butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Always been just under the surface with this cheesy clown.
The Alt-Right
- Thread starter Jeff Robinson
- Start date
Treacle Toes
Time
Breitbart are looking for journalists Cheesy. You will fit right in with this condescending, apologist, whataboutery. You can call yourself a provocateur or a performance artist. That way you can carry on these supremacist styled double standards and write about 'decent black people' pretending all the while you don't know that you are using a racist trope.
Treacle Toes
Time
Yes he does. Two examples... He encouraged the racist abuse of a Black actress (Lesley Jones) on twitter, he openly threatened to expose undocumented migrants.... Is that okay because his victims are not White?
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Libertad
Sparking up a rollie in the Reichstag
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Why not defending Katie Hopkins late into the night you blueshirt want-wit?
Dom Traynor
Tino Pai
Why do you hate Black people?
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Uh. What.
Okay, well, at the least, this has been reported for disrupting the thread so can I suggest that anyone wanting to discuss Toronto BLM events of 2016 take it elsewhere?
Okay, well, at the least, this has been reported for disrupting the thread so can I suggest that anyone wanting to discuss Toronto BLM events of 2016 take it elsewhere?
Treacle Toes
Time
What like on one of the blm threads of the past two years that cheesy hasn't once posted on because she actually doesn't give a shit?
It would be good if some of the pointless posts/vids she flooded the thread with last night could be tidied up and/or moved.
This was a deliberate attempt to derail and shift the focus of this thread away from the alt-right.
FridgeMagnet
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Cid
Proper break this time
It is there though... I mean it's a part of the discussion in that it shows how an individual can attempt to deflect criticism by trying to point out flaws in something they attach to the people they're arguing against. Though I suppose it's also drunken ramblings. Up to the mods. I think I just don't believe in wholesale purges of threads unless really needed.
Shechemite
Be the sun and all will see you
Cheesy - you are a dishonest simpleton and when it comes down to it, your views are based on the most simplistic and crapulous criteria - a pretty(!) face...although frankly, that sort of pallid wasted white guy look does nothing for me. The objects of your veneration - stringy, youthful(ish) celebrity white men. Now go away and spout rubbish eslewhere or just own it that you are a sucker for the shallow nitwit - just so damn edgy.
Treacle Toes
Time
On the question of free speech and whether the alt-right should be platformed:
Anti-fascist radicals: Liberals don’t realize the serious danger of the alt-right
Anti-fascist radicals: Liberals don’t realize the serious danger of the alt-right
thats exactly the kind of stupidness that Khogali preaches. Its really bad for kids to listen to her hateful bullshit.
to claim that Justin Trudeau for example - who factually, must be the most immigrant friendly president in history and Canada an example to all nations -a 'white supremacist terrorist' just speaks of the poisonous bullshit that i am not surprised, intelligent black people want to get away from.
and lets not mention the stupid tweet she did praying to Allah that she would not kill white people....'Plz Allah give me strength to not cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today. Plz plz plz."
which she then deleted.
Black Lives Matter Toronto speaks out on controversy over 'cuss/kill' tweet
"
The Muslims who have entered Europe are very plain about telegraphing their future actions. They have no plans to fit into the culture. Muslims do not believe that when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Muslims believe: when in Rome, rape everyone and claim welfare."
Why haven't you condemned Milo for things like the above. Never mind all the other examples. You came on this thread to defend him. Why the double standards. Can you explain that?
She seems to think he (Yiannopoulis) is 'cute' and a slap in the face for us staid, dull, sensible types who just don't get the 'banter'. Honestly, I truly don't think Cheesy is malign, just a bit superficial.
eta not too dissimilar to the infamous FoxyRed and the short-lived but silly Silent Whisper...and I am now feeling a bit ashamed at-being mean...although I do think it is apt that this is examined...not least because there are power relations which require sober assessment (who gets to speak...to who....who gets a platform and who doesn't etc. etc.)
eta not too dissimilar to the infamous FoxyRed and the short-lived but silly Silent Whisper...and I am now feeling a bit ashamed at-being mean...although I do think it is apt that this is examined...not least because there are power relations which require sober assessment (who gets to speak...to who....who gets a platform and who doesn't etc. etc.)
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
She's a shit katie hopkins.
Shechemite
Be the sun and all will see you
Desperate middle aged lush is what she is
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Hmmm. I'd say her love of the Milo creep has more than a passing resemblance to her fondness for Jim Morrison. I think this may say something wider about the psychosexual peculiarities of the Alt-Right (see my forthcoming opus, The Mass Psychology of Wankers).
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Looks like an interesting article, except I can't read it, because it seems to be laid out horribly, with some 'sign up for our newsletter' things on top of it. I'm browsing in Firefox, could that be the cause of this.
What I can see of it looks to be spot on - especially the bit about Fascist aesthetics and ideology being one and the same.
Treacle Toes
Time
Here you go...
GENDER & SEXUALITY
#Milosexual and the Aesthetics of Fascism
DANIEL PENNY
Photograph: Lucian Wintrich
For the September 2016 stop at Louisiana State University of his Dangerous Faggot Tour, Milo Yiannopoulos is dressed as his drag persona Ivana Wall. Accompanied by a young squire, he teeters across the stage in a pair of sparkly high heels and a long white ball gown with gold brocade, carrying a gold-bound Bible. He removes his silver lamé cloak and white feather boa and adjusts the enormous blond wig perched atop his head, then waves his gloved hands to the ebullient crowd and proceeds to sing the national anthem and “America the Beautiful.” A slide on the screen behind Milo reads, “Admit it. Your dick is confused.”
Internet troll-master and technology editor for the far-right Breitbart News website, Yiannopoulos has built a cult of celebrity around himself as a breaker of liberal taboo and an advocate for what he calls free speech fundamentalism. In his articles, tweets, and lectures, he presents himself as a bold truth-teller, right-wing provocateur, and self-declared “faggot.” Like Cher or Beyoncé, his fame has grown so large that most people know him simply as “Milo.”
Milo is singular: an ultra right-wing pundit with a high-femme persona who is nonetheless embraced by a political bloc contemptuous of homosexuals and feminine men.
Though a fixture of the alt-right circuit since 2013, Milo was rocketed to mainstream visibility during the summer of 2016 when he was banned from Twitter for leading an online campaign of harassment against African American actress Leslie Jones. More recently, he became the center of controversy after it was announced he had signed a book deal with Threshold, the conservative imprint of Simon and Schuster, for which he received a $250,000 advance. Many bookstores are refusing to stock the book, accusing it of hate speech, and Chicago Review of Books has even taken the step of boycotting Simon and Schuster titles. Despite, or perhaps because of, this backlash, preorders from fans have thrust the title, Dangerous, to Amazon’s number one spot for political humor. These same fans recently flooded a survey on the website LGBTQ Nation to have Milo named its “Person of the Year.” Seemingly at odds with a movement founded on the hatred of racial, religious, and sexual difference, Milo has somehow been crowned the alt-right queen.
What makes Milo so vexing to the left and successful among young people on the right is the way he manages to utilize his “deviant” sexuality as a political asset rather than a liability. Milo’s rhetorical and aesthetic strategies are manifold: he adopts the argot of science and history in support of his claims about the supremacy of Western culture, but simultaneously asserts that we live in a “post-fact world.” He mocks the offended sensibilities of leftists who protest his campus appearances, yet uses the language of assault to characterize himself as an embattled champion. He effortlessly pivots from ridiculing his targets (fat people, Muslims, feminists) to asserting that his insults are in fact efforts to save these people from their brainwashing. If all else fails, he whips out a cock joke.
While there are parallels to be found between Milo and historical and contemporary fascist figures interested in homoeroticism, he remains singular: an ultra right-wing pundit with a high-femme persona who is nonetheless largely embraced by a political bloc synonymous with contempt for homosexuals and feminine men. Understanding the sources of his appeal is crucial to developing sophisticated insight into the way alt-right media—now the sanctioned news of the White House—uses spectacle and irony to persuade, bewitch, disrupt, and overwhelm the public.
Treacle Toes
Time
Hitler with the bullet-scarred Röhm.
To understand exactly how Milo operates in a milieu shaped by fascist aesthetics—by which I mean both the visual tropes associated with Nazism, as well as the increasingly diverse visual strategies employed by contemporary fascists—it is necessary to examine the historical connections between fascism and homosexuality.
There is a long and grand tradition of masculinist gay fascism.
There is a long and grand tradition, in particular, of masculinist gay fascism. One need only look back to Ernst Röhm, a founder of the Nazi party and long-time head of its militia (the Sturmabteilung or SA), who was openly homosexual (as were many of his lieutenants) and advocated a militarized vision of masculinity based upon his experiences in World War I, in which “only the real, the true, the masculine held its value.” Influenced by the right-wing German sociologist and philosopher Hans Blüher, Röhm subscribed to a vision of fascism that embraced homosexuality as an acceptable and even necessary component of an all-male militaristic society called the Männerbund. Consistent with this line of thinking are Milo’s constant digs at “ugly” women, feminists, and lesbians, all of whom he considers baffling, useless, and pathetic. Like Röhm, Milo embraces a vociferous misogyny that suggests he would rather live in a world without women. However, the similarities between Röhm and Milo run out here.
With his large facial scars and barrel chest, Röhm’s hypermasculine appearance fell outside of Weimar stereotypes of how a homosexual should look and act (a stereotype that more closely resembles Milo). In Röhm’s view, conservative homophobia was a reactionary current in German political discourse that would be swept away when the Nazi’s rose to power. But the uneasy coalition of fascist homosexuals and homophobes would not hold, and ultimately Röhm’s homosexuality provided Hitler a ready rationale for his assassination in 1934 during the Night of Long Knives. After Röhm’s death, the Nazis increased the punishments for homosexual conduct under Paragraph 175 (a provision of the German criminal code), and initiated a public anti-vice campaign to rid the Reich of “homosexual contamination,” leading to the imprisonment and death of thousands of gay Germans. Yet Röhm’s long-term position of power and influence testifies to the complex and sometimes contradictory attitudes of fascists toward homosexuality within their own ranks.
Masculinist strains of fascism persist to this day, with the treatises of American gay white nationalist Jack Donovan perhaps best exemplifying this strange blend. In The Way of Men (2012), Donovan’s most popular book, he lays out his “gang theory of masculinity,” which relies upon “four tactical virtues”—strength, courage, mastery, and honor—that he claims distinguish men from women. Though Donovan skirts “the Jewish question,” he makes heavy allusion to Nazi symbolism, especially in his use of Germanic runes, and his writing is distributed by Counter-Currents Publishing, which exclusively sells Nazi- and white nationalist–themed books. Combining terms such as “tribe” and “barbarian” with imagery drawn from Crossfit, the Hell’s Angels, and Germanic mysticism, Donovan has concocted a vision of fascist masculinity based on a mythic past. Though Donovan’s fantasy may be backward-looking rather than future-oriented, like Röhm’s, it imagines a white and male-dominated society outside existing morality and sexual strictures.
Treacle Toes
Time
In her 1975 New York Review of Books essay “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag interrogates what was then a growing trend within 1970s popular culture of reviving fascist imagery after three decades of total rebuke. Sontag begins by examining Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s photography book, The Last of the Nuba, in light of Riefenstahl’s involvement in the Third Reich. Sontag tracks a set of visual sensibilities across Riefenstahl’s filmmaking career, arriving at a kind of taxonomy of fascist aesthetics, which she calls “both prurient and idealizing.” For Sontag, fascist artworks share:
a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry . . . around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets.
Sontag connects these obsessions with theatrical control to the rise of Nazi imagery in cinema, erotica, and fine art in the 1970s. Arthouse films such as The Damned (1969) and The Night Porter (1974) use the “supremely violent but also supremely beautiful” imagery of the SS to lasciviously explore the twisted psychologies of sadomasochism-loving Nazis; while films such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) epitomize the cresting wave of Nazisploitation, in which “far-out sex has been placed under the sign of Nazism.” As Sontag sees it, the unique appeal of Nazis in the context of sadomasochist fantasy is twofold: first, by the 1970s, fascism had become both novel to young people, yet also taboo; and second, fascism provides a readymade sexual fantasy that requires little imagination, “a master scenario available to everyone,” replete with a highly organized visual system: “The color is black, the material is leather. . . .”
Why did Nazi Germany become erotic?
From the arthouse cinema to the art gallery, Sontag’s analysis transitions from straight preoccupations with fascist aesthetics to the more pronounced and visible revival of these tropes within the gay community. She homes in on a self-portrait by Robert Morris that was used to promote a gallery opening of his work. Shirtless and oiled, Morris appears on his invitation wearing a Wehrmacht helmet and chains around his neck and wrists. As with Milo’s signature look, a pair of aviator sunglasses obscures Morris’s eyes in the photo. “Why has Nazi Germany, which was a sexually repressive society, become erotic?” Sontag asks. “How could a regime which persecuted homosexuals become a gay turn-on?” These are not unlike the questions the left has been asking about Milo, whose sexual identity and presentation leave him at odds with many of the constituencies in the alt-right.
A scene from llsa: She Wolf of the SS
Unlike Sontag, Žižek fails to understand that fascism’s aesthetics are its ideology.
Yet it is this very eventuality, of fascist rhetoric and imagery entering the mainstream through appropriation, that Sontag predicts in her analysis of Morris’s Nazi-inflected self-portrait. It is also precisely what philosopher Slavoj Žižek misses when he praises the band Rammstein for allowing audiences to take pleasure in the aesthetics of fascism without its ideology—failing to appreciate the degree to which fascism’s aesthetics are its ideology. Sontag writes of Morris’s portrait that he “is said to have considered this to be the only image that still has any power to shock: a singular virtue to those who take for granted that art is a sequence of ever-fresh gestures of provocation.” In this reading, Morris’s Nazi-themed image is merely an extension of other avant-garde art practices aimed at shocking the viewer into heightened experience. Yet Sontag senses that this move is a potentially corrosive aesthetic dead-end. “But the point of the poster is its own negation,” she continues. “Shocking people in this context also means inuring them, as Nazi material enters the vast repertory of popular iconography usable for the ironic commentaries of Pop art.” It has been more than forty years since Morris and so many others began reappropriating Nazi imagery for sexual and artistic purposes. Milo and his ilk are the end result.
The Emcee in Cabaret performs for a Nazi audience
Despite the long and entwined histories both of masculinist homosexual fascism and of fascist imagery being put to homoerotic use, most members of the alt-right remain hostile to homosexuality. Websites such as The Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff display an outright hatred of Milo, whose homosexuality they associate with femininity and a potential to undermine the bonds of masculine camaraderie. Women are meant to exist in a purely domestic sphere, and their only role is to produce and raise young fascists. This current of Neo-Nazism recuperates fascism’s emphasis on a vigorous, athletic homosociality defined by communal activity and sexual abnegation. As Sontag explains, “The erotic is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse.”
Treacle Toes
Time
Violating the psychic and social boundaries of conventional masculinity is especially distressing to a community whose very existence is predicated upon the strict and sometimes violent enforcement of identity boundaries—yet gay fascists, of which there certainly must be many, continue to have sex with other men. This forbidden contact may occur in secret; it may arise out of “necessity” in all-male environments, such as prison or war; or it may occur as an act of aggression.
Exploring the motivations for gay fascist sex among Nazis and Neo-Nazis, sociologist Klaus Theweleit notes in his classic study, Male Fantasies Vol. 2: Male Bodies – Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (1989), the potential for these encounters to enforce power positions within a group. “The anus is identified as the site of aggression precisely because of its potential to produce vast deterritorializations” in unwilling victims while in turn producing “some form of wholeness in the persecutor.” One need only recall the shower rape depicted in American History X (1998) to understand the essential role of sex between fascist men as both a sexual outlet and a tool of violence and control. Yet as Theweleit notes, though homosexual intercourse is typically forbidden in fascist ideologies, the burden of shame is rarely distributed equally, such that “taking the ‘passive’ role in anal intercourse becomes a particularly pronounced form of degradation.” To be the top is to be a “moral degenerate” (as in the case of Röhm), but to be the bottom is unspeakable.
Milo’s tightrope walk relies upon the ambiguity of irony—he and his fans are just in it for “the lulz.”
Milo, then, occupies this unspeakable place: he is a self-avowed bottom who routinely celebrates the delights of being fucked—by a black man, no less, his supposedly black Muslim boyfriend (whose identity is perhaps Yiannopolous’s only secret). But rather than be embarrassed by his sexual predilections, Milo embraces his desire to bottom for black men, and uses media outlets such as Bloomberg and CNBC to trumpet it at every opportunity. As one example among many, Milo wrote in response to accusations of racism: “Racist? Me? I’ve had more black dick in me than the entire Kardashian family.”
At some events Milo furthers this femme bottom image by appearing in blousy shirts or Fire Island–ready tank tops, sometimes wearing feminine jewelry and makeup, or carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag. He may play up this queen act by swishing his hips when he takes the stage, or making droll comments about wishing he could have lived in ancient Sparta in order to participate in “sweaty man orgies.” (Nevermind that Athens would have been a more likely place to find these orgies.) “A faggot can dream!” he adds.
Yet in other appearances, Milo will wear a suit or sport coat and appear almost like a “coat-and-tie fascist” in the mold of Jared Taylor or Richard Spencer. Positioned behind a lectern, he can give off a vaguely professorial air. He embellishes his points by taking off and putting on his oval glasses, or looking down his nose into the eyes of his audience as he reads from his notes. In this mode, Milo is a trustworthy truth-teller. He is fond of making statements such as, “These are facts—you don’t just come here to be entertained—you come here to learn things.”
A meme of Milo from Know Your Meme
But the truth is that Milo’s fans do come to his events to be entertained, and it is Milo’s talent for entertainment that has allowed him to occupy what would otherwise be an untenable relationship to the alt-right. As he himself has acknowledged, his fans do not represent the entirety of the alt-right. Rather, Milo’s army represents a growing subset within the alt-right coalition, a group he refers to in “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” as “the meme brigade.”
For the meme brigade, it’s just about having fun. They have no real problem with race-mixing, homosexuality, or even diverse societies: it’s just fun to watch the mayhem and outrage that erupts when those secular shibboleths are openly mocked. These younger mischief-makers instinctively understand who the authoritarians are and why and how to poke fun at them.
Treacle Toes
Time
Treacle Toes
Time
newbie
undisambiguated
I really don't know how true that is, it's sort-of what the discourse is now but not necessarily where it's going.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
One noticeable thing about Milo is his performance of narcissism. That may be part of the appeal. The piece on the alt-right of silicon valley seemed to me to imply that a lot of these eejits arrive in that godforsaken spot thinking they're going to be the next Bill Gates, only to discover that they're LARPing a Dilbert cartoon. Hence the emphasis on technology as proof of the "superiority of the white race" - by claiming membership of same they can satisfy their compulsion to gaze lovingly at themselves in the nearest mirror.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
Probably says a bit about my small-mindedness, but I would chop my thumbs off with blunt secateurs rather than refer to Yiannopoulis as 'Milo' It always incensed me that Clinton was routinely referred to as 'Hillary' - a familiarity which was simultaneously condescending and sanitising.
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