00:00:08.560And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:13.620So Adrian, today we are joined by one of my favorite guests and low-key one of my favorite
00:00:19.700people, the lovely and talented Matt Bernstein, joining us here from A Bit Fruity.
00:00:25.640Matt, thank you so much for being here.
00:00:27.240It is a pleasure and an honor. You're also one of my favorite people, and I love that this podcast is audio only, so no one has to see my face without makeup. It feels good.
00:00:39.780We can see Matt on the Zoom, and he is a cutie pie.
00:00:43.000If you've seen that part of Labyrinth where Jennifer Garner's acting next to all the little goblins, like, that's our Zoom. It's Jennifer Garner and two little goblins.
00:00:54.860It's funny because we've got like the sweetest person in the world, Matt, here to talk with us about one of the most odious little shits in the world, who is, I think, a model for so much of the way that the right has used the media in the Trump era.
00:01:14.200And that is the one, the only, the endlessly imitable Milo Iannopoulos.
00:01:21.780So, Adrian, Matt, what do you guys know about Milo?
00:01:25.420How did this guy first come to your attention?
00:01:27.280Well, spoiler alert and plug for my own show.
00:01:30.260I just did an episode on Milo, which will no doubt be very different from this one
00:01:35.260because we all navigate these topics in different ways.
00:01:38.520But you can listen to that on my podcast, A Bit Fruity.
00:01:41.660But needless to say, right now, I do feel like my loins are girded.
00:01:46.180I feel lubed up and full of knowledge about Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:01:50.940So I can start wherever you guys want to start.
00:04:03.800Like, the kinds of memes that he specialized in,
00:04:06.640You would get now from the president, you would get from Elon Musk, you would get from Pete Hegseth, right?0.99
00:04:11.260So it's both a communicative style that's become rarer among sort of online clowns, but that's only because the online clowns have taken over the fucking asylum.0.93
00:04:20.800Yeah, one of the theses that we came away with in my episode was that while Milo has definitively lost a personal battle with his own relevance and career, what Milo came to represent has certainly won.0.96
00:04:33.760Yeah, I think this is all like really good context, right? Like Milo was somebody who moved very rapidly from sort of the fringe of Republican Party politics and conservative American politics into the center.
00:04:47.060He was part of this nationalist, conspiracist, far-right wave, and he was really reviving the right-wing provocateur model for the digital age.
00:04:58.420Adrian, as you said, he was really kind of like drawing on sort of like talk radio models, some like television models,
00:05:05.300and bringing that kind of provocative, winking, almost like impish conservatism into the social media age.
00:05:14.480And of course, for those of you who have been living under a rock, Milo, who has had a precipitous fall from grace in the MAGAverse over the past few years, was deported late last month.
00:05:26.080He was arrested by ICE at the New Orleans airport and sent pretty quickly back to the UK, where he has now, of course, launched his latest round of media appearances about his fall from grace and deportation and all the lessons he has supposedly learned.
00:05:43.800I have no doubt that Milo will try to spin his deportation into yet more grift and money, which is what he has done with every humiliation and defeat he has faced.
00:05:55.300But I think, like, you guys are right in your broader point, too, that, like, if Milo personally has become disposable and indeed been disposed of by the American right, that's only because his model is now pervasive.
00:06:08.320There's no longer anything unique about Milo.
00:06:39.800Milo's not the first gay conservative by any stretch. We have a whole episode on this. But he definitely was outrageous, was explicit, and was sort of fey in a way that I think a lot of gay conservatives of a previous generation had not wanted to be.
00:06:57.180And he sort of created a new style of sort of fash queer masculinity that I think is really important. And of course, his downfall was very connected with that persona and with this kind of quippy, bitchy gender performance.0.91
00:07:09.820Oh, I think it's actually right wing femininity. I think what was interesting about Milo as a gay conservative was that he was never in mask drag the way somebody like William Buckley allegedly, allegedly, allegedly was, you know, so he was never pretending to be anything other than what he was.
00:07:29.540And if somebody like Roy Cohn used the closet as sort of like a demonstration of his own power because of how transparent it was, that he was sort of like daring everybody to say anything, Milo said it first.
00:07:41.280Milo was in fact like very sexually vulgar early in his career.
00:07:44.740Like, Matt, you have some unfortunate knowledge of this.
00:07:48.900Yeah, Milo was kind of, while definitely not the only gay conservative, he was kind of the only gay conservative to walk directly out of Hot Topic and into the RNC without changing his clothes at all.
00:08:02.660and i think that there's reasons for that i think that was permissible at a very specific point in
00:08:11.920time because while it's true that he during the height of his fame looked like a very flamboyant
00:08:18.660almost doing like at points like madonna christianity drag cosplay sort of thing like
00:08:23.360he wore a lot of like crucifixes and pearls very like a virgin um he did later on and we'll probably
00:09:57.140Yeah, he has a Jewish mother and a Jewish maternal grandmother. He never seems to have practiced Judaism, but he will like sort of use his Jewish heritage as like a moral shield when people point out that what he's saying is really anti-Semitic, which is often.
00:10:11.880As a Jew who has their Judaism frequently called into question by Zionists because of my anti-Zionism, I'm not one to get up on a perch and say that he's not really Jewish, but he does tend to invoke various religions, you know, as it seems convenient to him and his self-branding, including, I don't know if you guys saw this, his latest religious invocation,
00:10:37.640which is that he has, since being deported, converted to Islam.
00:12:30.280And at the time, humor worked much more as a kind of like disarming interruption in typical discourses.
00:12:38.540It worked much better as a form of plausible deniability.
00:12:41.740And I think the fact that Milo was gay, was visibly gay, was sort of like honing up a kind of traditional gay affect seemed to sort of like blunt the horror of his politics for some audiences.
00:12:57.860It reminds me of how like conservatives will sometimes send out like a right wing woman to deliver their most like violent and hateful messages because it seems a little softer or a little less serious coming from somebody who, you know, I guess like doesn't have the capacity for physical violence or whatever.
00:13:15.620I think there was something with Milo, too, as that kind of messenger.0.51
00:13:19.140I think you're right, Matt, that he was coming at the peak of his career into an American culture that had this, like, post-Obergefell infantilization and popularization of, like, gay culture, right?
00:13:30.880Gay people were sort of, like, everybody's pet for a couple years there in this way that I think allowed Milo a lot of leeway on the right that he wouldn't have now and doesn't have now.
00:13:42.560But also he was tapping into this like longer standing idea that gay men, women, feminized people are sort of not serious.0.60
00:13:52.420And that allowed him to say a lot of really terrible things without being taken entirely seriously.
00:13:59.860In preparing for this, I looked at Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies, which is sort of like the canonic first sort of accounting for the alt-right moment.
00:14:08.500And rereading it, it's like, that's what you just said is what struck me.
00:14:13.140And I'm like, people were fully unprepared for conservatives being kind of funny and cheeky.
00:14:18.540And it's like, yeah, it seems like there's like short circuit, like author analytic categories.
00:18:46.860So, let's dig into what's happened, right?
00:18:54.640Because Milo, you know, he had this moment where he was sort of one of the most prominent conservatives in the U.S.
00:19:03.980He had a pretty abrupt fall from grace, nominally about his, you know, pro-pedophilia comments, for which he has apologized, we should say.
00:19:14.820one of the only things he's ever, like, actually apologized for was this.
00:19:18.320He seemed to, like, understand that he had gone too far pretty quickly.
00:19:22.800But I am going to try and trace us through a couple of other factors
00:19:36.420Like, progressively further and further out on the fringes of the MAGA movement.
00:19:41.060And over the past couple years in particular,
00:19:43.540He's really kind of gotten to bed with people who are trying to attract Trump from the right,
00:19:48.380which is a small but, you know, dedicated constituency, right?
00:19:52.360He's allied with Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:19:56.940He has alienated Trump further after he organized this dinner between Fuentes and Kanye West and Donald Trump,
00:20:06.380for which Donald Trump got a lot of flack.
00:20:07.940Yeah. He advised Kanye West's brief and kind of like theoretical presidential campaign back in the early 2020s. And he has also been on an ex-gay grift. Right. He said that he's no longer a homosexual man. He said he demoted his husband to housemate. Charming. And he's like sort of endorsed and tried to sell conversion therapy. Right.
00:20:33.780I love you rattling off these like every single one, just uniquely insane items, like a grocery list, like, you know, well, this happened. And then he demoted his husband to housemate. It is what it is.
00:20:44.940I was talking to Adrian before we started recording. And I was like, this was a hard one to research because there's so many mini scandals, right? His career is all online.
00:24:57.960And, like, my love 2018 could have done an ex-gay conversion,0.98
00:25:01.260but he would have done it as performance art.0.70
00:25:02.940It would have been very witty, and it would have been this whole thing about, like, how serious am I?
00:25:07.280When you look at what he actually describes, and I do not recommend that people check this out, it's horrifying stuff.
00:25:14.480And you're like, in the early Milo, I could understand some people not wanting to look away.
00:25:17.960With that one, you can only look away.
00:25:19.520And you're like, this is a man who I wish wasn't saying any of this into a microphone right now because I feel horrible at me saying this.
00:25:26.080I wonder how much of, like, when he talks about the conversion therapy he administered to himself, which was, like, physically quite violent, right?
00:25:36.780Like, I'm just going to, like, say it.0.56
00:25:38.260Like, what he says he did was that he practiced an inversion therapy by pouring hot oil on his thighs whenever he had a homosexual desire.
00:25:47.220And, you know, that's not out of, like, the normal range of conversion therapy.
00:26:02.180I wonder how much of that is just the similar like attempt to horrify and revile and thereby sort of like titillate and entice an audience just coming in the sort of preacher clothing as opposed to the old pervert clothing of his like 2016 era.
00:26:18.060You know, this is like my hobby horse that the perverts and the preachers are actually the same people.
00:26:22.100like like this is a nail that i hammer on quite a bit but i do think when you see milo you see
00:26:30.960somebody who doesn't really know how to do anything other than to try and shock and offend
00:26:36.340yeah it's his only note yeah when he tried to apologize back in 2017 for the pedophilia stuff
00:26:43.260it was like watching a dog try and walk on its hind legs it was very strange he was trying to
00:26:47.500like twist it back into being the sort of impish, saucy, humorous mode that he's much
00:26:57.080more comfortable in because he does not know how to be sincere because he doesn't believe
00:29:37.460And as a virtue of being right-wing and extremely online, he sort of like lands a gig as a quote-unquote tech columnist,
00:29:45.420by which I don't mean really like somebody who covers like business in the tech industry.
00:29:49.440I mean somebody who's like covering internet culture and like nascent social media culture.
00:29:54.100It's the emergence of the job of someone writing about Twitter for a living.
00:29:57.600Kind of, yeah. And he starts writing these like left punching columns that are aimed at going viral. And he tweets kind of a lot. This was back in like the first half of the 2010s. Being very visible on Twitter actually was like a viable career path.
00:30:16.560This was, like, basically what I was doing at the time from a different political position.
00:30:21.040But, like, if you're tweeting a lot at people who have the power to give you jobs, eventually one of them will.
00:30:26.620And what seems to have happened is that he gained a following of, like, devoted and often, like, pretty cruel devotees who he could sick on people who pissed him off and did.
00:30:38.220And he became very visible, very titillating to watch because he's starting a bunch of fights.
00:30:43.860This is how he gets the attention of an American media entrepreneur called Steve Bannon, who is then running Breitbart News.
00:30:53.920Matt, you've already like touched on this a little, but do you want to just like quickly gloss what Breitbart was and what they were doing in like 2014 when Milo gets hired by Steve Bannon?
00:31:02.960Breitbart was essentially, it was like the news platform and sort of like meeting hub for this burgeoning alt-right movement.
00:31:12.860It was an attempt to sort of do half-po from the right. And it was a platform that took culture and especially online culture more seriously than, let's say, National Review or something like that. These were people in the trenches of the culture wars online in ways that, yeah, as you were saying, a Mitt Romney Republican would not be.
00:31:32.040Yeah. And the 2010s internet, especially for younger people who were increasingly living their lives online, we were on things like, I mean, we were reading, you know, buzzy celebrity-ish like news stories on the Huffington Post. We were also, a lot of us were on Tumblr learning about social justice.
00:31:49.820A lot of us were on BuzzFeed, which had like a liberal bent, you know, towards like feminism and equality and Black Lives Matter and like stuff like that, like in the 2010s, where a lot of times the culture felt like liberal leaning by default, which, you know, feels a lot different now.
00:32:08.180And yeah, Breitbart was sort of a conduit to reaching people from, you know, in the culture war sense from the other direction.
00:32:17.400Something I also want to emphasize about Breitbart that I think can be lost from our position in 2026 is it was a hinge between sort of mainstream right-leaning audiences, people who would like maybe watch Fox News at home and the real odious white nationalist right.
00:32:36.700Those had not been integrated yet. And in fact, there was still a little bit of a taboo of like, you know, going to get talking points from 4chan, for instance, or looking at what they were saying on Stormfront, the white nationalist website, right?
00:32:51.640Like if you didn't want to type in Stormfront to your search bar, but you were an audience, you know, a right leaning news consumer who is maybe a little white nationalist curious, Breitbart supplied that niche for you.
00:33:06.520Breitbart would take what was happening on the Nazi far right Internet and launder it into the mainstream by being this hinge point.
00:33:16.020This is, in fact, famously what Milo was doing, and we're going to get into that in a little bit when we get to the email leak that BuzzFeed News did where they found out, you know, where Milo was getting his story ideas from.
00:33:31.940But also, I want to first talk about the other thing that happened right as Milo joined Breitbart in 2014, which is Gamergate.
00:33:41.000Adrian, could you, like, just very quickly gloss Gamergate for us?
00:33:44.880Very quickly, because we could be here all day.
00:33:51.020Basically, it's an online harassment campaign that knitted together conservative media and online trolls, basically.
00:34:00.200And that sort of perfected the thing that we are now all familiar with, where the people doing a bunch of online bullying present themselves as actually the victims of online bullying.
00:34:11.080In this case, there was an allegation of misandry in games journalism and the fact that female video game authors basically were sleeping allegedly with journalists covering them, et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:23.820It became this whole thing about, you know, concern about ethics, a question about unfair gendered practices, et cetera, et cetera, while really being the thinnest and most conspiratorial veneer over what is just a straightforward doxing and harassment campaign.
00:34:39.660Gamergate was sort of this mass sort of leaderless harassment campaign, right?
00:34:47.660It was one of the first instances where wounded entitlement provoked an outpouring of right wing sentiment, really here like misogyny and frequently in like later iterations of this phenomenon, misogyny, in a way that people could tell would benefit conservatives politically.
00:35:08.820but which they couldn't exactly control, right?
00:36:05.520I don't think he particularly cared about that either.
00:36:08.200What he saw in Gamergate was the ability of anti-feminist and misogynist sentiments to go viral online and the potential to harness male anger for conservative ends.
00:36:39.380And the other thing about Gamergate is it was just a means to audience growth for Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:36:46.800And like, yes, the broader coalition that they were trying to build into this new right, which would become MAGA very successfully.
00:36:54.900But also for himself and his career, Milo is nothing if not a strategist and for a long time a savvy one.
00:37:02.780But my often co-host Kat Tenbarge made this point so eloquently to me, which is that like Gamergate was a mass misogynist event that specifically targeted, I mean, it broadly targeted women in gaming with the goal of getting them too scared or embarrassed or anything to like show their faces in the gaming world.
00:37:22.740But it very specifically targeted, like, three or four women, you know?
00:37:27.300And yet, the cultural reverberations were meant to be against all women.
00:37:34.440And there were electoral and political effects as a result of that.
00:37:40.160And the point that Kat makes very well is that in 2022, I believe,
00:37:44.860Depp v. Hurd employed much of the same strategy,1.00
00:37:48.540which was to say, you know, Me Too went too far, you can't trust women, women will manipulate the0.99
00:37:55.820small perceived gains made through Me Too to subjugate men with their allegations of rape0.95
00:38:01.380and violence. And we need to, you know, put them back in the kitchen, back in the home where no
00:38:07.260one can see or hear them, because feminism is dangerous. And you see that the right employs1.00
00:42:46.880I mean, ironically, with all that, given the level of talent involved, like if you have those four women in the cast, Sparks should fly and they didn't.
00:42:55.980But that is not what this campaign was about. It's true.
00:43:00.880No. And I should mention, too, that the campaign against Leslie Jones, largely led by Milo Yiannopoulos, like Gamergate, this was another thing that it's like, you think Milo Yiannopoulos gave a shit about Ghostbusters to begin with?0.97
00:43:13.280no he saw a bunch of people who he could convince to be aggrieved about the situation which would
00:43:20.420almost ultimately benefit him yeah and that's what he did I mean Milo he goes from one thing0.95
00:43:25.600to the next but he you know he doesn't fucking care actually that's the other thing it's just0.86
00:43:29.940like it's so inauthentic I don't know we all talk into microphones and sometimes cameras0.97
00:43:36.540for a living and like one of the things that I tried to do and I know like authentic is such an
00:43:42.420annoying buzzword but like if I don't really care about something I cannot bring myself to make
00:43:48.100content about it or make a podcast about it or whatever not to make this too personal but one
00:43:53.200of the thing that just kills me on the right especially is I'm like all of your influencers
00:43:58.620so clearly are just scamming you for your emotions and scamming you so that you get involved so that
00:44:07.440you benefit the influencer and the influencer's bottom line and all this stuff like they don't0.96
00:44:12.080give a shit about these like culture war outrage things they turn the lights off at fox news and0.97
00:44:16.820they go home and they don't give a shit yeah do you guys remember the matt walsh tweet about0.99
00:44:21.540nolan's odyssey where he faults the movie for being told out of sequence and it's like matt0.99
00:44:27.740puppy just pick up a fucking book man the woke mob wants you to accept in medius race0.95
00:44:32.680red-blooded americans tell things in chronological order only red-blooded homeric americans i'm just0.99
00:44:40.520like you guys are so easily gotten just like it's just like yeah it's so exhausting and tedious and0.54
00:44:45.880like the like farming of outrage is so insincere and all that said i think like the fakeness of it
00:44:53.420of like their actual emotions right and the low stakes of the supposed controversy like who could0.82
00:45:00.280possibly give a shit but i think that makes it easier to overlook like how bad it actually was
00:45:05.520Well, I think the two things are linked, right? Because like, yes, the actual occasion is nugatory, absolutely pointless. But you're right that the hatred especially leveled against Leslie Jones was very sincere, right? Like, they're like, oh, all female reboots are bad. Like, they didn't mean that. What they did mean is there's a black lady on my screen.0.99
00:45:25.240Right. I think like the racism is really key here. Leslie Jones is black. Yeah. And that is why she out of everybody else in this once again quite large ensemble cast was signaled out for harassment. Milo made sure that this harassment was conducted in explicitly racist terms. Right. Yeah. He called her barely literate. He repeatedly said that she was or looked like a man.0.95
00:45:49.420Part of this, like, of course, long tradition of racist degendering of black woman.0.77
00:45:54.420He directed his followers to attack her and they did.0.71
00:45:59.060Her personal website was hacked and like nude photos supposedly of her were posted, often with a gorilla head photoshopped on.
00:46:30.560I know she's, like, got a special out now, and that must have taken a lot of psychic determination to continue doing a public-facing job after being punished for it that badly.0.98
00:46:42.840But yeah, shout out to Leslie Jones,0.77