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Book Review: Milo Yiannopoulos is Coming for Your Kids

MiloDangerous

“I’m no hypocrite,” states Milo Yiannopoulos near the beginning of his recently released first book, Dangerous. “I tell the truth, always. That’s my whole fucking problem.”

There’s no doubt that telling the truth, or at least his version of it, has been a problem for the self-proclaimed “dangerous faggot.” Earlier this year, publisher Simon & Schuster canceled the contract on this very book after remarks that appeared to condone pederasty made by Milo on a podcast last year were reported in mainstream media.

Milo was also disinvited from speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference and forced to resign as tech editor for Breitbart, the news website often credited for helping elect President Donald Trump. It was a brutal comedown for the fabulously gay conservative Trump supporter, but he vowed to return to the fray quickly. True to his word, here he is less than six months later with Dangerous, published on his own imprint, Dangerous Books.

For those unfamiliar with Milo, he’s a 32-year-old English journalist, political provocateur and occasional drag queen who first gained notoriety covering the #GamerGate controversy, which essentially concerned the issue of political correctness and video game content, a matter of great concern to millennials and the multi-billion dollar gaming industry.

In Milo’s words, “It was “a bitter war between gamers, anonymous internet trolls, hectoring feminist scolds, and left-wing journalists.”

Milo sided with the “dorky weirdos” in the battle, who just wanted their video games to be left alone, and his coverage brought in hordes of young readers to Breitbart. His star was rising and in March, 2016, Milo (and co-writer Allum Bakhari) broke into the limelight with “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right,” purported to be a taxonomy of the alternative right political movement supporting then candidate Trump.

The article rightly pointed out that in today’s politically correct environment, where white males have been cast as the villain, it’s become difficult for whites to express any sort of white identity or culture without being hectored by some so-called Social Justice Warrior.

This sentiment is nothing new, I’ve been tracking white identity groups online for more than 20 years. Mainly, that’s because I’m entirely opposed to identity politics. As a journalist who still believes in democracy and the ideal of objectivity, I try very hard not to play one group off of another. But I do not deny that identity politics has been a significant factor in American politics, particularly since the 1960s.

Thus, I was familiar with all the names listed in Breitbart’s Alt-Right guide, as well as the names not listed, and was keenly aware Milo was down-playing the movement’s hard-right elements.

He and his co-writer denied being a part of any movement, but with his shock of bleached blond hair and Adonis good looks, Milo’s face was soon plastered all over the mainstream media as the leader of the Alt-Right, operating out of the Alt-Right’s Berlin Bunker, Breitbart, then commanded by notorious alleged crypto-nazi Steve Bannon.

It was an epic troll, which is Milo’s specialty.

“On the one hand, these guys are declaring the alt-right to be a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic hate group,” Milo writes in Dangerous. “On the other, they’re saying that a gay Jew with a black boyfriend is the head of it.”

LOL! Milo trolled the mainstream media and the alternative right! Never mind that the majority of the alternative right can be considered, by most normal people, racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, and subscribes to a conspiracy theory known as “Cultural Marxism” that blames Jewish academic theorists for the alleged decline in Western culture, a line of thought Milo continues to promote front-and-center in Dangerous.

More on that later. Despite his reputation as a public intellectual, there’s very little standard political content in Dangerous. At various points Milo calls himself a conservative, a conservative libertarian, a cultural libertarian and once says he’s not a libertarian at all. In the end he says people hate him—each chapter is dedicated to the various groups that despise Milo—because, “I’m not one of them. I don’t fit into the box they demand of me. I don’t fit into any fucking box. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

That last bit of inspired megalomania may be the truest thing he says in the book. It’s also a symptom of nihilism.

Dangerous is presented by Milo as a guide to political activism in the internet age. That is, it’s a guide to trolling by an author who is arguably one of the internet’s most successful trolls. Milo claims when it comes to trolling, he’s second only to “Daddy,” his favored sobriquet for the president, and I’ll grant him that conceit.

“The ideal troll baits the target into a trap, from which there is no escape without public embarrassment,” Milo writes. “Even calling myself a faggot is trolling you. Calling myself a ‘fabulous faggot’ is trolling you fabulously. It’s an old trick I picked up from drag queens: always tell the joke the other guy is going to tell about you first, and make it funny.”

Now, I enjoy drag humor as much as anyone, and I’ll admit I thought it was pretty damned funny when, last year during the Twitter controversy over the new Ghostbusters reboot, featuring four women instead of four men as in the beloved original, Milo got in a flame war with African-American actress Leslie Jones that ended with him signing off, “Rejected by another black dude!”

That’s Milo, always referencing his black boyfriend(s). Twitter didn’t see the humor in the tweet, accused Milo of setting loose an angry mob of internet trolls on Jones, and booted him for life from the social media site.

But as he recounts in Dangerous, being de-platformed only made Milo stronger, particularly with the growing audience of Breitbart behind him. “Culture flows downstream from politics,” is one of the late Andrew Breitbart’s most frequently cited axioms and the key to both Milo and Breitbart’s success. It too derives from the theory that Cultural Marxists have seized control of Western culture. Breitbart’s unabashed mission since its inception has been to take back that control. Take back the culture.

Andrew Breitbart’s genius was to turn the tools of the Cultural Marxists—Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals is frequently mentioned by members of the broad alternative right as a guidebook—and turn them against the Cultural Marxists. More or less that means demonizing and destroying your opponent with facts, innuendo, pseudo-facts, name-calling, outrageous behavior and whatever else you have in your bag of tricks. As Milo notes, “Trolling is the perfect weapon of a political dissident intent on spreading forbidden or inconvenient truths.”

But one inconvenient truth Milo stealthily avoids is the way in which Cultural Marxism is understood by the vast majority of the alternative right, as a modern Protocol of the Elders of Zion, the late nineteenth century forgery alleging a Jewish plot to control the world.

Milo correctly notes that what is academically known as Cultural Marxism traces its roots back to the Frankfurt School, a group of German Marxist academics who immigrated to the United States in 1935. That year ring a bell? He fails to note that virtually all the scholars were Jewish.

That fact may not mean much to Milo, but I’ve been encountering this theory that Cultural Marxists control everything, the money supply, the movies we watch, the language we speak, the books we read, the music we listen to, who we can have sex with, what drugs we can take, etc., since the 1990s, and it’s frequently placed in what can only be called an anti-Semitic setting.

In its more benign presentation, as in Milo’s case, it is offered up without reference to Jewish academics, and “Hollywood,” or “mainstream media” or “leftist” or “progressive” or even “bankster” is inserted. In its more virulent and in my opinion more common form, there’s no question as to who the man behind the curtain is: the eternal scheming Jew.

I’m not saying that everyone who believes Cultural Marxism is the root of all evil is anti-Semitic. There are many Jews on the Trump Train who consider themselves alternative right. Perhaps they are unaware of the origins of this conspiracy theory. I can guarantee you that Jews who are aware of it, including the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, consider it anti-Semitic.

It came to me as no surprise whatsoever last week when the Anti-Defamation League named Milo on its list of leading opinion makers on the Alt-Right and Alt-Light. FYI, that’s a career-killer for most people, but not for Milo, so far.

I know what some of you are thinking. What is this Cultural Marxism that I never heard of before? Well, the reason you’ve never heard of it before is because in its most benign yet powerful form, it just sort of seeps in through osmosis. From watching TV and movies and listening to rock-and-roll music. You didn’t feel a thing, did you? Writes Milo:

“Cultural Marxism, nurtured by the Frankfurt School, struck a chord—even though, for the most part, these young Baby Boomers didn’t realize where their ideas were coming from. Rock musicians, the standard-bearers of young boomer culture, became fierce advocates of pacifism, feminism, gay rights and all the other causes of the New Left.”

Lest you think those were not great causes, Milo, who brags that he doesn’t do caveats, demonstrates he at least knows what caveats are.

“There is of course, another reason the New Left was so successful: a lot of their arguments made sense,” he writes. “There was racism to be fought, structural, institutionalized and legal racism.”

But that’s all over now, in case you didn’t know that.

“The counter-culture of the 1960s became the prevailing culture of the 1980s,” he writes. The goals of the Civil Rights era and Cultural Marxism had been obtained. “It was now difficult to argue that any social group in the West lacked equality under the law.” Unfortunately, those pesky Cultural Marxists kept going, until they “achieved complete control of media, academia and the arts, just at the point when they were no longer needed.”

Just in case you need to be reminded who runs institutions like the media, academia and the arts, Milo offers a helpful tip.

“It’s simply a fact that Jews are disproportionately well-represented in the media, entertainment industry and in banking,” he writes. “We perform well in those industries! And merely pointing out that statistical success should not be considered anti-Semitic.”

No, it shouldn’t be considered anti-Semitism on its face, but mentioning it in the context of a political philosophy that half his fan base believes is a Jewish plot to control the world might be considered … what’s the word I’m thinking of?

Oh, yeah. Dangerous.

I am by no means saying that Milo is anti-Semitic. Neither is he a creature of the Alt-Right. “America isn’t about where you’re from,” writes this would-be English deTocqueville near the beginning of Dangerous. “It’s about how grateful you are to be in the greatest country on earth.”

Anyone even remotely familiar with the alternative right knows that’s pretty much the exact opposite of their thinking. Even worse is being a gay Jew who prefers black men, as Milo constantly reminds us he is. “I’m a threat because I don’t belong to anyone. I’m unaffiliated,” he puffs himself up. Then this non-American citizen educates us about the constitution. “Freedom of speech is America’s most cherished right, and implicit in freedom of speech is the freedom to disagree.”

Especially if you get lots of hits on the internet, which is what this is all about for Milo. That, and having fun! Join me, intrepid college students (his target audience), Milo advises:

“In the following pages I’ll teach you how to cause the same sort of mayhem I do in defense of the most important right you have in America: the right to think, do, say and be whatever the hell you want.”

What could be more fun than causing mayhem? So says the internet’s “greatest super villain,” who hails from that country we defeated way back in 1783 that still doesn’t have free speech. In Milo’s mind, wrapping himself in the American flag gives him dramatic (he loves that adjective) license to pretend the significant racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic elements in the alternative right don’t actually exist.

It’s just kids blowing off steam, he continues to maintain. That’s the cover that allows him to claim, incredibly, that the trolls are winning because “we’re the only ones telling the truth any more.”

Beware of self-proclaimed attention whores claiming to carry the truth, in case you didn’t learn that in the college-level critical thinking class you’re required to take in the state of California.

In case you’re one of those white deplorables without a college education Milo claims to be a spokesman for, just ignore anyone claiming to be telling you the truth. They’re all over the internet these days. Truth is easily the most misused word in English and probably every other language.

If Milo isn’t carrying the truth, what is his burden? Why it’s a sackful of clickbait outrage delivered in drag and aimed at the easiest and most vulnerable targets of the progressive left, defined as the “latte-sipping metropolitan voters, fairy tale dwelling antiwar activists, ugly women (sigh), and minorities.”

I know an alleged intellectual such as Milo is in trouble as far as the truth is concerned when they completely mischaracterize and insult the opposition. It’s basic informal logic. Milo is apparently unaware that there hasn’t been a sizable antiwar movement in this country since at least the election of President Barack Obama, and realistically since 9/11.

I know. That’s my thing. I’m antiwar. Anti-interventionist. I’m an honorably discharged United States Navy veteran who’s earned that right. I’ve covered the topic frequently as a journalist. I’ll tell you right now the establishment — Republican and Democrat — from Washington D.C., right down to your local city council, no matter whether you live in the big city or podunk Shasta County, doesn’t like this kind of talk. You’ll not find a single antiwar sentiment in Dangerous. That’s by design. Again, it’s all about the hits. Selling books.

When Milo stumbled upon the #GamerGate controversy, he hit pay dirt, as far as internet hits were concerned. Here was the nexus of young white males, let’s say ages 20 to 40, rightfully upset, as I have written in many stories about the Alt-Right, at the total over-reach of political correctness. As a white person myself, I’ve found much of the anti-white PC rhetoric offensive, but I don’t attribute it entirely, or really much at all, to Cultural Marxism, as do Milo and the vast majority of the alternative right. But it’s a toxically persuasive theory for the uninitiated.

History and culture are more complex than that, both in the longterm and the short-term. “We should look to Nietzsche for wisdom, not hideous queer studies professors,” Milo advises. Well, I’ve studied me a little Nietzsche, the famously obtuse 19th century European philosopher, in college and on my own, and my favorite Nietzsche epigram is this: “Suppose truth was a woman? What then?’

What Nietzsche meant is slightly un-politically correct for our times, but we’re not so far down the conspiratorial Cultural Marxist road that we don’t understand his meaning. Philosophers, Nietzsche was saying, will chase anything in a skirt. That makes sense, because at the time, most philosophers were men, and just like most young heterosexual men today, they lusted after women. Now imagine instead of a woman, truth was Milo Yiannopoulos, dressed as Marilyn Monroe singling “God Bless America.”

Milo actually did that, on his tour of American colleges last year. Chase me, Milo was saying, I’m wearing a skirt, I’m the truth, and sure enough, his supporters and detractors chased him all over the United States.

I watched this unfold on the internet during and after the Trump campaign; the riots protesting Milo’s appearances at U.C. Davis and U.C. Berkeley earlier this year made major headlines. Despite the fact that the alternative right universally disavows Milo, because after all he’s a degenerate faggot that only exists because Cultural Marxist Jews recruit degenerates, they still endorsed his message, and continue to endorse it. I have yet to read a negative review of Dangerous on an Alt-Right website.

Why should they write negative reviews? Milo is promulgating the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory known as Cultural Marxism, he’s opening the Overton Window, the window of acceptable political discussion in mainstream culture, another common alternative right theme, and gosh darnit, we shall overcome!

This sort of nonsense is endemic of identity politics and the main reason I’ve followed its practitioners throughout my 30-year career in journalism; it both interests and frightens me. Social science research may say Asians are smarter than Jews who are smarter than whites who are smarter than Latinos who are smarter than blacks, a distinction Unz Review columnist and Alt-Right hero Steve Sailer has gone on and on about for years now. But don’t trust me on the subject, let Milo hang himself (figuratively) with his own words.

“I’d prefer a world with no identity politics,” Milo writes. “But if you’re going to divide everyone up, you have to accept that straight white men are going to want their own special party too. If we are to have identity politics, we must have identity politics for all.”

OK. I’m agreeable to that, with some reservations. Yet oddly enough, in his book exploiting identity politics, that actually advises young white males to follow his lead, Milo inadvertently puts his finger on why identity politics is problematic in a multicultural country that calls itself a democracy:

“Identity politics is universally attractive because it enables failures and weaknesses to be be spun as the products of oppression and historical injustice,” he writes. “Personal responsibility is removed from the equation.”

Strong feelings from a dude who continues to dabble in identity politics, which begs the question: Why dabble?

Here’s my simple answer. Milo the Jewish drag queen who only has sex with black men is playing rural white America, the so-called deplorables who helped elect Donald Trump, for rubes. Like most young people these days, and I can say that because I’m 57, he wants attention. He’s getting it. He’s oh so outrageous.

I enjoy Milo’s writing, but I’m not buying his act, even though I bought his book and read it twice before writing this review. I’m a rural American who’s spent a great deal of time in big cities, and I understand Milo clearly doesn’t have a clue when it comes to the culture, the politics, and the people who actually live in the United States. As my father, who was born in the Great Depression and is a retired U.S. Navy nuclear ballistic missile submarine electronics technician, is fond of saying, we’re a melting pot. That’s an easy and perhaps slightly inaccurate answer, but it’s better than Milo’s.

Milo, a gay Jewish man who dates black men, has embraced, some say hijacked, an ideology whose adherents would kill him on the spot if they got the chance to do it anonymously, a fact he dismisses with the wave of a limp wrist. Call it gay privilege. He’d never admit he’s taking advantage of it.

Nevertheless, that’s what he’s doing. Milo the truth-teller, the half-Jewish anti-Semite, the half-Catholic alter boy sucking Father Mike’s dick—an anonymous priest he claims he willingly had sex with at the age of 14—is only in it for the lols — the laugh-out-louds — as the kids he so creepily covets say these days.

Other than that, Milo has literally nothing to offer as far as solutions to our present dilemma are concerned in Dangerous. It’s news to this dangerous faggot, who has apparently never dated a woman, that birth control pills have side effects and that abortion is a hard decision for any woman to make. Fat and ugly people deserve to be ridiculed because, well, they’re not beautiful like him. The “left” is stupid because somehow they weren’t able to absorb the lessons from Milo’s ultimate touchstone, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

Good Lord. This man is Rush Limbaugh in drag. But that doesn’t stop him from pressing his case.

“Three things separate my brand of conservatism from the tired ‘suit and tie conservatives’ American college students are so familiar with: humor, mischief, and sex appeal,” he writes. “Over the next decade, social justice warriors and busybodies are going to be beaten into submission by the forces of freedom and fun.”

To which I reply with an old Navy saying, “loose lips sink ships.” Milo may think free speech is on the alternative right’s side, but he’s dead wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled decades ago that inciting violence is exempt from free speech. It’s even ruled against campus speech codes, designed to provide the safe spaces for bullied minorities that Milo so abhors. In short, we don’t need some vulgar Englishman to tell us how to conduct our business.

True, many public universities didn’t get the Supreme Court’s message, and have actually expanded speech codes to include protections for, say, transgender students, with all the tortured pronouns that entails. Some states and municipalities have even followed their lead by mandating gender-free public restrooms. Maybe these laws will stand, maybe they’ll fade away as a passing fad. There’s not a large number of transgender people in this country. We, as a country, are working it out.

How it all works out means less than nothing to Milo. He’s only interested in the hits, and he’s already working on his new routine.

The writer who claims American isn’t about where you’re from is hellbent on proving that’s not true if you’ve immigrated here from the war torn Middle East. It’s amazing how much power the people we’ve bombed into submission for the past 16 years wield. Simply by inviting refugees into our country, “liberals” have endangered the whole democratic project.

“They have watched the dream of multiculturalism die at the hands of Islam, despite all their attempts to downplay and cover up the atrocities,” Milo states matter-of-factly.

This is lunacy. Multiculturalism isn’t some sort of Jewish plot, it’s reality. The millions of men, women and children we’ve directly and indirectly killed in the Middle East since 9/11, mostly Sunni Muslims who had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on that fateful day, don’t even rate a mention in Milo’s book.

That’s because the truth is, he’s just a George W. Bush-loving neocon in a skirt. That’s why out of nowhere, Milo drops names in his book such as “the distinguished Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss,” the intellectual father of neoconservatism.

You remember the neocons right? The guys who drew up plans for a New American Century, predicated on a military takeover of the Middle East? The guys who said it would might take a “new Pearl Harbor” to make that happen?

That’s exactly who and what Milo Yiannopoulos is. Don’t let the fact that he looks hot in a dress fool you. And for God’s sake, keep this imbecile away from your children. I’ll let him have the last word just to prove my point.

“Isn’t it deliciously ironic that the children of the 1960s, that era when the young rose up against the heroic, selfless World War II generation, are now stuck in the same old jam as their grandparents?” he writes near the end of Dangerous. “After working so hard to destroy conservative principles, they settled into a lazy complacency, foolishly believing they had won the culture war forever. Now they have to watch as their own children rise up against them in glorious rebellion, embracing the very principles they sought to destroy.”

He’s trolling, as usual. The only place this vision of America exists is in the author’s tortured mind. Do not buy his book. I don’t know what we’re going to do about him.

R.V. Scheide

R.V. Scheide is an award-winning journalist who has covered news, politics, music, arts and culture in Northern California for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in the Tenderloin Times, Sacramento News & Review, Reno News & Review, Chico News & Review, North Bay Bohemian, San Jose Metro, SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, Alternet, Boston Phoenix, Creative Loafing and Counterpunch, among many other publications. His honors include winning the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s Freedom of Information Act and best columnist awards as well as best commentary from the Society of Professional Journalists, California chapter. Mr. Scheide welcomes your comments and story tips. Contact him at RVScheide@anewscafe.com..

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