Breitbart: Whitewashing white supremacists?
The revelation that Breitbart’s star, er, journalist Milo Yiannopoulos apparently relies on dozens of unpaid “interns” to write most of his garbage is rather delicious.
Unfortunately, that bit of news — which doesn’t seem to be an April Fools gag — is drawing attention away from another huge embarrassment for Breitbart, and for Milo himself.
Earlier this week, you see, Breitbart gave a big wet kiss to the posterior of the internet’s white supremacists in the form of a 5000-word “Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right” written by Milo and his colleague Allum Bokhari (and presumably a small army of Milo’s interns).
Milo et al celebrated the can-do spirit of the proudly racist and anti-Semitic alt-right and tried, as best they could, to pretend that the virulently racist movement’s virulent racism was all a big goof.
Yesterday, Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer — the disconcertingly popular alt-right internet tabloid — told Milo and pals to eff off, in a post memorably titled “Breitbart’s Alt-Right Analysis is the Product of a Degenerate Homosexual and an Ethnic Mongrel.” It goes without saying that Anglin, who festoons his site with giant swastikas and animated gifs of Hitler, is not a fan of either of those demographics.
But before we get to Anglin’s objections let’s try to understand just what led Breitbart’s biggest star to celebrate — and try to align himself with — a movement that’s more racist than a barn full of racist uncles.
Ok, I’m done trying to understand, because the answer is blindingly obvious.
Milo rose to internet prominence, you may recall, as a shameless GamerGate panderer. But not that many people are talking about GamerGate these days, while interest in the burgeoning alt-right is soaring, particularly amongst the garbage people who made up the footsoldiers of GamerGate. You figure it out.
Milo et al’s sprawling article-cum-application-for-membership-in-the-alt-right is remarkable not only for its length but for its repeated attempts to pretend that a movement rooted in racism isn’t really racist at all, if you think about it.
The piece starts off by looking at the more “respectable” members of the alt-right — the would-be intellectuals of the movement who try to pretend that their racism is merely an appreciation of “human biodiversity” and gradually works its way towards the Nazis with anime avatars who so energetically flood Twitter with paeans to Trump and dire warnings of an impending “white genocide.”
Milo et al do their damnedest to hand-wave away the racism of this movement.
Halting, or drastically slowing, immigration is a major priority for the alt-right. While eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration.
Oh, they’re not bigots “on a personal level.” They just hate Mexicans and Muslims categorically, and would like them expelled from the country as soon as possible, please!
But it’s in the section on what some people call the “anime Nazis” where the apologias for blatant bigotry become truly pathetic.
All those people Tweeting racist memes mocking “dindus” and declaring that “with Jews you lose” aren’t real bigots, Milo et al claim. They’re just a bunch of enthusiastic young people with an appreciation for “politically incorrect” humor and internet fun!
The alt-right is a movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet. 4chan and 8chan are hubs of alt-right activity.
If you think about it, they’re just like the hippies of the sixties!
Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide.
Golly, what kind of Grumpy Nofunnington could possibly object to racist genocide jokes?
Oh, sorry. Totally not-racist genocide jokes.
Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.
They look like bigots, and quack like bigots, and dox their enemies like bigots, but really they’re just a bunch of lovable scamps. When they rail against race-mixing and joke about the Holocaust, they’re doing it “almost entirely satirically.”
Just like that “ironic” white supremacist who “satirically” assaulted a black woman at that Trump rally.
The full story of the white supremacists who assaulted this Black student at a Trump rally.https://t.co/WPywX72tVOhttps://t.co/vpJrCxH1bP
— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) March 2, 2016
Milo et al do admit that maybe there are some at-rightists who could be a teensy bit racist for real — the “humorless ideologues” who embrace the symbolism of the literal Nazis and actually take the horrible bigoted crap they spew seriously. These are the dreaded 1488ers.
They can be found on Stormfront and other sites, not just joking about the race war, but eagerly planning it. They are known as “Stormfags” by the rest of the internet. …
[T]here’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.
To Anglin at The Daily Stormer, these are fighting words.
In his 3500 word response to the 5000 word Breitbart post, Anglin assures Milo et al that yes, he and his colleagues in the alt-right really do hate the people they say they hate. “Seriously,” Anglin tells Milo et al, “we sincerely are racists.” And those who claim otherwise are lying.
Saying that we don’t hate them, and it’s all a big joke because we want to anger our parents, is not just spin, it’s an outright lie.
Maybe it was true in 2005 that we made racist jokes about Jews and hajis for teh lulz,but then things got real. Now we know for a fact these people are trying to destroy us.
Why would we not hate them?
The so-called Anime Nazis, Anglin assures us, are just as sincere about they say they love; they actually do “love anime and the Nazis.” Yes, they make jokes, post ridiculous memes, and engage in wanton acts of trollery. But they do so with a purpose:
lulz are not an end in themselves.
lulz are a weapon of the race war.
Those who embrace the hatred and bigotry of the alt right don’t do it, as Milo et al contend, “because it seems fresh, daring and funny.” According to Anglin, they go the racist way
because they’re sick of being genocided by kikes.
They’re sick of not having a future. They’re sick of being forced to bow down before women and monkey people from anywhere. They’re sick of being told they are lesser, while looking at themselves and seeing that they are better in every conceivable sense than any of these people they are being told to submit to.
This isn’t some big joke.
We actually, literally hate these people who are trying to destroy us.
We are going to fight them and we are going to win.
Anglin also points out that Milo et al largely ignore the rampant anti-Semitism of the alt-right, a fact that is as remarkable as it is telling. As anyone who’s ever waded into an alt-righty hashtag on Twitter can tell you, these guys won’t shut up about Jews.
As Anglin sees it, “stopping [the] Jews” is the fundamental goal of most serious alt-righters, so much so that he feels the need to warn his readers to
[b]eware of anyone who isn’t talking constantly about Jews. They are probably up to something. They are at best useless. Any attempt to downplay the Jew role in the destruction of Western civilization should be looked at as subversion.
This Breitbart article is the first large-scale attempt to co-opt the movement and remove the Jews. I expect Breitbart to do follow-ups, pushing this same narrative. Probably, they’ve been awarded this task by other Jews.
Spoken like the sincere anti-Semite that Anglin is.
While Anglin’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is not only offensive but a bit silly, he’s right to be suspicious about Breitbart’s intentions in posting such a long and deeply dishonest paean to the alt-right.
You don’t need to posit some vast conspiracy by the Elders of Zion to understand why Breitbart would pretend that the racism of the alt-right is just for lulz.
Milo and his bosses at Breitbart clearly see the alt-right as a vast repository of potential traffic for the site.
But embracing a blatantly racist and anti-semitic movement could undermine Breitbart’s already tenuous claims to respectability — and risk offending advertisers and staffers who’d really rather not have the site go full-on Nazi.
The solution? Embrace an essentially racist and anti-Semitic movement without admitting that’s what it is. Hell, Milo pulled off something pretty similar when he went GamerGate.
How very ethical it all is.