Welcome to Milo Yiannopoulos’ world, where ugly women are ‘dykes’ and gay men are punchlines
The darling of the alt-right came to speak at Dartmouth
Breitbart Technology Editor, public speaker, and darling of the ultra-conservative, Trump-backing alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos, visited Dartmouth this week to give a talk titled “In Defense of Hazing.”
The talk was textbook Milo. It mainly consisted of him articulating and justifying his political views, while also poking fun at his ideological opponents and frequently making sexual or self-deprecating jokes in-between his points.
Regardless of your views, you’ll definitely get a few good laughs if you watch one of Milo’s talks: you can’t deny he is an exceptional public speaker. His intelligence is superficial though – don’t be fooled by his charisma or UK prep school accent. If you compare his ideological statements from over the years you’ll quickly see his non-comedic work is riddled with contradictions, and that the biggest appeal of his performances is that they provide something of a safe space for the ultra-conservative ideological indulgences that mainstream society will no longer accept.
For instance, his claim that he is not a homophobe falls a bit flat. Once you have said that “being gay is a sin” and “I hate lesbians,” referencing your homosexual experiences and fantasies every five minutes afterwards doesn’t absolve you, it just makes you a hypocrite.
It was funny to see him criticize stereotypically oversensitive groups of his non-followers, while simultaneously pandering to similarly sensitive groups who make up his audiences. And were he to ridicule their ideological sensitivities as he does others, they would cringe as hard as the few scattered liberals in the room did after the fifth time Milo was able to bring the audience to an uproar by referring to “unattractive or unappealing women” he showed on PowerPoint slides throughout his talk as “dykes.”
Were he to prod the military personnel, conservatives, hazing-advocates, or unappealing men who disproportionately make up his audiences and inner-circles, they’d shy away from him too.
Liberal audience members walked away from the performance with a nice look into the psyche of Milo’s alt-right following. The audience (mostly the non-students in attendance, of which there were many) went wild every time he threw out the word “dyke” or reminded them in some way or another that gay men in fact DO have sex with one another.
The post-talk Q&A was riddled with inquiries as to how people might go about fighting the evil forces of political correctness and the “regressive left” in their everyday lives.
After the talk I had a chance to ask Milo a couple of questions:
You champion Trump as something of a symbol of liberty and freedom of expression. How do you reconcile that with the fact that he sues and attacks those who freely speak out against him at an unprecedented rate for politicians?
He hasn’t actually sued any media outlets for a very long time, I think decades. He’s talk about how it should be easier to sue the press, and my reading of that is he’s talking about mendacious libel, when journalists knowing print things that aren’t true. It seems to me that there could be a bit of a tougher restriction there. Obviously there been something of a systemic failure of America’s media industry, and I don’t think many people disagree with that. I don’t have a problem with a strengthening of the law for mendacious libel – purposeful, deliberate untruths because the bar is set so high – like to actually prove that in court is almost impossible.
Part of what I was getting at in my speech is that boisterousness and braggadocio is what people like about him. You know, Trump talks a lot about legal remedies, but I think it’s been at least two decades since he’s actually filed suit against any media outlets.”
So you just think this is all boy talk?
I think so. He hasn’t actually filed suit against a media publication in a very long time. People tend to lose those.
Earlier in you talk you said that the Head of Dartmouth’s Native American Studies department is a “fake Native American.” What did you mean by that?
I’ll get you the Daily Beast story, and I’ll refer to that. She sort of did an Elizabeth Warren, sort of posing as a minority in order to plead special privileges, but there’s a question as to whether she has the lineage and identity to justify that, so it’s sort of an Elizabeth Warren problem. You know, I have it somewhere…I’m going to send it to you right now because I want you to have it.
Milo did actually take it upon himself to send me a citation from his personal iPad (which I’ll note, featured photos of himself as the lock and home screens).