A Milo event in Florida has just been cancelled due to real and credible death threats.
The threats are speculated to have come from White Supremacists. This may come as a surprise to regressive leftists who only think in simplistic terms, caricatures, and a very regimented worldview. “But that’s silly!” they’ll say. “Milo is racist and literally Hitler!”
Not exactly. Milo is gay, Jewish, and has a propensity for black boyfriends. Like many of us, he isn’t bogged down and entangled in the silliness of identity politics like, say, the Southern Poverty Law Centre (destroy Israel because we side with Palestine) or the Keystone State Skinheads (destroy Israel because we think Hitler was kinda cool). Most of us merely have our beef with the insanity of Cultural Marxism and the collateral damage that it brings to society if allowed to flourish unchecked like a bad case of hives.
A day before the cancellation, The Daily Stormer called for a “holy crusade” against the “kike” Milo, and encouraged its readers to attend and disrupt Milo events. I had a quick look at the site, and the rhetoric sounded quite familiar. Replace “holy crusade” with something like “commitment to stamping out hate-speech” and “kike” with something like “racist”, and substitute a few other buzzwords and pejoratives here and there, and you could slip the same article straight into Salon.com or Mother Jones.
It speaks volumes that Milo is receiving the same genuinely hate-filled rhetoric (as opposed to the usual critical thinking that the left likes to frame as hate-filled rhetoric) from those who can genuinely be accused of racism and are proud of it, as regressive leftists who would be appalled if they realised just how strikingly similar they are to Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer in practice. Andrew Anglin is a muppet. And this isn’t even a judgement based on tired virtue signalling about his worldview. Andrew Anglin is a muppet because in personality and practice, he’s exactly the same as all the irritating social justice warriors we loathe so much. If he’d grown up around a slightly different crowd with slightly different fringe views, he’d probably be one of those annoying white knight beta males who identifies as a feminist.
Wanting to silence somebody from speaking on a campus because they disagree with you? Threatening to kill them over it? Newsflash, Andrew: despite your assertions, you’re about as far removed from the Alt-Right as it gets. In practice, if not beliefs, you’re a textbook social justice warrior, and just don’t realise it. Your mindset and ideology is about the same as the Jihadists who tried to shoot up the Cartoon Mohammed contest in Texas. If you’d been born in a third world s—hole somewhere in the Middle East, you’d be the first to raise your hand to join Isis.
Likewise, the Regressive Left should feel extremely uncomfortable that they share about 90% of their DNA, and 100% of their tactics and attitudes toward the sanctity of free speech, as this imbecile. They should be very embarrassed, so much so that they should re-evaluate their attitudes toward people coming to speak at their campus, and who their ideological peers are. But they won’t. Whether they care to admit it or not, the likes of Andrew Anglin, Triggly Puff, and your garden variety Middle Eastern Jihadi are all attracted to the same lightning rod that is Milo Yianoppolous for the same reasons and with the same mission: to silence the most fabulous supervillain on the Internet.
Like it or not, you people are all on the same page. It’s amusing in a way that the cops literally have no idea which of you to point the finger at, because you’re all equally crazy and fanatical. You’re strange bedfellows with minor ideological differences. Milo, I’m sure has no wish to get into bed with any of you. You aren’t a black dude for starters.
Photo by LeWeb14 