Milo’s Fall

There are many of you out there, particularly my overseas readers who may never have heard of Milo Yiannopoulos.   Not being a reader of the Alt.right media, and being of a certain age and not a twitter follower, I had never heard of him until recently either.

Well ok – I heard of him but only recently has he emerged from the social media world and onto the old fashioned media like television news.

Milo became famous for his ability to trigger rage in liberals.  His steady stream of articles are designed  to demean and offend: that feminism makes women ugly, that fat shaming works, that he would prefer it if teenagers self-harmed rather than discuss trans issues on Tumblr and that women will be happy only if we “un-invent” the birth control pill and the washing machine.  Here’s a sample

:  http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/27/im-worried-not-enough-teenagers-are-self-harming/

Combine this talent with the fact that Yianni is a good looking, young outwardly gay man with a touch of flamboyance and you have all the makings of a social media celebrity sensation.  Welcome to America.  He became a regular Breitbart News writer/contributor  – Breitbart,  the voice of the Alt.right whose chief Steve Bannon is now in the White House on the National Security Council.

Several weeks ago riots broke out at University of California – Berkeley forcing the administration to cancel an appearance by Yianni.  The rage of liberals brought out howls, articles and tweets from the right about the loss of “free speech” and the fascism of political correctness.

Yianni was becoming useful.  Even the President took to twitter:

Donald J. TrumpVerified account‏@realDonaldTrump Feb 2

If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

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Within days Yianni was booked on the Bill Maher show clashing with liberals, calling one panel member “stupid” and being told by that member to “Go f–k yourself.”  Informative television.

The new voice on the far right who had been banned from twitter for inciting harassment against actress Leslie Jones was invited to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference which felt Yianni was of value to their movement on free-speech grounds.

He also signed a book deal with Simon and Schuster with a quarter million dollar advance.  Don’t you just love America?

But about 96 hours after his appearance on Maher’s “Real Time” program, Yiannopoulos’s most considerable step yet toward leaving his alt-right adjacency and entering into mainstream conservative discourse, he became a castaway.

“Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart on Tuesday. The day before that, he lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster, and his invitation to speak at CPAC was rescinded. The reason, as CPAC put it, was “the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia.”  That’s in reference to a series of videos that the Reagan Battalion, a conservative site, tweeted out days ago, showing examples of Yiannopoulos’s past comments on pedophilia and consent.

In a 2015 clip, Yiannopoulos discusses a parish priest who had a sexual relationship with him when he was a teen, declines to name the priest, and says, “It was perfectly consensual.” He adds: “When I was the 14, I was the predator.”

Further damage came from a January 2016 episode of the podcast Drunken Peasants, in which Yiannopoulos appears to defend sexual relationships between adults and “younger boys” in their teens.

Specifically, he says: “Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming-of-age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents.”

Well those revelations were enough for Breitbart, CPAC and Simon & Schuster.  The social media storm destroyed Yianni just as quickly as it had created him.  There never was really anything there; no giant intellect.  He was not the second coming of Bill Buckley, who would have despised him.

What is sad about Milo’s fall is that he seems to be totally oblivious to history; he appears to be just an out young good looking gay man making money and having fun.

It was not always so Milo.

In the “Guido” neighborhood of my youth you would have unfortunately been beaten up and bloodied on a regular basis followed by lots of name calling as you ran home.  Sad but true.  How lovely that now you can be an out gay man without giving it a second thought. How easily you take it all for granted – as if it was always so.

How easily you got a platform for your speeches and articles.  That too was not always so.  Out gay men or women were not given platforms to speak on ANY subject. let alone on politics and free speech.  There were no out gay men; most were in the closet suffering in silence.

Milo never spoke of gay civil rights; he went out of his way to attack trans-gender people as “mentally ill”.  It was not THAT long ago that all homosexual men were considered mentally ill.  Milo would have been one of those so  labeled by the psychiatric community.

How does he think America got from those halcyon days of my youth to here?  It certainly wasn’t the religious right that led the way for the likes of Milo; they would still send him to conversion therapy.

No.  Instead of being conscious of who he is and where he came from, instead of realizing that he walks by choice on the path of Stonewall and Harvey Milk as well as in the footsteps of Matthew Sheperd, that all of his “success” comes on the backs of those who went before, Milo chooses to become an attack dog for those who hate what he is.

To many of those Milo. you will always be a sodomite.  And now that your use to the “movement” is at an end, they don’t even have to feign to like you.

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