics.”

In those days, she says, when congregated on webpages like 4chan they seemed wilfully apolitical. They often did horrible things. They trolled memorial pages and bullied suicidal teenagers. They thrived on anonymity and they targeted those who dared to be sincere or, indeed, female.

“They were totally morally degenerate… but they were nihilistic about it. They didn’t have any politics other than some vague sense of being anti-establishment.”

But the politics were already there in a nascent form. Even in the more goal-focused web groups of pick-up artists there was a seed of ideology. “Their view was basically that ‘irrational female brains’ were like systems they could hack. It’s a short journey from that to racism because they’re not viewing people as human beings. And it’s a pushback against the [left wing] idea that gender and race are socially constructed.”

White male identity politics

Over time a general anti-liberal politics began to take shape. They used the transgressive style of the countercultural left “but they changed the content. Their view was that the dominant ideology now was liberalism, so if you wanted to be transgressive that’s what you transgress against.”

Before long this mutated into a virulent strain of white male identity politics predicated on the notion that feminism and immigration were destroying civilisation.

Continues at: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books ... -1.3104338

[American Dream]

Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream



Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, on September 24.


A year and a half ago, Milo Yiannopoulos set himself a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech, 10 months before the alt-right’s great hope became president, and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the country’s politics and culture.

At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life.

Yiannopoulos was a useful soldier whose very public identity as a gay man (one who has now married a black man) helped defend him, his anti-political correctness crusade, and his employer from charges of bigotry.

But now Yiannopoulos had a more complicated fight on his hands. The left — and worse, some on the right — had started to condemn the new conservative energy as reactionary and racist. Yiannopoulos had to take back “alt-right,” to redefine for Breitbart’s audience a poorly understood, leaderless movement, parts of which had already started to resist the term itself.

So he reached out to key constituents, who included a neo-Nazi and a white nationalist.

“Finally doing my big feature on the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a March 9, 2016, email to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer, and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. “Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”

“It’s time for me to do my big definitive guide to the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote four hours later to Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug helped create the “neoreactionary” movement, which holds that Enlightenment democracy has failed and that a return to feudalism and authoritarian rule is in order. “Which is my whorish way of asking if you have anything you’d like to make sure I include.”

“Alt r feature, figured you’d have some thoughts,” Yiannopoulos wrote the same day to Devin Saucier, who helps edit the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance under the pseudonym Henry Wolff, and who wrote a story in June 2017 called “Why I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist.”

The three responded at length: Weev about the Daily Stormer and a podcast called The Daily Shoah, Yarvin in characteristically sweeping world-historical assertions (“It’s no secret that North America contains many distinct cultural/ethnic communities. This is not optimal, but with a competent king it’s not a huge problem either”), and Saucier with a list of thinkers, politicians, journalists, films (Dune, Mad Max, The Dark Knight), and musical genres (folk metal, martial industrial, ’80s synthpop) important to the movement. Yiannopoulos forwarded it all, along with the Wikipedia entries for “Alternative Right” and the esoteric far-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola — a major influence on 20th-century Italian fascists and Richard Spencer alike — to Allum Bokhari, his deputy and frequent ghostwriter, whom he had met during GamerGate. “Include a bit of everything,” he instructed Bokhari.

“I think you’ll like what I’m cooking up,” Yiannopoulos wrote to Saucier, the American Renaissance editor.

“I look forward to it,” Saucier replied. “Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”

Five days later Bokhari returned a 3,000-word draft, a taxonomy of the movement titled “ALT-RIGHT BEHEMOTH.” It included a little bit of everything: the brains and their influences (Yarvin and Evola, etc.), the “natural conservatives” (people who think different ethnic groups should stay separate for scientific reasons), the “Meme team” (4chan and 8chan), and the actual hatemongers. Of the last group, Bokhari wrote: “There’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.”

“Magnificent start,” Yiannopoulos responded.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstei ... tionalism/