Shouldn’t Milo’s 15 minutes be over by now?


It’s not as if Yiannopoulis is contributing anything interesting. But, as Shiv mentions, he’s got a new profile published which throws him softballs. It’s the equivalent of Jimmy Fallon’s Trump interview — it presents a dangerous crackpot as just another goofball, rather than as an inflammatory bomb-thrower.

ThinkProgress protests his presentation as a representative of the LGBT community.

The Out profile of Yiannopoulos represents the peak of this harm. Here is a white supremacist whose entire career has been built on the attention he can get for himself through provocation. His attacks against women, people of color, Muslims, transgender people, and basically anybody who doesn’t like him are as malicious as they come, and he catalyzes his many “alt-right” followers to turn on any target he deems worthy of abuse. This puff piece — complete with a cutesy clown photoshoot — makes light of Yiannopoulos’s trolling while simultaneously providing him a pedestal to further extend his brand of hatred. Indeed, he does so in the profile itself, openly slurring the transgender community, which Out published without any apparent concern.

Amanda Marcotte was at the photo shoot and took the opportunity to grill him on his views. He likes to claim that he’s just a troll who is trying to get a response, but Amanda found him to be completely serious about being an anti-feminist, anti-immigrant, far right wing bigot.

Milo Yiannopolous is not playing around. He is utterly sincere about his far-right views.

He is sincere enough that he lectured me for about 15 minutes and was so caught up in the moment that he seemingly forgot that he was half naked while wearing a wig and makeup. He was sincere enough to get genuinely wound up during this time.

Yiannopolous was so sincere that when the Salon team shut off the cameras so as to move to another vantage point, he demanded that I leave the room, refused to answer any more questions and called me a “bitch.”

Well, now we know how to get under his skin: actually talk about what he really believes.

Comments

  1. says

    Out has only ever been for and about the cis-white-homo-TAB-man’s perspective – from that intersection, Milo’s just an entertaining clown, as they’ve depicted him. It’s much like Trump – if he’s dangerous to you, he doesn’t seem very funny.

  2. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    Like Scientific American profiling Sen. Inhofe as merely a troll in discussion of Climate Change, while glossing over all his denialism and obstructionism, and saying the snowball was just ‘harmless theatre’. /analogy
    Milo certainly deserves to never be heard from again. His 15 minutes were used up years ago (before they even started).

  3. says

    Next time they should try the old “okay, I’m turning the camera off” trick, while there’s another camera still running.

    Not that the resulting shit-fountain of bigotry, caught on video, would weaken his support. But it would at least document it in a relatively undeniable form.

  4. says

    I watched the Marcotte piece; it’s pretty bad.

    Why did the photographer allow someone to be interviewing their subject during a shoot? That’s just bad.. You have lots of pictures of someone looking out of the frame with their mouth open. It’s a tribute to how unprofessional Yiannopolous is that he couldn’t pay attention to one thing (getting the photo shoot) long enough to stop dispensing the stupid. I’m not super impressed with Marcotte’s decision not to pin him down in a chair and do a more structured interview; give him a better chance to reveal his true colors. The poor photographer was being paid to do a shoot and she’s got all this drama going on in the middle of it – I’m surprised she didn’t throw all of them out of the set.

  5. Rey Fox says

    Well, now we know how to get under his skin: actually talk about what he really believes.

    Being a woman and asking him questions is probably sufficient.

  6. says

    Damn. I would really love to see more of that than just a 3 minute clip.

    Marcus, it seemed to me like the photographer, Jill Greenberg, who BTW is a noted feminist herself, was pretty interested and supportive of Marcotte’s interview.

  7. mbrysonb says

    A narcissistic sociopath. And the press can’t seem to stop feeding him what he wants (I could mention another example, but I won’t).

  8. Hatchetfish says

    If they’ll agree to it, interviewing someone while they’re forced to multitask is often a good tactic to get candor from what would otherwise be a hostile or deceptive subject. Lying takes focus.

  9. says

    I haven’t been able to bring myself to blog about him, I can’t stand the thought of giving him any attention at all. That said, it’s good Amanda Marcotte was able to bring out the truth of the self-styled troll king, as I’m sure there are still people who don’t know about him.

  10. rietpluim says

    Why do authoritarians so often consider themselves libertarians? Those are contradicting positions.

  11. vytautasjanaauskas says

    @13, the way you phrased it, it almost seems like you think that people care that their beliefs are logically inconsistent.

  12. applehead says

    @13, rietpluim:

    You’re making the mistake of assuming libertarianism is a genuine, internally consistent philosophy. Same problem as with Objectivism.

  13. A Masked Avenger says

    Objectivism is literally based on non sequiturs: Life is the standard of value; therefore Mozart is bad and cigarettes are good.

    Libertarianism, as formulated by Rothbard at least, is logically consistent. Logical flaws are not the problem with it. The non-aggression principle is actually delightful in its elegance and simplicity, and I’d go so far as to say that it deserves to be taken into account in policy debate. Today all sides tend to ignore it, and casually accept the use of naked aggression; ths subtext of public policy debate often involves arguing whom to victimize.

    The flaw in Libertarianism is if anything that it’s too logical and not sufficiently empirical. It posits humans as spherical cows. Specifically, it defines aggression as physical force (or threat of same), directed at persons or owned property, other that that used to repel a prior initiation of force. This definition takes no notice of psychological abuse, but specifically assumes that victims of such can and should leave abusive jobs or relationships, and that failure to leave constitutes consent. Esseially, libertarianism makes “sticks and stones” an axiom.

    It also fails to handle harm that has no specific perpetrator, like global warming. No one person is to blame, so there’s no aggression for libertarian law to take notice of.

    Libertarians, on the other hand, are seldom pure adherents to Rothbardian non-aggression. There are many flavors, but almost all are closet authoritarians. Most are college boys who think libertarianism consists in smoking lots of weed, and provocatively calling for privatization of roads, or the airwaves, or the military. Preferably after stimulating the creative juices with a long toke.

    Side note: mention that libertarianism dictates that you can’t assault someone for romancing their spouse, assuming the spouse permits it. I’ve never met the libertarian who fails to vow he would assault someone for that. Non-aggression dictates that their only option is divorce, basically, if they can’t persuade them to stop it and if they refuse to put up with it. So if you want a litmus test of a Rothbardian, that’s a decent one.

  14. rietpluim says

    @14 and @15 – We all suffer from cognitive dissonance every now and then, but I can’t imagine someone having cognitive dissonance that big.

  15. Mark Dowd says

    “He likes to claim that he’s just a troll who is trying to get a response…”

    Why would anyone consider “I’m an immature child with no actual principles of my own, I just like to upset people” to be a good way to describe themselves?

    “but I can’t imagine someone having cognitive dissonance that big”

    Creationists are the same way. They use the fine-tuning argument as “evidence” for god’s existence, then whirl right around to c-decay to answer the starlight problem.

    In other words, god was necessary exactly and precisely fine-tune the knobs of the physical constants, except foe thisbone knob that he had cranked to 10 million (Spinal Tap got nothing on him) until his mom yelled at him to “Turn of that racket or so help me!”, which caused the value of c to be reduced to the present-day level.

    Creationism, like libertarianism, is nothing but cognitive dissonance.