Comments by "Paddle Duck" (@paddleduck5328) on "Why We Keep Pounding On Ben Shapiro's WAP" video.
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This article from the guardian was written in 2017:
The rise and fall of Milo Yiannopoulos â how a shallow actor played the bad guy for money
Like Donald Trump, Yiannopoulos grew out of a grotesque convergence of politics and the internet, and thrived by turning hate speech into showbusiness
Dorian Lynskey
Tue 21 Feb 2017 13.07 EST First published on Tue 21 Feb 2017 13.06 EST
Milo Yiannopoulos resigns from Breitbart News: âI am horrified by paedophiliaâ
So there is, after all, a line that you cannot cross and still be hailed by conservatives as a champion of free speech. That line isnât Islamophobia, misogyny, transphobia or harassment. Milo Yiannopoulos, the journalist that Out magazine dubbed an âinternet supervillainâ, built his brand on those activities. Until Monday, he was flying high: a hefty book deal with Simon & Schuster, an invitation to speak at the American Conservative Unionâs CPac conference and a recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. But then a recording emerged of Yiannopoulos cheerfully defending relationships between older men and younger boys, and finally it turned out that free speech had limits. The book deal and CPac offer swiftly evaporated. The next day, he resigned his post as an editor at Breitbart, the far-right website where he was recruited by Donald Trumpâs consigliere Steve Bannon, and where several staffers reportedly threatened to quit unless he was fired.
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In the incriminating clip, Yiannopoulos prefaces his remarks with a coy, âThis is a controversial point of view, I acceptâ, this being his default shtick. Maher absurdly described him as âa young, gay, alive Christopher Hitchensâ â a contrarian fly in the ointment, rattling smug liberal certainties â but Hitchens had wit, intellect and principle, while Yiannopoulos has only chutzpah and ruthless opportunism. Understanding Yiannopoulos requires a version of Occamâs Razor: the most obvious answer is the correct one. What does he actually believe in? Nothing except his own brand and the monetisable notoriety that fuels it. Thatâs Miloâs Razor. Understanding how he got this far is more unnerving.
Milo Yiannopoulos book deal cancelled after outrage over child abuse comments
Yiannopoulos was born Milo Hanrahan in Kent in 1984 and grew up in a financially comfortable but emotionally fraught family. He later adopted his beloved Greek grandmotherâs surname, but prefers the pop-starry mononym Milo. On Twitter, before he was permanently banned last July, he operated as @nero. After dropping out of two universities â Manchester and Cambridge â he wrote for the Catholic Herald and covered technology for the Daily Telegraph. On the Telegraphâs blog pages, under editor Damian Thompson, he became a professional troll; a clickbait provocateur who hated the left more than he loved anything.
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In 2011, having left the Telegraph, Yiannopoulos co-founded the tech journalism website the Kernel. âTechâs gadfly continues to provoke and irritate, often for its own sakeâ was Wiredâs judgment, but that only helped Yiannopoulos paint himself as a thorn in the side of a complacent tech establishment. The more people he insulted, the more attention he got. But his vindictiveness wasnât just an act. In 2013, the Kernel was successfully sued by former editor Jason Hesse for non-payment of wages and one female staffer publicly complained about similar treatment. In a vicious email, Yiannopoulos threatened to ruin her career and called her âa common prostituteâ. Many profile-writers have noted that his critics wonât speak on the record for fear of vendettas. Iain Martin, the Telegraphâs former comment editor, remembered âtalk of him being someone who should not be crossedâ and was shocked by the cruelty of his mob-like followers, which included rape threats and doxing.
Yiannopoulos found his stepping stone to America in Gamergate, an online movement that claimed to campaign for ethics in videogame journalism while subjecting women in the industry to brutal harassment. Unlike older conservatives, Yiannopoulos understood what was bubbling up on platforms such as Reddit and 4chan: a new gamified form of hard-right discourse based not on ideas but on memes, harassment and âsaying the unsayableâ, driven by white male resentment toward minorities and so-called âsocial justice warriorsâ, the au courant name for political correctness. It didnât matter that he had recently mocked gamers as âunemployed saddos living in their parentsâ basementsâ. For Milo, Gamergate was an exciting new front in the culture wars and the career boost he craved.
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As an informal movement, Gamergate didnât have a figurehead so Yiannopoulos gave himself the job and turned into an outlaw antihero. Gamergateâs activists and opponents both agreed that without his advocacy the movement would have fizzled out. Profile-writers and shows such as Newsnight expanded his celebrity beyond the internet. Young, handsome, charismatic and eloquent â the writer Laurie Penny called him âa charming devil and one of the worst people I knowâ â he was far more alluring to the media than, say, James Delingpole.
Milo Yiannopoulos speaking on campus
Milo Yiannopoulos speaking on campus at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado in January 2017. Photograph: Jeremy Papasso/AP
Yiannopoulos preached the topsy-turvy gospel of the âalt-rightâ: liberals, feminists and people of colour were the oppressors and bigotry was a rebel yell. âI always thought journalism was about sticking up for the many against the powerful few,â he told Fusion in 2015. Yet in the same interview he implied it was all a show: âI didnât like me very much and so I created this comedy character. And now theyâve converged.â Whenever he gets into trouble, he blames the character. On Monday, he attributed his justification of child abuse to his âusual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humourâ. Last year, he flippantly told Bloomberg Business Week: âIâm totally autistic or sociopathic. I guess Iâm both.â
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In 2015 Yiannopoulos spotted his next opportunity, and perhaps a kindred spirit, in Donald Trump, a man he calls âDaddyâ. (He rarely speaks to his own parents.) With Trump, the backlash against political correctness went nuclear and via Bannonâs Breitbart, Yiannopoulos became a far-right hero and gleeful scourge of liberal âsnowflakesâ. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls him âthe person who propelled the alt-right movement into the mainstreamâ.
Most people who are no-platformed or shamed on Twitter didnât set out to inspire outrage, but outrage is Yiannopoulosâs lifeblood; without it, he is nothing. He boasted that being banned from Twitter made him more famous than ever, and endeared himself to mainstream conservatives when protesters shut down his appearance at UC Berkeley on 1 February. (At previous campus events, he had targeted individual students for harassment.) Even Trump, the USâs first troll-in-chief, tweeted his support. CPac billed him as a âbrave conservative standard-bearerâ and an âimportant perspectiveâ, not because he said anything valuable but because protesters hated him. Thatâs the level to which the debate over free speech has sunk.
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So what is his âimportant perspectiveâ? What does he stand for? Itâs telling that he was banned from Twitter (no easy feat) for ringleading a campaign of harassment against actor Leslie Jones for the crime of daring to appear in the female-led reboot of Ghostbusters â hardly a vital cause. He is a gay man who hates the gay rights movement. A libertarian who calls an authoritarian president âDaddyâ. A vigorous opponent of Black Lives Matter who says he canât be racist because âI just like fucking blacksâ. A self-styled second-wave feminist who sells hoodies reading âFeminism is cancerâ. A conservative pin-up who claims: âI donât care about politics.â A writer and speaker who claims his provocative statements are just âfactsâ while celebrating the âpost-fact eraâ.
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