This basketcase might be deplorable
by digby
One of the new memes coursing through the media is that Clinton made a huge mistake when she said that some white people were deplorable for being racist, sexist xenophobes. (That's just not done in America.) She needs to give the American people a reason to vote for her besides the fact that Trump is a fascist because apparently being a fascist isn't a good enough reason not to vote for someone (or enable his win with a third party vote.)
Anyway, here's a story about a white person you've never heard of who is a big part of the Trump Movement. (Just don't call him deplorable because that would be rude.)
At 4 p.m., Milo Yiannopoulos puts on a pair of glasses for the first time today. He examines himself in a mirror to see if he wants to add a gray suit to his purchases, which will push his bill to almost $12,000 at Savile Row’s Gieves & Hawkes. He’s buying clothes for his next round of college speeches in, as his bus announces in huge letters next to five giant photos of him, the Dangerous Faggot Tour. It resumed at Texas Tech University on Sept. 12 and is scheduled to hit campuses including Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Alabama, and the University of California at Berkeley before concluding at UCLA in February. “I have ridiculously bad eyesight, but I have learned to live with an impressionistic view. Life is a Monet painting,” he says, taking off his glasses. “I wander around enjoying myopia.”
Yiannopoulos is the 31-year-old British tech editor and star writer for Breitbart News, where he’s the loudest defender of the new, Trump-led ultraconservatism, standing athwart history, shouting to stop immigrants, feminists, political correctness, and any non-Western culture. Yiannopoulos gained his initial fame as the general in a massive troll war over misogyny in the video game world, known as Gamergate. He was permanently banned from Twitter in July after the social media company said his almost 350,000 followers were responsible for harassing Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones. He still has nearly 275,000 subscribers to his YouTube speeches, and CNBC and Fox turn to him as the most notorious spokesman for the alt-right, the U.S. version of Europe’s far right (led at various times by England’s Nigel Farage, France’s Marine Le Pen, Austria’s Jorg Haider, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, and Germany’s Frauke Petry).
Their followers’ politics are almost exactly the same: They’re angry about globalization—culturally even more than economically. They’re angry about political correctness guilting them about insensitivity to women, minorities, gays, transgender people, the disabled, the sick—the everyone-but-them. They’re angry about feminism. They don’t like immigrants. They don’t like military intervention. They aren’t into free trade. They don’t like international groups such as the European Union, United Nations, or NATO—even the International Olympic Committee. They admire the bravado of authoritarians, especially Vladimir Putin. Some are white supremacists. Most enjoy a good conspiracy theory.
But members of the alt-right, unlike their old, frustrated European counterparts, are less focused on policy than on performance. Their MO usually involves pissing people off with hypermasculine taunts.
They call establishment and even Tea Party Republicans “cuckservatives”—because they are cuckolded by the Left. They do most of their acting out online, often by organizing on 4chan or Reddit and then trolling targets on Twitter. The alt-right is a new enough phenomenon that in August, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan—running against an alt-right candidate in a primary—mistakenly called it “alt-conservatism” on a radio show. “It’s a nasty, virulent strain of something,” he said. “I don’t even know what it is, other than that it isn’t us. It isn’t what we believe in.”
As Donald J. Trump has become the candidate of the alt-right, Breitbart News has become the movement’s voice. The two merged semiofficially in August, when Breitbart’s chief executive officer, Steve Bannon, quit his job to run Trump’s campaign. And Yiannopoulos, whose byline on the site is simply “Milo,” is Breitbart’s most radioactive star.
“Milo is the person who propelled the alt-right movement into the mainstream,” says Heidi Beirich, who directs the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and describes the term “alt-right” as “a conscious rebranding by white nationalists that doesn’t automatically repel the mainstream.” Beirich says she’s not even sure if Yiannopoulos believes in the alt-right’s tenets or just found a juvenile way to mix internet culture and extreme ideology to get attention. “It’s like he’s joking: ‘Ha ha, let me popularize the worst ideas that ever existed,’ ” she says. “That’s new, and that’s scary.”
There's more at the link. If youcan stand it.
How weird that this "hypermasculine" cult has vaulted into the mainstream when the first woman is nominated by a major party for the presidency of the world's only superpower. Go figure.
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