I like to joke that I have a tendency toward being prematurely correct, by which I mean that I am very often right about things early on, at a time when that take is very annoying and inconvenient to other people, and frequently not about things I am happy to be right about. One of the most disappointing things I was ever prematurely correct about is that I said fairly early that I thought Donald Trump was going to win in 2016, and that it was a huge mistake for Dems to be pushing for him to win the GOP primary, thinking he’d be easiest to beat. There were four main reasons I thought this, one being that Democrats at the time were vastly underestimating the Rust Belt’s NAFTA PTSD; second, that they were apparently willing to let Trump position himself “anti-war” candidate; third, that the DNC could not grasp that being super-obvious about trying to tank Bernie Sanders’s campaign was giving many people the ick; and the fourth was the rise of Milo Yiannopoulos.
He was, and is, a fucking moron, but Yiannopoulos was, at the time, an incredibly popular moron who was very successfully framing blatant bigotry as the cool, rebellious position of the day, as opposed to something establishment conservatives should shy away from for fear of bad press.
This paragraph, from his “Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” has haunted me for a decade:
Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide. These caricatures are often spliced together with Millennial pop culture references, from old 4chan memes like pepe the frog, to anime and My Little Pony references.
Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.
Except it wasn’t, was it?
People insisted at the time that this was just a small cadre of internet weirdos who seemed larger in number than they actually were — a game we always play and never seem to win. But it’s always a mistake to underestimate the appeal of subversion, of going against the grain, or of what seem to be new ideas, even when they are actually very, very old ideas. At the same time, the Democratic Party was eager to portray itself as the new “Adults in the Room” party, thinking that stealing that mantle from the GOP was the surest path to electoral success at a time.
Meanwhile, the GOP was having some success trying to repackage itself (for PR purposes anyway) as not being the grandpa party anymore — that the weird super religious nonsense, the homophobia and everything else that seemed so outdated were things of the past. People on the right loved to tout that Trump was the first president to go into office supporting same-sex marriage (which was extra-infuriating because we knew Barack Obama had only really been pretending to be a “civil unions” guy in order to appease them in the first place). Even with all the evangelical support he had, there were also a whole lot of people using his obvious irreligiosity as evidence that the GOP was now hip and with it.
And Milo Yiannopoulos was a gay man with a Black husband (boyfriend at the time), who ran around in enormous fur coats, who had a past as a bit of a social justice warrior himself, having at least once argued for the banning of online trolls like the one he would turn into. If you didn’t know, prior to Breitbart, Yiannopoulos ran a relatively left-leaning tech news site called The Kernel, until it got a bunch of bad press for not properly paying contributors and he ended up selling the site to The Daily Dot.
He was the street cred the GOP needed at the time and he remained hugely influential, right up until the time he started justifying his own molestation at the hands of a priest — a take so extreme even the Right couldn’t justify it. He got banned from Twitter. He disappeared. He came back as a new Catholic convert and an “ex-gay,” remaining legally married to his husband but otherwise publicly demoting him to “roommate.” He worked for Marjorie Taylor Greene and for Ye, he embarked on a career selling Virgin Mary tchotchkes on some far-right Catholic version of the Home Shopping Network, and was never really able to claw his way back to the power he once had as the troll king of the alt-right.
Meanwhile, the right went on its merry way toward being more openly the exact thing he and other “anti-SJW” dorks insisted it wasn’t at the beginning. They dropped the facade of irony and went in for the pure, unadulterated racism that had always been simmering underneath, started pushing for full Christian Nationalism, and got even more homophobic than they were before. As mentioned, Milo tried to go along with for the ride, even becoming an “ex-gay” himself and railing against those sharing his allegedly “former” orientation, but he never seemed to have the same level of exuberance for following as he did for leading.
And now, Milo Yiannopoulos, who for so long advocated for the aggressive deportation of other immigrants, has been deported. The Department of Homeland Security, strangely enough, gleefully celebrated his exile with an official post on social media, featuring the extremely unflattering mugshot posted above.
Clearly, Donald Trump and his administration didn’t feel even a stitch of loyalty to the man who had probably had more to do with his 2016 win than he did. No one else did either. His former pal Laura Loomer claimed to be the one who hepped DHS to his illegal status in the first place.
Clearly, there’s been a lot of blood under the bridge since the good old days.
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For his part, the only commentary Yiannopoulos has had since news of his deportation broke is a screenshot of an admittedly excessive-looking “Dirty Louisiana Burger” from KFC, captioned “oh fuck off.” (He was picked up in Louisiana.)
The racism and bigotry were never ironic, but there is certainly some Alanis-style irony in the fact that the trajectory he helped create for this country is what ended up getting him kicked out of it.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
“ If you didn’t know, prior to Breitbart, Yiannopoulos ran a relatively left-leaning tech news site called The Kernel, until it got a bunch of bad press for not properly paying contributors and he ended up selling the site to The Daily Dot.”
I genuinely wonder how many are doing it just for the attention. Like this is all just a path on the road to celebrity for someone who doesn’t have any talent and is repulsive to their very core. I will always give Steven Miller credit at least for the authenticity of his Transylvanian old world aesthetic and hunger for blood banks.
The biggest political movement is the transformation of the Republican Party from trickle down economics into a racist authoritarian cult of personality. Many people are responsible and few if any will face consequences for it.
Milo helped. And now he’s gone. I will not be shedding a tear over it.
good news from California.
The state legislature rejected Newsome's plan to let Edison and PG&E off the hook for wildfire costs.