I was skipping around the HBO channels the other night, looking for something to watch before going to sleep. Bill Maher popped up on the screen-- with neo-Nazi publicity hound Milo Yiannopoulos and I quickly moved on to Alien vs. Predator. Until the last few weeks not many Americans knew who Milo Yiannopoulos was. Essentially a social media troll, he tries, tries, tries to be outrageous enough to get famous. It finally worked-- and he was kicked off this year's CPAC program, had his book deal with Simon and Schuster cancelled and was forced to resign as a senior editor from crazy Long Island billionaire Robert Mercer's on-line fascist propaganda sheet, Breibart. I guess he can go back to harassing Brianna Wu full-time now, although he does still have his Trump white House press accreditation.Some Americans already knew him as the aging-but-flamboyent gay guy who was permanently banned by Twitter for harassing women and blacks-- particularly black women-- under various pseudonyms. But until a film of an interview he did embracing pedophilia and extolling the virtues of the statutory rape of 13 year old boys by old men, he was just another faceless Nazi buzzing around the Trump presidency-- who he refers to as "Daddy," while referring to himself as a "Trump-sexual." Needless to say, he's a close friend of Señor Trumpanzee's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Ryan Lizza, in the article linked below, noted that "While working for Bannon, Yiannopoulos did more than anyone else at Breitbart to explain and build bridges to the so-called alt-right, the amorphous collection of neo-nationalist activists."The son of a Greek gangster and thug living in England, Milo was chucked out by his parents' home at an early age-- leaving him an emotional cripple, intensely angry at the world-- and was raised by his Jewish grandmother, something that has been problematic for his Nazi allies. He was exposed for starting a phony charity for Nazi youth and then pocketing all of the money. He's also a serial plagiarizer who was caught using other peoples' work in his books.As bizarrely obsessed with his own version of outrageous sexuality as he is, he is infamous among normal gay people for insisting that gays "get back in the closet" and assumes his own unhappiness and abhorrent behavior is something he has in common with the LGBT community, which completely rejects him on every level. Much of Milo's money comes from tubby little quasi-billionaire and racist Palmer Luckey (the Trump-crazed founder of Oculus who put up the "too big to jail" billboards with Hillary's picture on them during the election). Yiannopoulos publicly brags about being expert at fellatio. The Nazi movement in Germany started out with certain gay overtones. Milo, who made this video recently, may fancy himself a kind of modern day Ernst Röhm:Tuesday Ryan Lizza tried making sense out of Yiannopoulos for New Yorker readers:
“Things sometimes tumble out of your mouth on these long late-night live streams, when everyone is spitballing and had a couple of drinks, that are not completely expressed and not exactly what you intend. Obviously, if I had known I was going to have the media profile I have now, I would have been cautious about this stuff. I never imagined that I would become famous,” Yiannopoulos told me. He is usually brash and outrageous, leaning on his partly Jewish background and the fact that he is gay as a shield to justify his insults. A recent short music video [the clip above] that he posted on YouTube showed him and some shirtless men building a wall on what purported to be the Mexican border. But yesterday afternoon he was sorrowful and self-pitying as he tried to explain himself. “Everything I say in there is completely defensible with proper context and explanation. It just takes nuance and close attention to understand what I’m really getting at.”...[Before CPAC booted Milo] Conservatives scheduled to speak at the event also started to grow uncomfortable. “I’ve always thought Milo was pointlessly provocative and that he added nearly nothing in terms of conservative or libertarian ideas,” Tim Carney, the commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, said. “cpac never should have invited him to give a major speech, because his ‘provocativeness’ is often bigoted or licentious.”In the face of the growing outrage, Schlapp at first stood by his decision. Then, over the weekend, the videos of Yiannopoulos began to circulate. In one clip, he cavalierly approves of sex with thirteen-year-olds and suggests that he once attended a party at which minors were sexually assaulted. In another, he talks about the “statistical fact” that “Jews own most of the banks” and “completely dominate the media.”...[T]he damage to the conservative movement had already been done. In a previous era, there was an élite conservative establishment that could police the movement and cast aside its fringe adherents. William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review, famously did this in the early sixties, when he attacked the conspiracists and racists of the John Birch Society, the alt-right of the day.“The invitation strikes me as more important than the disinvitation,” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, said of the cpac conference. “The invite said, ‘We are welcoming an alt-right (or alt-right-fellow-travelling) provocateur into the big tent.’ The disinvite said, ‘Well, O.K., since you’ve advocated pederasty, we’ll back off.’ cpac hasn’t set out a principled position here, and absent the tapes presumably would have forged ahead.”[American Conservative Union head Matt] Schlapp stood by his original decision and dismissed critics like Lowry. “Last year around this time, there was the creation of the Never Trump movement, and there were a lot of these very same journalists who were attacking us for inviting Donald Trump,” he told me. “There are journalists in the conservative world that use cpac as a piñata once a year, and they attack us for inviting, for not inviting. The fact is this: politics is messy and it’s complicated. And we can try to sanitize it for our stage or we can decide to not avoid the controversies, but simply put them on the stage in an appropriate way for our attendees to listen to.”But even one of Schlapp’s own board members did not buy that argument. “So we were cool with the Anti Semitic, racist, vile stuff, but we drew the line at pedophilia?” Ryun wrote to me via text, echoing Lowry’s complaints. “My argument from the minute I heard about it was to reject the alt-right ASAP.”As for Yiannopoulos, when I spoke to him at one p.m. yesterday, he said that he was still consulting with his team about what to do next. Asked if he might still show up in Washington this week, he responded, “Probably.”Whether or not he attends, cpac promises to be a rowdy forum for debate about the future of conservatism and the alt-right. Fans of Yiannopoulos won’t be too disappointed. Yesterday, before announcing that Yiannopoulos was disinvited, cpac organizers revealed that they had a new speaker who was even more beloved by the alt-right: Donald Trump.
