Flashy, provocative – and steeped in misogyny
Helen Lewis on Yiannopoulos and the populist right:
Alas, poor Milo Yiannopoulos, we hardly knew ye. Well, actually, that’s not true. I first encountered Yiannopolous in 2012, when he tried to slut-shame a friend of mine, sex blogger Zoe Margolis, after she criticised his tech site, the Kernel. “We write about how tech is changing the world around us,” he tweeted. “You write about how many cocks you’ve sucked this week. Back off.”
It was a typical Milo performance. Flashy, provocative – and steeped in misogyny.
Misogyny was his chief claim to fame for years.
Helen’s take on the claims about his rise and fall is the same as mine.
What changed CPAC’s mind? On 18 February, the organisation had tweeted that “free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective”.
Milo’s important perspective on what was left unanswered, because it is unanswerable. Does anyone, really, think that Milo Yiannopoulos has deep and rigorously researched convictions? That his statements on feminism, on transgender people, or his criticisms of Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones, spring from some deep well of evidence and sincerity?
My point exactly. He has no important perspective, he has only the habits of a bully. The two are not the same. CPAC invited him to “speak” because it likes that kind of bullying.
For those on the left, the overwhelming reaction to all this has been: why now? Why these comments, not the ones about “preening poofs“, or lesbians faking hate crimes, or the danger of Muslims, or the harassment campaign against Leslie Jones which got him permanently banned from Twitter? (Do you know how consistently and publicly awful you have to be to get banned from Twitter???)
There’s only one answer to that, really: yesterday marked the moment when Milo Yiannopoulos ceased being an asset to the mainstream right, and became a liability.
Why yesterday and not before? Because, frankly, misogynist bullying just doesn’t count.
The strangest part of yesterday was seeing Milo Yiannopoulous’s increasingly sincere Facebook posts, as the awful realisation dawned on him – as it dawned on Nigel Farage during the referendum – that the sweet shelter of the mainstream right was being withdrawn from him. When he had attacked his female peers in the London tech scene, when he attacked transgender people for being “mentally ill”, when he attacked an actor for the temerity to be black, female and funny in a jumpsuit, he was given licence. He was provocative, starting a debate, exercising his free speech. But yesterday he found out that there is always a line. For the right, it’s child abuse – because children, uniquely among people who might be sexually abused, are deemed to be innocent. No one is going to buy that a 13-year-old shouldn’t have been out that late, or wearing that, or brought it on himself.
Unless maybe the 13-year-old is black and wearing a hoody.
I would not be surprised if this isn’t the end of Milo Yiannopoulos’s career, and I will watch with keen interest what strategies he will use for his rehabilitation. He’s still got his outlaw cachet, and there are still plenty of outlets where the very fact that people are objecting to a speaker is assumed to mean they have something that’s worth hearing. And there are plenty more ideas that some on the right would be happy to see pushed a little further into the mainstream – with plausible deniability, of course. If that’s the extreme, then the mainstream shifts imperceptibly with every new provocation. Because he’s not one of us, oh no. They’re not, either. But you see, they must be heard. And provocateurs are useful, until they’re not. But it’s not the left who decides when that is. Only the mainstream right can stop the extremists on their flanks.
Which is too bad, because most of them seem to have no intention of it.
Totally appropriate space to quote this:-
“Let Sporus tremble –”What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’er enjoys,”
Ahhhhh, indeed it is.
He’ll always be Sporus to me now.
Actually, people say this all the time of 13-year olds – if they are female. You don’t even have to be that old. The moment a female-bodied person selects what to put on for the day, they have labeled themselves as sexy, or slut, or frumpy, or feminist, no matter what their age. They are evaluated by how the males perceive their value as a sex toy.
But Milo was talking about boys. Boys can go around in speedos, and no one assumes they are free game for the gals on the beach who might have their libido stimulated. Boys can go around flirting, and are not assumed to owe sex to the girls they flirt with. Boys can drink (even if they are not legal) and that doesn’t absolve someone who commits a crime against them of the responsibility for crimes.
Which is why the cases we hear about in the Catholic Church scandals also tend to be the ones that happen to boys. We hear very little, if anything at all, about the girls.
And now Milo has “resigned” from Breitbart.
Prediction: Milo lays low for another year or so. Then, in 2018, when the Republicans get their asses handed to them in the midterms and Trump is scraping even lower in approval ratings, Milo will re-surface, having “seen the light” and being ready to dish dirt on his former cronies in the alt-right.
Which will be disgusting and transparently mercenary. But I’ll bet he’ll have some good dirt to dish. He strikes me as the kind of person who held on to every racist, homophobic, sexist email that anyone on the right ever sent him — just as a little insurance policy.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since last night. It occurred to me that Milo probably really is screwed. Oh, he’s made plenty of money; I don’t think “his life is ruined.” But I don’t think he’ll ever reach the level of mainstream acceptance he was hoping for, now, and what he’s got left can only offer diminishing returns.
Mainstream U.S. conservatives are never going to accept him now. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t say what they think he said. Whatever awful shit they do in private, the Religious Right publicly oppose sexual libertinage, especially the gay variety, and they won’t forgive him unless he finds Jesus and renounces teh ghay. And you can’t reach the pinnacle of conservative fame in the U.S. without sucking up to the Religious Right (see: Donald Trump.)
That’s probably why Breitbart are cutting him loose, the hypocrites. They’ve hitched their star to Trump, via Bannon, and Milo is now too toxic to be associated with Trump. (Delicious irony: this is the man who called Trump “Daddy.”)
As for Milo’s other allies, well, Gamergate is pretty much dead, and some of the alt right already hated him for being gay and half-Jewish. (Protip, Milo: Identity Politics is a thing on the Right as well.)
Who’s left? 8chan, maybe. That’s him back in the shadows. I wonder how they’ll treat him: they’re seeing him bloodied, and they despise weakness.
Probably too much to hope that he’ll learn something from all this.
I’ve wondered in the past if Fascism wasn’t most effectively opposed by the anti-fascist RIGHT. And Stalinism most effectively countered by the anit-communist LEFT.
Churchill-DeGaulle perhaps, and Orwell-Sidney Hook?
That doesn’t seem to hold true of the U.S. today. Supposedly ‘sane, responsible’ Republicans are rubber-stamping Trump’s appointments and policies, and the Left is following Stein off a cliff.