[Peace-discuss] American Billionaires Created MILO

[David Johnson]

American Billionaires Created MILO

By  <http://nymag.com/author/Jesse%20Singal/> Jesse Singal 

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Milo Yiannopoulos. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images 

There are many shocking details in
<https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smugg
led-white-nationalism?utm_term=.gc97lK4gr#.imzK8vG7D> Joe Bernstein's
blockbuster BuzzFeed article about the inner workings of Breitbart - so many
that it's hard to know where to start in describing it. With Milo
Yiannopoulos's extremely cozy relationships with white-nationalist and
neo-Nazi figures? With the revelation that ostensibly liberal journalists
and tech figures were tipping Milo off? With the video of Milo singing
"America the Beautiful" to a room of Nazi-saluting white nationalists?

Ultimately, the juicy details are just flourishes on a bigger picture, one
that's essential to anyone trying to understand (and check) the rise of the
alt-right. That picture shows the aggressive, coordinated way in which
conservative billionaires helped turn Milo Yiannopoulos, once a failed
British tech editor
<https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/mar/05/kernel-close-debts-unpaid-sen
tinel-media> mired in legal trouble for not paying his contributors, into
MILO, a conservative star famous for his popular, gonzo - and sometimes
violence-provoking - appearances at college campuses around the country.

It's important to be clear here: Yiannopoulos does have legitimate, organic
appeal. It would be impossible to build a platform like his if he wasn't
charismatic or even, to some people, charming. There is a big audience for
content designed to shock and provoke, particularly when it targets women,
minorities, and liberals. If Yiannopoulos hadn't figured out how to speak
the language of predominantly white American conservative anger and
resentment, and to do so in a way that appeals to young people, none of us
would have heard of him.

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<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/milo-yiannopoulos-just-got-12-
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But Bernstein's article shows very clearly just how much help he has had
along the way. He has been veritably showered in far-right money from Robert
and Rebekah Mercer, the billionaires
<http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mercers/> described by the
Huffington Post as "the reclusive duo who propelled Trump into the White
House," who are also major Breitbart investors. As Bernstein reports, Steve
Bannon first introduced Yiannopoulos to the Mercers on their yacht at Cannes
in 2016, where they were
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/05/18/cl
inton-cash-filmmaker-comes-to-cannes-with-an-agenda-and-looking-for-a-distri
butor/?utm_term=.0cdad7d8d14d> in town to promote Clinton Cash, a film
Bannon and the Mercers were releasing through Glittering Steel, their
production studio.

After the meeting, Bannon began pushing Yiannopoulos to do more and more
live shows - apparently with the enthusiastic support of the Mercers. Soon
"Dan Fleuette, Bannon's coproducer at Glittering Steel and the man who acted
for months as the go-between for Yiannopoulos and the Mercers . was enlisted
to process and wrangle the legion of young assistants, managers, trainers,
and other talent the Breitbart tech editor demanded be brought along for the
ride." When Yiannopoulos expressed security concerns, Bannon told him they
would be using the Mercers' private security detail.

Thus began a relationship that would extend past Yiannopoulos's tenure at
Breitbart, which ended after a moderate-conservative group resurfaced video
of him appearing to condone pedophilia:

After firing Yiannopoulos, [Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex] Marlow
accompanied him to the Mercers' Palm Beach home to discuss a new venture:
MILO INC. On February 27, not quite two weeks after the scandal erupted,
Yiannopoulos received an email from a woman who described herself as "Robert
Mercer's accountant." "We will be sending a wire payment today," she wrote.
Later that day, in an email to the accountant and Robert Mercer,
Yiannopoulos personally thanked his patron. And as Yiannopoulos prepared to
publish his book, he stayed close enough to Rebekah Mercer to ask her by
text for a recommendation when he needed a periodontist in New York.

That was February. In April, Yiannopoulos
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/milo-yiannopoulos-just-got-12-
million.html> claimed to Vanity Fair that he had been given $12 million - he
wanted to protect the identity of the donor - to start a new venture geared
at "making the lives of journalists, professors, politicians, feminists,
Black Lives Matter activists, and other professional victims a living hell."
Which more or less brings us to today. Yiannopoulos continues to be a loud,
well-funded traveling outrage machine - one who, thanks to his secretive
benefactors, is able to charge student groups zero dollars to tell his
young, adoring audiences that they are being screwed over by a small cabal
of wealthy, powerful elitists who don't care about them.

As this circus has raged on, of course, the farthest edges of the far-right
have benefited greatly. The money that flows to Yiannopoulos benefits them
in an indirect but important way. As the anti-racist group Hope Not Hate
explained
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/opinion/alt-right-white-supremacy-underc
over.html?_r=0> in a recent report and undercover investigation, the
popularity of what the group calls "alt-light" figures like Yiannopoulos -
"light" because they usually shy from the sorts of explicitly racist
arguments made by the Richard Spencers and Jared Taylors of the world, with
the exception of their rhetoric on Islam (seen as an acceptable punching
bag, even for moderate conservatives) - have shifted the boundaries of the
conversation, acting as a gateway drug to more extreme and explicit forms of
political hate.

After all, it's only natural that among the subset of young people who hear
Yiannopoulos (or Mike Cernovich, or Paul Joseph Watson, or .) rant about
"globalists" and migrants and liberals and Muslims over and over and over
again, some of them are going to seek out harder fare. Just a few years ago,
there simply wasn't much of a youthful reactionary movement, online or
offline. That's changing, and it's in part because of, well, a small cabal
of secretive conservative funders.

 

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