00:00:00.000I woke up one day and I looked over and I was like oh no I don't want to do this anymore
00:00:03.880like hell is real I don't want to go there. Baby you're in hell right now
00:00:07.620you're in the realest hell you're ever going to experience right this second.0.99
00:00:17.820I have a very sex in the city intro I was like just like tip-tap typing away like I couldn't0.98
00:00:24.780help but wonder hello hello and welcome back to a bit fruity i'm matt bernstein i'm so happy that0.69
00:00:33.020you're here i'm wearing this sort of fishnet top today which context appropriate is i was gonna
00:00:40.140say it's partially because i'm at the beach and just have a very limited wardrobe but it also
00:00:43.940feels very much like something milo would have worn in the mid 2010s i agree i moved to new york
00:00:51.360City at kind of a weird time. It was the summer of 2017, some months into Donald Trump's first
00:00:58.720term as President of the United States, and while most of the country was grappling with the
00:01:04.040realization that much of the country's white working class was willing to elect an openly
00:01:09.620racist rapist, many in New York were having a community reckoning of their own. While it's true
00:01:16.240that a vanishingly small number of New Yorkers supported Donald Trump in 2016, there were some
00:01:23.440intentionally provocative countercultural figures who embraced the aesthetics of fascism because
00:01:30.420they thought contrarianism at any cost was cool. One such figure was an artist and troll named
00:01:37.420Lucian Wintrich, an openly racist white gay man then in his late 20s. Lucian went viral for a0.96
00:01:46.220series of photographs called twinks for trump wherein he had a number of young slender mostly
00:01:52.940naked gay men pose in trump merch in his east village apartment those photos were displayed
00:01:59.220at the republican national convention times times have changed lucian has since faded into obscurity0.99
00:02:10.300You can only survive on a stupid-ass bit like that for so long, especially when the audience you need to support your artwork, is in the process of purging queer people from their coalition.0.99
00:02:22.880One of Lucian's last big moments was in late 2016 when he curated a pro-Trump art exhibition called Hashtag Daddy Will Save Us.0.99
00:02:33.200Among the pieces on display were paintings of figures like George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. wearing Trump hats and a single pill with a $20,000 price tag on it by none other than Martin Shkreli.
00:02:47.680But perhaps the most notable piece was a live performance of a British gay man wearing a MAGA hat and smoking a cigarette while bathing in a tub of pig's blood.0.51
00:03:00.940That man was named Milo Yiannopoulos.0.99
00:03:04.040I really just wanted to introduce him in the tub of pig's blood.0.96
00:03:19.840For years, he's been an alternative right firebrand, a blogger, a manager to Kanye West,
00:03:25.680all while bouncing in and out of the closet so as to placate his fascist colleagues.
00:03:30.800But the fun could only go on for so long.
00:03:33.740Milo Yiannopoulos was deported by ICE last week,
00:03:36.900allegedly after his colleague and one-time friend in Islamophobia, Laura Loomer, had enough of him.
00:03:42.820Today, we're going to tell the story of Milo Yiannopoulos,
00:03:46.380which I could naively call his rise and fall,
00:03:49.460but the truth is he's risen and fell so many times it's hard to keep track.
00:03:53.560There are articles from 10 years ago called The Rise and Fall of Milo Yiannopoulos.0.96
00:03:59.840Being a homosexual fascist requires an immense savviness and ability to pivot.0.93
00:04:05.500And Milo might have been one of the savviest, and it still was not enough.0.99
00:04:10.200So let's get in to some of the worst gay lore there is.1.00
00:04:14.400And to do that today, I am so excited to be joined by friend of the show,1.00
00:04:19.660burgeoning YouTube star herself, Kat Tenbarge. Welcome back.
00:04:22.580thank you so much for having me and new friend of the show Matthew Sittman who you may know
00:04:29.460from the know your enemies podcast I know we have a big overlap and many of you are probably
00:04:34.820excited to be hearing from him yes uh yeah I'm a little offended this is my first invite but
00:04:40.040despite all that overlap you're talking about but uh I'm glad you you thought you know we're
00:04:45.920talking about this terrible person who's the the perfect guest I was one of them so I that's an
00:04:51.540ambiguous compliment, but I'll take it, I guess. I mean, I needed a gay guy to back me up on this1.00
00:04:55.840one. I have been talking to each of you over the last few days since Milo's deportation back to
00:05:03.980the UK. And perhaps what's more interesting about Milo in the end is what he came to represent more
00:05:10.800so than what he actually did. But I'd love to hear your top line thoughts about everything
00:05:14.660that we are about to talk about. It's interesting. Listeners to Know Your Enemy know I love
00:05:19.600poetry. And I don't know if you caught a couple of days ago, the great Kentucky farmer and writer
00:05:25.240Wendell Berry died at age 92. And one of the poems of his that I love is titled Enemies.
00:05:31.960And I'll just read the first line from it to you. He writes,
00:05:34.840If you are not to become a monster, you must care what they think. If you care what they think,
00:05:41.040how will you not hate them? And so become a monster of the opposite kind.
00:05:45.460and that poem has been ringing in my ears so to speak preparing for this because it is a kind of
00:05:52.520you know on the left my politics are universalist right or i strive for them to be that way and so
00:05:58.340my top line comment might be something like when i got the news that milo was deported you know
00:06:03.600believe it or not a lot of friends sent that uh news story or a twitter post to me uh my first
00:06:10.460thought was i do want to resist the schadenfreude of seeing a terrible person of something terrible0.90
00:06:15.260happen to him because my politics there's actually not like an asshole carve out for what i think0.98
00:06:20.940how i think people deserve to be treated or there's not even like a wicked homosexual who0.98
00:06:25.500takes out his shame and pain on uh vulnerable minorities himself including other queer people
00:06:32.220there's not even a carve out for that in my politics so i guess i wanted to say that at the
00:06:36.940start that we will be very critical of milo i'm sure all of us will be but uh i don't relish this
00:06:42.700And in some ways, I resent having to talk about him 10 years after Donald Trump was first elected.
00:06:49.100And it was really the 2016 campaign when I first, you know, I'd probably heard of him.
00:06:53.760He's been Catholic media, too, which I was formerly an editor of Catholic magazine.
00:06:58.460So I've known about him for a long time, but it really was 2016 when I paid attention to him the most.
00:07:03.100and in some ways it's like 2026 the year of our lord 2026 and and milo yunopolis we're still
00:07:11.160recording podcast episodes about him and for good reason you know this was a very revealing story in
00:07:16.980some ways the person at the heart of it i kind of hate that he's getting renewed attention but in
00:07:21.600this case i think it's worth it matt i should not have let you gone first
00:07:24.980that was really beautiful oh that was really good i did really pour it on thick didn't i
00:07:31.420really poured out where's your poem i can't follow that well what i will say i completely
00:07:40.280agree with you on your point about not relishing it i think that that is the instinct of so many
00:07:46.240people and understandably so i think even my first thought when i saw the news was like well
00:07:51.300I hope he suffers. But I think that that is, in fact, the instinct that the Trump administration itself is channeling to, which is why they are creating so much social media content around this arrest and deportation and why they are enjoying and relishing it so much as well.
00:08:11.100I will also say my first time really encountering Milo Yiannopoulos, in December 2016, I was
00:08:19.540a student at Ohio University and Milo came to our campus and it was a big deal.
00:08:28.380Trump had just won and I was working at one of our student outlets covering campus politics.
00:08:36.480So I had sent a reporter to the event to cover it.
00:08:39.560And what sticks out to me the most about Milo's presentation is that he was like putting up all of the pictures of people who worked in our women's and gender studies department and just like mocking their appearances, their pronouns.
00:08:53.820It was so grotesque to witness. And the feeling of like, oh, my gosh, like these people have won the culture was like something I really remember, like feeling that like, oh, my gosh, like we're in such a bad, bad cultural moment right now.
00:09:09.700And of course, that was true. But I also think that in sort of watching what happened to Milo on a personal level since then, and also seeing the ways that our culture has responded, and in some cases gotten better, and in some cases gotten worse, and then gotten better again, it's a reminder that like that real depth of depravity was not the end, neither of like where we were at as a society and also where even Milo himself was at.
00:09:38.720okay that was gorgeous so don't sell yourself short poetry of its own kind cat thank you
00:09:46.080should we talk about milo yiannopoulos let's do it yeah milo yiannopoulos listeners of this
00:09:53.000podcast know i give context was born in kent england on october 18th 1984 two days after my
00:10:00.620birthday what i don't know is he a scorp he's a libra milo and i are one of your many common
00:10:22.580Another similarity I have with Milo is that he is, according to Jewish law, a Jew.
00:10:27.900Milo's maternal grandmother was Jewish.
00:10:30.500He started his career out identifying as a gay Jew, same, but also says that he was baptized and raised Roman Catholic, which he continues to practice.
00:10:42.520You know that joke on Seinfeld where Tim Watley converts to Judaism, the dentist, but he like formerly was Catholic.0.77
00:10:48.380And Jerry says if he gets Polish citizenship, he'll have total like saying offensive jokes immunity.0.83
00:10:53.560That's what I was thinking about when you were describing.0.81
00:10:56.240Well, he he kind of claims this in some moments and claim this in others.
00:22:16.380So many things that were shocking, but now seen, not quaint exactly, but it's almost
00:22:21.640like there were these outside things that were like, wow, this isn't normal.
00:22:25.040But now it's just totally, look who the Secretary of War is.
00:22:28.380Look who's doing comms for the Trump administration.
00:22:31.200Look who is being elected to Congress in some cases.
00:22:34.140Like Milo himself has risen and fallen many times, but people like him have kind of triumphed
00:22:39.580in terms of who's running the Republican Party, which is, say, running the country right now.
00:22:43.680Totally, totally agree. I think back like the alt-right initially came to be meaning like, oh, these are Republican identifying people who aren't afraid to say things that are just like brazenly racist or anti-Semitic.0.59
00:22:58.380And I remember a lot of the objection to him at the time from people like Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro. I mean, Ben Shapiro has always had a sensitivity towards anti-Semitism or at least anything he perceives as anti-Semitism, which is funny because he's not to make this about Ben Shapiro, but he's always been very willing to be bigoted towards literally every other group of people.
00:23:19.140But when it comes to Jewish people, but in a way, I feel like the Republican Party before this 2016 era really fashioned itself as like high minded people that like weren't racist, that weren't anti-Semitic, that actually had an aversion to these things.
00:23:35.460And maybe it was just about tax policy and like being anti-abortion.
00:23:38.920But I do think that the alt-right and interestingly now MAGA is the establishment, but the MAGA
00:23:43.680party that it gave way to was a more honest look at what these people were doing with
00:23:48.580their policy and the way that it affected people.
00:23:51.020I view like this era of Breitbart and sort of like the media project of Breitbart News.
00:23:57.220They explicitly positioned themselves as the opposite of the Huffington Post.
00:24:01.360I also see them as sort of like the counterforce to like Tumblr, which is where I was as a teenager in the early to mid 2010s, like reading about social justice and like learning about all of these concepts like feminism.
00:24:17.960on that side of the internet there was just so much like progressive discourse happening like
00:24:24.080bringing in a lot of young people especially a lot of like women and queer people and associating it
00:24:28.740a lot of the time with like fandom and like cultural properties that were more diverse and
00:24:34.400that people were like really leaning on at that time and like sort of coming out of that era
00:24:39.860Breitbart is doing it but the exact opposite way I've um I've taken some time out of my busy
00:24:46.280schedule being fabulous and doing my hair to prepare a speech for you well a few remarks really
00:24:51.300feminism is cancer thank you very much and steve bannon's sort of ideology around this was like
00:24:59.980culture is the gateway to bringing people into these political moments that they would otherwise0.77
00:25:05.600shy away from like they were of course extremely islamophobic they were of course extremely
00:25:11.340anti-immigrant and xenophobic they were of course overtly misogynistic aligned with white
00:25:16.540supremacists aligned with anti-semitism but i think that what breitbart did really really well
00:25:22.920is that they got people's attention with more like cultural stories and more like shocking
00:25:27.280and salacious stories which is exactly the model that you see all of these now now the right-wing0.95
00:25:34.020media ecosystem has splintered in so many different directions and you have your candace owens is and
00:25:38.880you have your like daily wires which is already kind of itself on the way out like you have all
00:25:44.320of these different people and podcasters but that style of being like boom hollywood story boom you
00:25:52.440should you should support banning immigration like that's what breitbart did and it did it so well
00:26:00.000as a backlash to what more progressive places like buzzfeed and huffpost and tumblr were doing
00:26:06.240And a backlash to insufficient baseness in other parts of the right. It's like, we're not reading National Review and valorizing Ronald Reagan anymore. Someone like Bannon is like, I'm a Leninist. Claimed a kind of radical, this was an insurgency, an ideological insurgency, not just against wokeness and progressives and the establishment in that sense, but against the establishment on the right, as I was mentioning earlier.
00:26:31.940And because Breitbart was founded by Andrew Breitbart, I forget what year he died, but it was, you know, one reason Bannon took over was the founder of Breitbart, like dropped dead of a heart attack, like on a sidewalk in LA. But he was very friendly with like a lot of mainstream conservatives. People at National Review, they still speak highly of him. And it's almost like if Andrew Breitbart hadn't died, you know, dot, dot, dot, maybe we could have avoided all this.
00:26:55.060but it was a critique of the existing right too and because the existing right was anti-trump for
00:27:00.080the most part especially at the start and it was the bright like bannon had this magazine this
00:27:04.940this publication that he could you know kind of wield as a maga weapon now milo was also openly
00:27:13.400gay the whole time and very much not in a if you know you know kind of way like how someone like
00:27:21.360Douglas Murray remains today. Milo was openly gay in a bombastic, hypersexual way. He would often0.97
00:27:31.600half-heartedly reject accusations of his own racism by saying to crowds of people that he,1.00
00:27:38.960quote, loves sucking black dick. Well, I'm not just that. I'm a gay Jew with a black fiance.1.00
00:27:45.220So attempting to crown me queen of this white supremacist movement is a bit of a stretch.0.99
00:27:49.900I think you know I his 2015 and 2016 speaking tour was called the dangerous faggot tour not a bad name1.00
00:27:58.840not a bad name catchy but I mean what do you what do you guys make of this type of character1.00
00:28:06.740appealing to the right and in a social and professional circle populated by notorious
00:28:13.540homophobes and I don't know I think there's something here about how the 2010s alt-right
00:28:19.460but certainly not the traditional right created a space for eccentric figures like this to survive
00:28:25.700if they were sort of loud and bombastic enough about their racism and sort of finger pointing
00:28:31.240towards other minorities but I'm curious for your take I do think that a lot of people in Milo's
00:28:37.720audience thought that he was really funny because I think a lot of this is like oh well you're
00:28:42.920you're owning it but you're also like making fun of it and you're degrading yourself and you're
00:28:47.300degrading like your sexuality and what you do and you're doing it for our entertainment while also
00:28:52.620aligning with our worst and more serious like racist impulses so therefore like we think you're
00:28:59.560funny and we think you're entertaining and we're gonna like just kind of support what you're doing
00:29:04.980without actually supporting anything of course meaningful like for your community I don't think
00:29:10.080they look at it like that they just look at it as like oh Milo he's like hilarious and he says
00:29:15.160stuff that i agree with like 75 of the time that's very good i i mean matt this gets to the the0.95
00:29:21.300dangerous faggot title right of his tour like uh like the the self-deprecating or self uh insulting0.92
00:29:28.560i should really say nature of that right it's almost like saying i don't like you can laugh0.98
00:29:33.320at me yeah that makes it okay at some level but i think it's really the idea that the kind of alt
00:29:38.720right bright part etc kind of spaces made space for these people is true and it gets back to the
00:29:44.100island of the misfit toys it's kind of like you could be black you could be gay you could be like0.93
00:29:48.280some a member of some group that the right doesn't like but if you were kind of absurd enough and and0.99
00:29:54.760kind of almost self-deprecating the way we're describing milo being like that was fine yeah and
00:30:00.700it served the purpose of what you know you can say as a gay man right i you kind of vouch for
00:30:07.880the right always does this right there's women black people gay people right there's always0.50
00:30:13.240whatever kind of minority, any group at the right, you think, why would someone who is this0.54
00:30:17.980be so supportive of these kinds of politics and policies? Well, I mean, that's very lucrative
00:30:22.900to be one of those. If you're the X, Y, or Z that the right chooses, that's always a lucrative job.
00:30:29.460There's a lot of money on the right. But I think especially in this 2016 kind of early moment,
00:30:33.700the Breitbart moment, it really was an island of the misfit toys. And in some ways, it was only
00:30:37.940going to be those kinds of people right if you were more sober and kind of normal or mainstream
00:30:43.320however you want to describe it yeah right you would not have gotten any traction or attention
00:30:47.380it was partly just the whole absurdity just kind of like the spectacular nature of it all that was
00:30:53.020part of the like we like to say on our podcast maga is the mess right like think about trump
00:30:59.340rallies all the people they're like a carnival almost circus like sometimes even uh revival
00:31:04.000like atmosphere right but it's that sense of chaos crazy people stuff's gonna happen i don't
00:31:09.920know that's all in the mix and i feel like someone like milo his particular brand the bombacity and
00:31:16.440the self-deprecating nature of it too i think that's that's very like of the moment and it
00:31:21.020it's not exactly shocking in some ways when you think about how the right operates in the ways
00:31:25.260i was just describing i think people also sometimes forget that trump one tolerated
00:31:31.660certain types of gay people like yeah rather openly peter teal to someone i mentioned a few
00:31:37.760moments ago peter teal i mean milo spoke at like i mentioned the 2016 republican national conventions
00:31:44.100gays for trump rally which existed back then you think there's a gays for trump rally in the
00:31:50.880upcoming 2028 rnc absolutely not i mean there was still a room for like earnest advocacy for
00:31:59.200gay people within the Republican Party. And many of us back then were saying, well, that's going
00:32:04.780to go away, though. If you pursue this to its logical endpoint, that's going to go away. And
00:32:09.900what's interesting is that Milo says in many interviews at the time of the height of his fame
00:32:15.620that discrimination against gay people was a thing of the past. Like he would acknowledge that gay
00:32:20.740people were discriminated against. And he said, well, that's over now. I'm going to put in clips
00:32:24.860here and it's crazy because it's not yeah but identity politics also comes from understanding
00:32:30.360people have been marginalized in the past and did need protection and perhaps still do for sure i
00:32:35.760think um the argument as to whether or not they still do um gays i think we're doing fine gay
00:32:41.440people are doing fine matt i have a question for you like i remember the twinks for trump art
00:32:46.340exhibition gallery showing that you mentioned earlier but i feel like as a gay guy like i
00:32:53.060definitely knew about that my friends knew about it even if they would text me the link and in kind
00:32:58.620of ironical or joking about it or even critical ways but i feel like there was a way in which as
00:33:04.480a pr campaign it succeeded in some way in breaking through or at least kind of success might not be
00:33:10.200the right word but as with all these it might be self-defeating ultimately but in terms of just the
00:33:14.220attention right away what was your sense of that so so yes because milo spoke at the rnc in front
00:33:20.480of huge prints of these twinks for trump naked boys wearing trump hat photos which is just so
00:33:26.400ridiculous to think about now my memory of the twinks for trump thing was i had just moved to
00:33:32.640new york i was 18 years old i thought that moving to new york city from a suburb in new jersey was0.88
00:33:40.220going to be this moment where i'm like i go to love is love paradise and it's like all the gay
00:33:46.280people here are like cool and everyone's amazing and politically sound and everyone like hugs each0.52
00:33:51.500other good night or something and and and urban metropolises that with you know a big gay
00:33:57.420population there is that there is that but i remember one of the first things i heard about
00:34:02.320was this controversy where a bunch of like downtown gays in the art scene had participated
00:34:07.200in this twinks for trump photo shoot i think i thought then what i still think now which is just1.00
00:34:13.220like what a bunch of losers seeking attention like what a bunch of fucking losers seeking1.00
00:34:18.720attention you're not good artists the only currency that you have that you can work with is1.00
00:34:25.520outrage and what a fleeting way to exist as exemplified by the man we're talking about today0.66
00:34:31.800like i yeah i don't think it worked in producing any sort of meaningful republican gay cohort i0.72
00:34:36.960just think it like it's like there's always this like downtown dirtbag culture in new york that i0.70
00:34:42.300don't respect that does everything like ironically and it's like are we really trump supporters are
00:34:47.640we just pretending to be trump supporters and taking sexy photos who cares get a life make
00:34:51.620better art yeah and the the only other thing i want to add to this is i feel like in a certain
00:34:57.140sense matt for just the reasons you described but i feel like it kind of all held together too
00:35:01.700because trump is kind of the first gay president yes dancing to ymca like there really was a thing
00:35:07.880where like well trump he's not gonna be that bad for gay people because he's from new york he loves0.89
00:35:12.220broadway show tunes he's not he's not like this visceral homophobe and do you remember the
00:35:16.820incredible moment where the gaze for trump like the homemade gaze for trump when one of the0.99
00:35:21.060daughters spoke yeah oh my god tiffany trump wasted off her ass gave like the keynote speech0.97
00:35:27.200so let me just say how excited i am to be here in this room with probably so many of my friends1.00
00:35:35.220I bet I see a few of you already in here.
00:44:47.060Gamergate's activists and opponents both agreed
00:44:49.580that without Milo's advocacy, the movement would have fizzled out.
00:44:54.020I want to tell you guys Milo's core political tenets.0.61
00:44:57.740as i see them this is this is how i summarize them one trump is daddy two feminism is cancer
00:45:06.340even saying those three words it brings me it's like a shot of 2016 right into my system0.52
00:45:11.880feminism is cancer his big thing is like that he would literally say on speaking tours was like
00:45:17.300would you rather have a child with cancer or a child who's a feminist it's classic three0.95
00:45:22.480Three, feminists and people of color and liberals are society's real oppressors and political correctness is the sword they wield to crush free speech.0.95
00:45:34.920Four, Islam is bad because it's caused oppression for women and gay people, but Christianity is good despite having done the exact same thing.0.98
00:45:45.840And also, women and gay people are bad anyway, but it's not racism, I promise.1.00
00:45:51.560Five, Muslims are an inherent threat to Western society.1.00
00:45:58.220Thus, their immigration into the U.S. must be stopped.1.00
00:46:01.240Okay, these tenets, exactly as you have written them,0.99
00:46:04.760are what Elon Musk fed into the Twitter algorithm to create X as it exists today.
00:46:11.480Like, to your earlier point, Matt, about how, like, this is just what the whole right is now.
00:46:15.880Like, this is, if you could distill Elon Musk, the world's richest man,
00:46:20.340who controls so many of our communications platforms like this is this is him now this is
00:46:26.720what elon is now i want to make one more point that follows from gamer gate specifically and
00:46:32.580matt it goes to a number of the you know distilled uh milo beliefs you mentioned which is i kind of
00:46:39.500think the sequence of the misogyny and anti-feminism at the heart of gamer gate uh what
00:46:46.180years would you say the height of Gamergate would have been? 2014, 2015. Okay. And do you remember
00:46:52.840Trump, one way he broke through the very first Republican debate. Remember his attack on Megyn
00:46:59.240Kelly? She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. And, you know,0.97
00:47:05.800you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.1.00
00:47:11.380Making those comments going after Rosie O'Donnell.1.00
00:47:13.740You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.1.00
00:47:20.860Your Twitter account. Only Rosie O'Donnell.1.00
00:47:24.640Very dated reference, although she's back on TV. Everything old is new again, apparently.
00:47:30.260But like the misogyny at the heart of the Trump campaign, I think in some ways the Gamergate, the misogyny and anti-feminism at the heart of that was a way of like priming the pump for someone like Trump.
00:47:43.640who very first debate before we knew his opponent even would be Hillary, right, was talking about
00:47:48.920the debate moderator's menstrual cycles, right, and making fun of Rosie O'Donnell. And it turns
00:47:55.160out this is the man who wins the nomination and then defeats the first women candidate for, you
00:48:00.580know, of a major party. Like, I don't, I think that kind of trajectory and linkage is not
00:48:05.600accidental. Trump was, Trump was riding a wave that was maybe not started by Milo, but that Milo
00:48:11.040was instrumental in kind of churning up.
00:48:34.520in not only bullying a number of women into years-long solitude,
00:48:38.940but also turning Milo Yiannopoulos into a folk hero of the online right, Milo thought, why stop
00:48:45.580there? And so with his celebrity on the rise in 2016, when a Ghostbusters remake was released
00:48:53.060featuring an all-female cast, which included Leslie Jones, online alt-right wingers levied
00:49:00.260a misogynistic and racist harassment campaign against the film and its cast, specifically
00:49:05.300targeting leslie jones for being a black woman milo led his hundreds of thousands of followers
00:49:12.320on twitter to dogpile on her and posted a barrage of tweets himself calling her quote0.93
00:49:18.200barely literate a black caricature and a black dude this led to leslie jones leaving twitter
00:49:26.960which of course the goals of campaigns like this which by the way are the real cancel culture might
00:49:32.720i add milo's own account was then suspended by twitter for violating rules around harassment
00:49:38.900back when twitter still had those lolol
00:49:42.760throughout 2016 and 2017 milo spouted his beliefs in the most incendiary possible way at anyone who
00:49:53.640would give him a microphone and accused anyone who did not give him a microphone of being
00:49:58.080insufficiently devoted to the cause of free speech. If you don't let me speak on your campus
00:50:04.400and give me money, you are against free speech. So fucking ridiculous. I think it's relevant to1.00
00:50:11.620discuss here something that I feel very passionately about, which is that Milo's fame was
00:50:16.080not inevitable, but in my opinion, manufactured by a media apparatus that simultaneously treated
00:50:22.980him like a mean gay joke and like a serious person who represented free speech itself
00:50:29.660similar to other previously obscure figures like barry weiss or dasha nekrosova in the later 2010s
00:50:38.500working on a bonus episode about dasha right now subscribe to the patreon if you want uh
00:50:43.780mainstream media outlets profiled milo endlessly thereby conveying to the rest of us that this is
00:50:50.340someone worth taking seriously. And one of the reasons why mainstream media outlets were so
00:50:55.540obsessed with Milo and comparable figures is because he was their Waluigi. But he was the
00:51:04.400he was the anti Huffington Post. Therefore, you can create this ecosystem where it's like they're
00:51:10.340playing off of each other. It's like, oh, Milo says all the naughty bad things that we're not
00:51:15.600allowed to. So we're going to profile him and give him more ammo to use because there's this like
00:51:22.460mutual effect to that. That's why like the media ecosystem, why Milo became such a darling,
00:51:30.020because it was like at the end of the day, all of it was run off of the same desire to get clicks
00:51:35.120and to get attention online. And because he was so good at that, and specifically in a genre that
00:51:41.280mainstream media was very responsive to which was politics that in my opinion is is one of the
00:51:46.360reasons why milo became this like little media darling for that period i also think as someone
00:51:51.980who has a whole podcast thinking about right-wing politics intellectuals and so on i've noticed that
00:51:57.780for sheer like content creation purposes uh more mainstream outlets have to find some right-wing
00:52:05.320figure to profile inevitably in a in a way that it might not be overtly sympathetic but it's
00:52:11.260it it always ends up being kind of a win for them at some level because we all know the right wing
00:52:16.580like it's kind of priced in some of the nastiness so what they're gaining is wider exposure their
00:52:22.220ideas are being you know for every person like us who reads a profile of milo in year whatever
00:52:27.520and is horrified there's people who say oh wait i never heard of this guy this is kind of interesting
00:52:32.460And it's kind of a tricky problem because it feels wrong somehow to ignore people like Milo because they are spreading vicious, hateful things.
00:52:43.420But if you cover them too much, it's kind of a win for them because it's kind of in-kind contribution to their PR campaign.
00:52:50.820I just think if you are going to cover these figures, as I do, as both of you do on our respective very established media properties, but like if you're going to cover these figures, you have a responsibility to do it honestly, to weigh the harm that they're causing, to not treat it like a joke or I think perhaps even worse, something like serious and fashionable.
00:53:17.520And that brings me to one particular profile of Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:53:21.960He was put on the cover of Out Magazine in 2016.
00:53:27.020Out Magazine is probably the biggest LGBT media property.
00:53:32.780And it wasn't like, how horrible is this person?
00:53:36.940It was like, this is a relevant gay guy.
00:53:39.760So we're going to do a fashion photo shoot with him.
00:53:42.780And I want to look at some of those photos.
00:53:45.700the article the accompanying article was titled send in the clown internet super villain milo0.98
00:53:52.680doesn't care that you hate him it's so annoying internet super villain itself is a bullshit term0.98
00:54:01.240yeah no or descriptor like that makes it seem a little cool or at least like something you don't0.97
00:54:06.960have to take that seriously yeah right yes yeah ooh super villain could you just describe the
00:54:13.240the photos that we're looking at and if you're watching the video version i'll throw it on the
00:54:16.500screen i mean i literally gasped when i saw these pictures because i was just like you have got to
00:54:22.560be fucking kidding me they are like glamour shots like they have put him in these elaborate costumes0.67
00:54:29.220in the first one he's dressed as a clown and he has like uh the classic like clown makeup with0.99
00:54:35.200like the blue diamond face paint on his eyes like little red hat and like like retro clown suit on
00:54:42.740But even in this photo, it's like they're shooting it like he's a movie heartthrob.0.95
00:54:48.080They're shooting it like he's like a sexy, like, clown.
00:54:51.960I hadn't either didn't see or didn't remember that photo shoot.0.91
00:54:56.680And, Matt, when you sent them around beforehand, like, I was like, what the hell is this even?
00:55:03.000Like, it's bizarre in a way that I words are failing me.0.97
00:55:07.220Like, it's just very strange, the clown.0.77
00:55:19.220And also for Patreon, Kat and I did an episode about Barry Weiss.
00:55:23.840And it was like New York Magazine or like one of these like very fashionable, trendy publications did a similar piece and a similar photo shoot of Barry Weiss.
00:55:33.280where i'm like this photo shoot and all of the people you paid to create it and the makeup
00:55:39.580artists and the set designers and everything costs thousands of dollars they look on top of the world
00:55:44.880like someone you would want to be and interestingly attached to this article about milo yiannopoulos
00:55:49.980out magazine put a disclaimer that was like just because we're covering someone does not mean we
00:55:55.600endorse everything that they've ever said and i'm like well based on how you've presented the
00:55:59.520material it sure looks like it the fact that they had to say that someone felt compelled to insert
00:56:04.660that is kind of like the tell right that's their conscience or something peeking through i have
00:56:09.160included a passage from the article i want someone to read it enter milo yiannopoulos a 32 year old
00:56:17.820shamelessly gay british catholic of jewish descent who now lives in los angeles he stands over six
00:56:25.160feet tall and has a lanky soft build when he's not dressed in tailored english suits he's usually
00:56:31.620sporting tank tops flowy textiles straight leg jeans and a thousand dollar nike basketball shoes0.98
00:56:38.560quote i wear these because the guys i want to fuck know what they are but can't afford them0.98
00:56:44.120dark sunglasses his signature strings of bahaman pearls around his wrist and a pair of gold0.99
00:56:50.240crucifixes about his neck he has poor eyesight and is constantly reaching for his glasses
00:56:55.440when he speaks he lowers his chin and leans in intently fixing a gaze with dark eyes that are
00:57:02.560at once doe-like and cutting shut up they're all like he's at the airport someone screams at him0.95
00:57:12.940but he doesn't care and flicks through instagram on his phone i'm just like shut up these people0.93
00:57:18.380aren't that cool or interesting but you're telling us that they are oh he reaches for his glasses
00:57:24.260yeah he reaches just like me i remember in the barry weiss profile they were like she couldn't
00:57:32.300believe that she had accidentally gotten pen on her shirt oh my god she told me i have pen on my
00:57:38.060shirt who cares oh that's incredible it gives the game away that they like him it really is
00:57:46.320revealing that they think he's cool and sophisticated and interesting and intriguing
00:57:51.240and it's like they don't care they like i whoever wrote this piece i find it very difficult to
00:57:58.200believe would actually care about leslie jones getting harassed off of the internet as a result
00:58:04.220of this man which by the way this was published two months after the leslie jones harassment
00:58:11.700campaign where milo called her a man like this was two months after that wow that's incredible
00:58:17.260how much of this i do not intend to derail us with this but americans falling for anyone with
00:58:23.800a semi-charming british accent it remains undefeated it seems like well actually that's
00:58:29.060a good segue into the next thing to talk about because because in his earliest days despite all0.98
00:58:35.620of the abhorrent shit he was saying, he was charming. And he could charm the pants off of0.99
00:58:43.700a live studio audience. And he did that very thing when he was invited to speak, of course,
00:58:51.120on Bill Maher's show. A few months after this Out Magazine profile, Bill Maher was one of many
00:58:57.820people who gave him a sort of primetime interview. I think that that interview is instructive for a
00:59:02.680few reasons and i want to play a couple brief clips the first clip is just an excuse for me
00:59:08.600to lay into billmar i'm for it um you look like bruno but uh you know i told her to dial down
00:59:18.920the contouring she didn't listen your makeup lady was just crazy all right about a year ago people
00:59:23.220started to tell me have you are you gonna get this guy milo you know on your show and i started to
00:59:27.540look into you know what you're saying and look i think you're colossally wrong on a number of
00:59:32.480things but if exactly if i if i banned everyone from my show who i thought was colossally wrong
00:59:38.660i would be talking to myself bill maher is like i need to talk to people who i disagree with
00:59:44.440otherwise i wouldn't have a show bill maher when's last time you talked to a leftist
00:59:48.780bill maher when's last time you talked to about a talk to a palestinian about israel palestine0.98
00:59:54.580it's so fucking again this has nothing to do with milo yiannopoulos it's just so fucking0.98
00:59:59.360bullshit because bill maher loves to create an aesthetic of like i'll talk to anyone but i'm0.99
01:00:05.460like no you won't you will only talk to people at least as right wing or more to the right than you0.99
01:00:11.240are because that's who you're most comfortable talking to and he does this thing with the this
01:00:16.720specific milo yiannopoulos interview where he sort of creates the aesthetic that like they have
01:00:23.100nothing in common and they are so different but not five minutes into the interview they're bonding
01:00:28.980over how much they hate muslim people no i like to think of myself as a virtuous troll but if it's0.96
01:00:34.780if somebody gets hurt in because of truth needs to be said like yes religion i've always attacked0.80
01:00:40.560religion well you're sound on islam unlike most of the people on your side yes that's true milo0.89
01:00:46.820is like grinning from ear to ear during this televised interview because this gives him
01:00:52.320everything he needs Matt you I think made this point earlier where it was like if you are giving
01:00:59.360these people a platform then they can sway non-believers even if the people who are watching
01:01:07.120think they disagree with them from the outset he's doing his whole charming funny shtick in the
01:01:13.280beginning and then he's like it's okay if you disagree with me it's okay if you disagree with
01:01:17.120me is manipulating the audience and Bill Maher is giving him a massive platform to do it and by the
01:01:23.560end of this appearance many people watching are going to be like you know I may not agree with
01:01:28.720Milo Yuneopoulos on everything but what a what a charming little man like what a what an interesting
01:01:34.060guy maybe I actually do agree with him on some stuff and maybe the media is wrong for saying
01:01:39.380all these things about him yeah Matt I like to say I really love your Bill Maher hate you know0.92
01:01:46.000i fucking hate him i know i know there was a uh an old writer for the nation magazine who0.97
01:01:54.120every summer when he'd get a new intern you know he would ask them like young man young woman0.99
01:01:59.900is your hate pure and that your hate for bill maher is pure i'm glad you played that clip because1.00
01:02:08.560milo is very charming in that clip but this is part of the why he's such a dangerous faggot0.99
01:02:13.500he lives up to the name he lives up to the name yeah and uh i want to play another one for you1.00
01:02:19.940so let's start with the contradictions about you which is pretty crazy because you're you're gay0.96
01:02:24.680and you're uh spoiler alert oh come on you can do better than that um what tipped you off0.99
01:02:36.240um i've been reading about you i mean your mother's jewish you have a you have a black0.96
01:08:48.420Simon and Schuster canceled plans to publish his autobiography called Dangerous,
01:08:54.060which he had previously received a $250,000 advance for.
01:08:58.460He resigned from Breitbart under pressure.
01:09:01.920and CPAC canceled his speech. In the wake of all of this, yet another 2015 interview clip emerged
01:09:09.720where Milo told Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of alternative media outlet Vice, who himself turned
01:09:16.960out to be a neo-Nazi, the 2010s were crazy, that child sexual abuse is, quote, really not that big
01:09:23.360a deal. You can't let it ruin your life. But as far as I can tell, it did ruin his life. I want to0.73
01:09:29.920play you guys the apology the rare the exceedingly rare apology that milo made in the wake of these
01:09:37.340clips resurfacing and here's what he said between the ages of 13 and 16 two men touched me in ways
01:09:44.520they should not have one of those men was a priest my relationship with my abusers is complicated by
01:09:49.740the fact that at the time i didn't perceive what was happening as abusive but i can look back now
01:09:54.860and see that it was. I still don't view myself as a victim, but clearly I am one. My experiences
01:10:00.820as a victim led me to believe that I could say almost anything on this subject, no matter
01:10:05.600how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of sassy gay British sarcasm, provocation0.97
01:10:11.880and gallows humour might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims
01:10:16.520or even worse, as seems to have been the case in reports, advocacy. I'm horrified by that
01:10:22.780impression. I would like to restate my disgust at adults who sexually abuse
01:10:27.240minors. I regret the things that I said. I don't think I've been as sorry about
01:10:31.740anything my whole life and this isn't how I wanted my parents to find out
01:10:34.900about this either. But let's be clear about what's happening here. This is a
01:10:39.020cynical media witch hunt from people who do not care about children. They care
01:10:43.480about destroying me in my career and by extension my allies. They know that
01:10:47.280although I made some outrageous statements I've never actually done
01:10:49.700anything wrong. They held this story back. They held the footage back, footage that's been out
01:10:54.140there in the wild for over a year, because they don't care about victims. They don't care about
01:10:58.760children. They only care about bringing me down. Additionally, Milo told The New Yorker, quote,
01:11:04.380I don't believe sex with a 13-year-old is okay. When I mentioned the number 13,
01:11:09.580I was talking about myself. I was talking about the age that I lost my virginity.
01:11:14.660I think anyone who is tuned into politics or was like watching the news a lot at this time
01:11:22.280remembers that Milo defended pedophilia and that was the story. I did not know until I went back
01:11:31.680and looked at all of this for this episode that he later explained it this way and I think it
01:11:38.880colors in so much of what we know about his life. My first thought when I hear him talk about this
01:11:46.040and sort of his rationale behind it is that it's not super uncommon. And in fact, over the past
01:11:53.440couple of years in my reporting, something that I've gotten really interested in is this phenomenon
01:11:59.260where people who are victims of abuse, whether it's childhood sexual abuse, like the type that
01:12:05.520Milo is describing here, or whether it's intimate partner violence, domestic abuse,
01:12:12.060I've noticed that a lot of times people will come out of these situations and they will develop
01:12:16.980really, really victim-blaming attitudes in response to being victims. And I was like,
01:12:22.440where does that come from? Because I see it all the time. And the refrain usually is not as
01:12:28.240horrific as Milo's commentary on children. It's usually something like, oh, well,
01:12:34.680I'm a victim of abuse and I don't believe her or him or them because I don't think what they
01:12:41.220went through is that bad or that's not how I would have acted or yada, yada, yada.
01:12:46.360And I actually spoke to a sociologist about this last year who told me that one of the reasons she
01:12:53.020thinks this is, is because when you are a victim of something, very rarely do you get anything
01:12:59.900even resembling justice. Like that rarely ever happens. We live in a very backwards world when
01:13:06.260it comes to abuse. Typically abusers don't really face any consequences and sometimes they even
01:13:12.560assume benefits as a result of them abusing others. And so as a victim, and I think particularly as a
01:13:18.980child victim, how do you internalize that and how do you grow from that and what does that do to
01:13:24.440your mindset. I think a lot of times in order to cope, people do flip it and say like, well,
01:13:31.100I'm not a victim. And actually what happened to me wasn't even bad. And that's exactly the way
01:13:37.100that Milo was describing these incidences. It's just that that doesn't justify or make it okay
01:13:44.180for you to spread that type of victim blaming language further. But I think that that internal
01:13:50.380sort of psychology around this is really, really, really common. And the sociologist who I spoke to
01:13:55.300found in her research that it happens more often than not. So that was kind of my first impulse
01:14:01.500here. I also suspect that at the time he was making like this press conference, there's no way
01:14:07.460that he would have actually been able to like heal and reprocess all of this stuff from the time that
01:14:12.340the podcast resurfaced and he got fired and the time that he was making those statements. Like,
01:14:16.640it's not that he was being coerced into saying like actually i am a victim and actually like
01:14:21.500what i said was wrong but i doubt that he actually believed it which i think helps provide color as
01:14:26.320to what will happen next in this timeline the last thing i'll say is when he mentions that people
01:14:31.720bringing this up don't actually care about children and it's all a very cynical like media
01:14:36.080ploy there is some truth to that i literally wrote down in my outline that is true that is true
01:14:43.460there's definitely some truth to that like some of the people who were outraged about this on
01:14:46.620line. And I remember this happening. And to your point, Matt, I don't really remember like
01:14:50.120all of this, but I remember him making these comments. A lot of people were justifiably
01:14:54.540outraged about it. But you think about him getting pushed out of Breitbart, Steve Bannon's
01:14:59.720operation. And just recently, it was revealed that Steve Bannon had a very close relationship
01:15:04.160with Jeffrey Epstein throughout all of this. And he was working behind the scenes to help try to
01:15:08.900allow Epstein to have a comeback into polite society. So it's like, yeah, what Milo said in
01:15:14.700that podcast, the language he used and the framing he used was notable. It was something that you
01:15:22.060don't hear every day. But the attitude he's espousing is not that abnormal. And it is deeply
01:15:28.260interwoven into the conservative movement and beyond. Yeah, and held deeply by many of the
01:15:35.060people who sought to push him out. And so much of this was about aggrieved conservative media figures
01:15:42.880who thought that Milo's brand of conservatism was going to make them irrelevant.
01:15:48.380Kat, could you say what when someone like Milo says, I am not a victim,
01:15:52.240what does that do for them? Or what is that compensating for?
01:15:56.140Yeah, obviously, you know, I can't speak for him directly or for every person. But
01:16:00.980the sociologist all excited, the person who's researched into this, I find really helpful.
01:16:05.640It's a book called On the Wrong Side. And the sociologist in question is Nicole Badera.
01:16:10.020and she did these interviews with people going through the title nine process where she would
01:16:15.640interview them before they started the process like after they had just been assaulted or abused
01:16:20.880and then they would go through the whole title nine process every single one of them unanimously
01:16:24.620in the entire school system that she studied over the course of a year every single one of them was
01:16:29.160filled by the system which is striking on its own and then she would interview them again at the end
01:16:34.520of it and a lot of them what happened to their thought process was they they kind of determined
01:16:39.480that they weren't victims because the alternative to saying like like if you say like I am a victim
01:16:45.440and I was failed by the system that is really haunting and difficult to carry with you and
01:16:51.840victims who internalize that they are in fact victims which is true often suffer more consequences
01:16:59.660than victims who flip it around because the the people who went through this system and were
01:17:04.860failed and who knew that and continued to believe that, a lot of times they would drop out of
01:17:09.600school, they would struggle to complete their degrees, and they would just struggle to be
01:17:13.860able to move on because they knew they had been failed. But victims who decided that actually it
01:17:18.520was their fault, and actually they weren't victims at all, and the school was correct to fail them
01:17:23.520in this way, those are the people who would be able to stay in school and like complete their
01:17:27.960degrees. So it's almost like a survival mechanism. Yeah, I was gonna say that that's exactly where I
01:17:34.420going to go it's like there is something almost empowering about saying i'm not a victim and
01:17:39.020moving forward but the problem then is you the actual stuff is not dealt with and that's not
01:17:45.800being critical it's hard it's obviously just beyond difficult to handle those things but it
01:17:51.760does mean like someone like milo as he was going through his life it was all kinds of undealt with
01:17:58.520traumas and difficulties that we can sympathize with but also kind of saying i'm not a victim
01:18:04.320It means it's kind of like you're moving forward, but without healing at all.
01:18:09.500And that's probably going to lead into what you might want to say next or where this tale is going to some degree.
01:18:17.160I mean, I want to provide compassion with the caveat that a lot of people do experience things similar to what he experienced and don't end up doing this.
01:18:26.600but at the same time like the compassionate part of me is like well maybe if he wasn't abused by
01:18:34.440a priest when he was 13 maybe he wouldn't have flunked out of school twice you know and maybe
01:18:41.120he would have gotten a normal job instead of filtering into this like shock jock conservative
01:18:46.900media persona thing and if that had all happened maybe he would have had space to deal with this
01:18:54.840in a healthy way that could actually allow him to heal.
01:18:59.040But he didn't have any of those things.
01:19:01.620And perhaps because he was already down this right-wing media persona career path,
01:19:07.860and this is all he could do, and perhaps also as a genuine coping mechanism
01:20:12.740I said some stupid shit trying to make sense of it, which was used against me in 2017.1.00
01:20:17.080The idea that this translates to Milo is a pedo is so warped and dark that anyone who1.00
01:20:22.100says it is dead to me forever. Well, I mean, to me, when Milo said that these people in the media
01:20:28.740don't actually care about abuse victims, what is he doing there? So I can honestly say when I was
01:20:35.580an editor at a Catholic magazine and the summer of 2018 is when the sex abuse crisis really
01:20:41.300reemerged in the news because Cardinal McCarrick, who was the archbishop and cardinal of Washington,
01:20:47.320dc very major figure in the american church his decades long abuse especially of like young
01:20:54.320seminarians or like priests in training came to light and francis happened to be pope who did not
01:21:00.540make cardinal mccarrick a bishop or an archbishop or a cardinal right he was cardinal mccarrick was
01:21:05.360retired basically by the time pope francis this time period we're talking about but i can honestly
01:21:10.720say no experience of mine in media has made me more depressed despairing just just almost sick
01:21:18.320to my stomach than using priests abusing children to try to do a coup against pope francis because
01:21:25.740you didn't like the direction pope francis was leading the church like that to me is just
01:21:30.300unfathomably evil to try to take out a pope who he has flaws and when it comes to handling of0.96
01:21:38.600sexual abuse by Catholic priests. I've written about that. I've written editorials about that.0.96
01:21:45.500I'm not letting Pope Francis off the hook, but he was not the heart of this problem.
01:21:49.940Nothing that happened to Milo had anything to do with Pope Francis. Pope Francis was a normal
01:21:54.480straight guy, which is why he didn't give a shit about when he said, who am I to judge? He was0.98
01:21:59.220almost like a straight guy saying, I don't get the big deal because he's not neuralgic about it.
01:22:04.320right that's why pope francis was able to be somewhat normal toward gay people compared to
01:22:08.560many other popes because he i think he just it didn't uh you know it didn't trigger any kind of
01:22:15.700his own neuroses or repression like it might have with pope benedict the 16th and his red
01:22:20.060prada loafers and such right so that's one thing i just want to say that the very thing milo was
01:22:25.560criticizing in that statement you know he was doing he was using the you know survivors of
01:22:31.800abuse to try to take out a pope who his ideological allies hated no one more than steve bannon like
01:22:38.100steve bannon hated pope francis with a passion he viewed him as like like the er globalist enemy of
01:22:44.640whatever he was trying to achieve politically and so i find i just want to say that like i have no
01:22:51.060tolerance when it comes to sexual abuse in the catholic church but i find leveraging the suffering
01:22:56.740of victims and survivors that way. Really disgusting. And of course, Matt, as you pointed0.97
01:23:01.520out, the link between pedophilia and homosexuality is discredited. The link between gay priests and0.98
01:23:07.980abuse is not real. None of these things are real that he's claiming. There are problems in the0.98
01:23:12.980Catholic Church, including with gay priests and the kind of culture and secrecy around that.0.96
01:23:18.080But that's like an institutional structural problem, not a gay problem. And so I just want0.92
01:23:24.340to say as someone who has thought about and read about these things far too much please do not take
01:23:30.240anything milo says seriously if i can convey one point on the catholic question he's ever almost
01:23:35.740every single point it's just the opposite of the truth in fact and i do think like the milo catholic
01:23:40.740media tour kind of this phase of his career which seems very connected to catholic matters uh i
01:23:46.460remember i mean again going back to the 2016 era when i started as an editor to catholic magazine
01:23:52.400I became aware of this gentleman named Michael Voris, who I always thought seemed very gay.
01:23:57.240And it turns out, as his story came along, he formerly lived the gay lifestyle, the homosexual lifestyle, but then stopped.
01:24:05.740And he ran a media operation called Church Militant, which the SPL Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an ultra-Orthodox Catholic propaganda ministry that pushes an anti-LGBT agenda.
01:24:20.460on the episode entitled The Pope and the Homo Mafia. The two, meaning this guy, Michael Voris
01:24:27.840and Milo Yiannopoulos, discussed the book you mentioned, Matt, Diabolical. And it's just one
01:24:32.520of those moments where as a gay Catholic, I've made a promise to myself, to be honest, when0.76
01:24:38.640I've told cardinals, important ones, that I'm gay at a cocktail hour. I take every opportunity I
01:24:45.320have, every priest I meet, every kind of Catholic, prelate, people in the hierarchy,
01:24:49.500I tried never to hide it. And so I found it especially appalling that these two gay men, right, were sitting there talking about how they're not really gay or they stopped being gay and how the gays are the problem with the Catholic Church.0.98
01:25:03.500It was just like a distinctly Catholic form of absurdity, actually.0.94
01:25:09.260Like, probably you're only really going to get that these days with any regularity in religious context, where the guys who are white-knuckling it, saying, I'm not gay, I prayed away the gay, whatever it might be, right, they're continuing to build the cage that they're trapped in, you know?0.81
01:25:25.000And it's just, it's both kind of comical and absurd, but also deeply sad because they're lying about themselves and they're lying about the church. And when you're building your life on lies, it crashes out in the way it has with Milo, among others.
01:25:40.840Speaking of, the 2017 pedophilia scandal was the effective end of Milo's short-lived relationship with the mainstream right.
01:25:51.500Since then, he's bounced around looking for work, working underneath figures, including Kanye West, who he served as chief of staff for in Kanye's short-lived 2024 political career, and for Marjorie Taylor Greene.
01:41:25.100Now, almost immediately, fellow right-wing provocateur, Islamophobe, pro-Israel sycophant, and friend of the president, Laura Loomer, claimed responsibility.
01:41:36.480Breaking! Illegal alien Milo Yiannopoulos has been detained by ICE.
01:41:41.840I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the U.S. illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Trader Greene.
01:41:52.880Recently, Candace Owens invited this illegal alien into her home.
01:41:58.020When Milo called for me to be assassinated, I reported him to ICE and the FBI.
01:42:03.180I told you all that Milo was an illegal alien.
01:42:06.160He was detained in Louisiana by at ICEgov.1.00
01:42:09.800Milo is going to be deported back to the UK, where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace.1.00
01:43:31.580Yes. Can I read from my great friend, John Ganz, who did his great sub stack, Unpopular Front? Great, great name. But he summarized it this way, which I think is really important to underscore.
01:43:45.260here's where the wry smile of schadenfreude must give way to the furrowed brow on its social media
01:43:52.340sites ice publicized its deportation with a mugshot of milo think about it the security
01:43:58.440state is being used to settle factional disputes in the ruling party and apparently at the behest0.84
01:44:04.960of a person who makes the screeching gobles seem like a paragon of steadiness manifestly insane1.00
01:44:11.120and idiotic people are running our government. They're using its tools to punish and humiliate1.00
01:44:15.640their enemies. What country are we living in? I could not have put that better myself.
01:44:21.260I think that's the key point. The ruling party is using the security states to settle its
01:44:25.300factional disputes, which is what arresting and deporting Milo, what its kind of substantial
01:44:29.880meaning is. And I would just add, he's still getting special treatment. Why was he not in
01:44:34.480some Honduran jail? Why was he sent back to the country he's actually from, right? Which is not
01:44:39.520something most people ice is arresting something we can say they're doing oh no oh no oh we lost
01:44:49.320matt he'll be back i hope his laptop is okay i'm gonna text him i'm gonna say okay oh oh there he0.97
01:44:58.500my laptop fell off of the pasta box and closed fuck me like i anyway upon returning to the uk
01:45:11.740milo gave piers morgan a tv interview where he said quote i wouldn't wish this on anyone0.93
01:45:19.080i didn't really understand the physical reality of of how institutionalized the brutality is in
01:45:26.300America that the manner in which they arrest you they put your manacles your
01:45:29.720hands your feet chained together I mean like it is every everybody is arrested
01:45:33.620is like an MS-13 gang member and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on
01:45:36.500television you know I was put from from from you know detention facility to
01:45:43.340a correction facility you know every three hours they were they were sort of
01:45:47.180trying to keep ahead of my lawyer so I couldn't you know so whatever but but no
01:45:51.800would tell me anything um it was it i mean i know it's designed to be like that but it's
01:45:58.120it was sure it was humiliating and it was disorientating the rest of it
01:46:03.000it was physically degrading it was it was frightening it was frightening i don't think
01:46:07.560i've ever been frightened like that before just not how emotional have you been through this period
01:46:13.320i've never been like this before i i tripped and kind of tumbled downstairs a night or two ago and
01:46:18.920you know i'm a clumsy person so that it's not the rarest thing in the world but it set something off
01:46:24.360from from when i'd been kind of you know uh shoved down a couple of steps and i was weeping
01:46:29.160like an old woman for an hour um and i was like oh i really have to get this out of my system
01:46:41.240their trauma a little bit kind of cavalier when people talked about um you know stuff kind of
01:46:46.040kind of lingering with them but i i get it now um and uh i wouldn't wish it on anyone i mean what
01:46:52.320is there to say yeah what is there even to say you spent 15 years making as much money as you could
01:47:01.780by specifically wishing this on everyone you thought was beneath you you you did wish this on
01:47:08.640on people and like i don't think that milo yiannopoulos should have been deported
01:47:13.260because of a personal tiff with a colleague who has entirely too much power but the situation
01:47:21.540you have here is one where like the machine that you very happily helped construct has set its
01:47:28.360sights on you yeah i mean how many times can we say the leopard ate my face i think for me
01:47:33.920part of this is going back to the question of like at the very beginning of this episode it was like0.88
01:47:39.380why are conservatives so comfortable with this guy who was so flamboyantly gay even though they
01:47:46.180don't like that? And I think part of the allure is the idea that you can be conservative and you1.00
01:47:52.400can benefit from these power structures even if you can't. That is why you have people from
01:47:59.600minority groups who are targeted by this ideology throwing their full support behind it, profiting
01:48:05.880from it and pushing it further than it's ever gone before out of the hopes that they too can0.79
01:48:11.400be a part of the ruling authoritarian class and crush everyone beneath their boot and that they
01:48:16.700won't be crushed like they want that domination and i think that appeals to people on like a very0.93
01:48:22.000intrinsic level where it's like oh well if this flamboyant gay guy can be a part of the the right
01:48:28.020wing ruling class then maybe i can be too but the end of this story is that you can't you can't0.99
01:48:35.860You can't be a flamboyant gay man who is so messy. You can't even renounce that and be a part of the winner's table. There is no winner's table. That's what people in the Trump administration tend to find out at the end of it. They're like, oh, it's not real. This fantasy that I built by wanting to crush all of my enemies.0.97
01:48:58.780Maybe it's real for like Trump himself, but it was never going to be like what Milo pretended it was. And even the consequences that he's living with now, to your point, Matthew, are still nothing compared to the hell and the torture that he has put thousands of other people through.
01:49:17.280Have either of you heard this great definition of conservatism by Frank Wilhoitz called Wilhoitz Law? Let me read it to you. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition to wit. There must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside out groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
01:49:37.680but as milo's finding out you know unless the law does protect everyone no one is bound right
01:49:44.360unless it's unless it's universal both in terms of the binding and the protecting uh it will
01:49:50.240eventually turn on you that screw will turn that worm will turn right this is the universal politics
01:49:55.840we started the conversation talking about right someone like milo really thought there are some0.99
01:50:00.180people whom the law should basically fuck over bind right control dominate and those who should
01:50:06.240be free permitted to do the dominating right and and you know punishing basically and he just found
01:50:12.240out and if you start once you start making exceptions you will eventually be that exception
01:50:17.460yourself it's like lincoln's line in his letter to joshua speed right you start out by saying all
01:50:22.320men are created created equal except black people then it's all people are created equal except0.86
01:50:27.240catholics and jews and it's all you know you just once you go down that slope it just you keep1.00
01:50:32.700sliding. They don't stop because I say, oh, Milo's one of the good ones. So we're going to give him1.00
01:50:37.080a pass. No, the machine he built chewed him up to. As I mentioned, I read so many of those like
01:50:43.120glossy profiles they made of him in 2016, 2017. And in one of them from Bloomberg, they talked
01:50:51.460about how much money he was making and how he would drop $12,000 in a single day on bespoke
01:51:00.160suits and milo yiannopoulos is now allegedly more than two million dollars in debt he owes
01:51:07.940hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid legal fees he owes even more than that to investors at
01:51:15.420his various media properties that didn't work out and he is in further debt to cartier the luxury
01:51:22.700jewelry company. Wow. It's bad for her.
01:51:29.780That's what I have left to say about this. It's bad for her. I don't know. I just kind of think,0.73
01:51:37.260you know, there's the macro political picture, which you two so eloquently described. And then
01:51:42.840there's sort of the micro picture of what was Milo Yiannopoulos, past tense. Like what was
01:51:48.280milo yiannopoulos to me i don't see him as someone who ever really planned this out in a long game
01:51:55.620sort of way i suppose if he had he would just be doing something entirely different but like
01:52:00.500even someone like candace owens who i find to be like very strategic very savvy always getting
01:52:07.000ahead of the next thing whereas like milo strikes me as someone who from the beginning was just
01:52:11.680always trying to string along one controversy to the next to sort of juice out one or two more
01:52:18.500years of relevance. And eventually it just gave out under the weight of its own ridiculousness0.95
01:52:26.540and sort of political stupidity. It was not sustainable. No, no, no. I don't think he ever1.00
01:52:33.320really had like a grand plan for where it was all going to go. And I don't know if Candace Owens has
01:52:39.740a grand plan i'm almost too scared to ask but i milo this story is like depressing on an individual
01:52:47.760level at a systemic level it's just really dystopian also depressing yeah i yeah matt i
01:52:56.560think like in the next day or two i'm just gonna send you like a wellness check dm to say
01:53:00.780after after imbibing all these glossy uh photo essays and profiles of milo are you holding up
01:53:07.480Or is your brain just totally, you know, are you in a dark place yourself now from convening this conversation?
01:53:15.180I think I might lean into like these like loose fishnet tops.0.64
01:53:19.540And I don't know, I might throw a couple of crucifixes in there.
01:53:35.780i do feel like i do feel like milo yiannopoulos has decidedly ended whatever that was feels over
01:53:44.540and with it an era of u.s politics bygone and so i like to cover these things almost like
01:53:52.820historically uh because i don't know i think there's lessons to learn from it if you're a gay0.58
01:53:58.140guy don't do this that is a really good takeaway honestly do not do this uh and matt i just want
01:54:09.520to say uh how honored i was by the invitation because i i have enormous respect for you
01:54:14.220over your recognition of the humanity of palestinians and the atrocities in gaza and i
01:54:19.500know you've taken some flack for it and so i was uh very uh chuffed to be invited on this particular
01:54:25.800podcast so thank you no that's kind of you and no as far as i'm aware everyone is only nice to me on
01:54:33.000the internet same same and i'd like to keep my very limited knowledge of what people say about
01:54:39.600me there but you both do excellent work where can people find more of it well i mentioned the
01:54:46.380podcast psycho hosts know your enemy you can listen to that wherever you listen to podcasts
01:54:51.000And if you really were stirred by this, my contributions to this conversation, you can subscribe on our Patreon, patreon.com slash know your enemy.
01:54:59.880And I'm on Twitter at Matthew Sittman.
01:55:03.260And that's probably the best ways to follow what I'm doing.
01:55:07.220I recently started my own YouTube channel.