Milo - Broadcasters In Trouble

The rise of victim-playing man-baby Milo Yiannopoulos, which was so rudely interrupted when he was exposed earlier this year as an apologist for paedophilia, has more recently been kicked back into life, the failed free speech event at Berkeley which never happened being a manifestation of that renewal of activity. But the deeply unpleasant Yiannopoulos and his pals may be about to encounter a more serious setback - reality.

The real Milo Yiannopoulos - a vacuous nobody

Joseph Bernstein at Buzz Feed has released a long read which lays bare not just the rise of Yiannopoulos, the networks that were involved, his friends, co-workers and supporters, but also the very clear and deliberate connection with the far-right. This connection involves not just mainstream activism, but white supremacists and neo-Nazis. It shows what Yiannoloulos is really like. And it makes grim reading for those who humoured him.

Bernstein’s article, titled “Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream”, observes “Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them … It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings ‘America the Beautiful’ in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes”.

Yiannopoulos claimed in a statement to BuzzFeed “that during his karaoke performance, his ‘severe myopia’ made it impossible for him to see the Hitler salutes a few feet away”. He’d have had no problem seeing it if it had been a paycheque. Along the way, he was inspired by the likes of Andrew Auernheimer of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer.

With Yiannopoulos on board, he and his networks took their experience of bullying and smearing from the GamerGate affair to go after anyone and everyone deemed necessary for Steve Bannon and his backers - including Robert Mercer of Cambridge Analytica fame. Mercer links it all to the Trump Gang and the campaigns for Britain to leave the EU (Zelo Street has covered the issues around this one HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE).

Steve Bannon - for the Breitbart "killing machine", the end justifies the means

And this blog has warned of entertaining Yiannopoulos for some time, not just because of his repellent nature, which saw him banned for life by Twitter, but also his less than cautious approach to using other people’s money. If only the broadcasters had heeded the warnings: he was invited on BBC’s The Big Questions to bully the unfortunate Connie St Louis, and also got an invite to the Beeb’s Sunday Morning Live.

But it was Sky News who have the reddest faces today. Every few weeks, it seems, this vapid creep fetched up on its screens. Whether he does so again, given his newly revealed white supremacist and neo-Nazi connections, will be interesting to see. And what his colleagues at Breitbart - hello James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole and Raheem “call me Ray” Kassam - have to say in explanation will also be fun to watch.

And that’s before the idiocy typified by Louise Mensch. Yiannopoulos may have been no more than Bannon’s stool pigeon, but his embrace of the fascist right shows how poisonous he not only is, but was. Hello broadcasters. Let’s hear your excuses.