If Perez Hilton had sex with Lee Atwater’s corpse–and I have no proof that didn’t happen–the resulting offspring might have been Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right, Kostabi-ish performance artist and self-promoter given to the ugliest politics. The Breitbart News dipshit supports Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies even though he’s a Brit working for a U.S. media outlet, taking a job away from a Real American™. A toad who spends his time harassing Leslie Jones on Twitter, Yiannopoulos may not have any actual authority, but in a decentralized media his outrages find outlets.
Another extremist potentially far closer to genuine power is Donald Trump Jr., the winner of several regional Patrick Bateman look-alike contests and an amateur eugenicist who thinks evolution has smiled on a stallion like himself. With his hideous hotelier of a father trying to moderate during the general election–at least by his bizarre standards–the chip off the old blockhead has been pandering to white supremacists at a furious clip, with a Holocaust reference here and a comparison of Syrian refugees to poison Skittles there. He is deplorable.
Excerpts below from articles about two of Donald Trump’s children.
From Joel Stein at Bloomberg Businessweek:
At 4 p.m., Milo Yiannopoulos puts on a pair of glasses for the first time today. He examines himself in a mirror to see if he wants to add a gray suit to his purchases, which will push his bill to almost $12,000 at Savile Row’s Gieves & Hawkes. He’s buying clothes for his next round of college speeches in, as his bus announces in huge letters next to five giant photos of him, the Dangerous Faggot Tour. It resumed at Texas Tech University on Sept. 12 and is scheduled to hit campuses including Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Alabama, and the University of California at Berkeley before concluding at UCLA in February. “I have ridiculously bad eyesight, but I have learned to live with an impressionistic view. Life is a Monet painting,” he says, taking off his glasses. “I wander around enjoying myopia.”
Yiannopoulos is the 31-year-old British tech editor and star writer for Breitbart News, where he’s the loudest defender of the new, Trump-led ultraconservatism, standing athwart history, shouting to stop immigrants, feminists, political correctness, and any non-Western culture. Yiannopoulos gained his initial fame as the general in a massive troll war over misogyny in the video game world, known as Gamergate. He was permanently banned from Twitter in July after the social media company said his almost 350,000 followers were responsible for harassing Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones. He still has nearly 275,000 subscribers to his YouTube speeches, and CNBC and Fox turn to him as the most notorious spokesman for the alt-right, the U.S. version of Europe’s far right (led at various times by England’s Nigel Farage, France’s Marine Le Pen, Austria’s Jorg Haider, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, and Germany’s Frauke Petry). Their followers’ politics are almost exactly the same: They’re angry about globalization—culturally even more than economically. They’re angry about political correctness guilting them about insensitivity to women, minorities, gays, transgender people, the disabled, the sick—the everyone-but-them. They’re angry about feminism. They don’t like immigrants. They don’t like military intervention. They aren’t into free trade. They don’t like international groups such as the European Union, United Nations, or NATO—even the International Olympic Committee. They admire the bravado of authoritarians, especially Vladimir Putin. Some are white supremacists. Most enjoy a good conspiracy theory.
But members of the alt-right, unlike their old, frustrated European counterparts, are less focused on policy than on performance. Their MO usually involves pissing people off with hypermasculine taunts. They call establishment and even Tea Party Republicans “cuckservatives”—because they are cuckolded by the Left. They do most of their acting out online, often by organizing on 4chan or Reddit and then trolling targets on Twitter. The alt-right is a new enough phenomenon that in August, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan—running against an alt-right candidate in a primary—mistakenly called it “alt-conservatism” on a radio show. “It’s a nasty, virulent strain of something,” he said. “I don’t even know what it is, other than that it isn’t us. It isn’t what we believe in.”
As Donald J. Trump has become the candidate of the alt-right, Breitbart News has become the movement’s voice.•
From David A. Graham at the Atlantic:
Donald Trump Jr. isn’t just his father’s namesake or dark-haired doppelgänger. He is increasingly emerging as his father’s id—or perhaps simply his father’s emissary to the alt-right.
Over the last few weeks, Trump has made an effort to tone down his rhetoric and try to avoid the most outrageous comments, the ones that endeared him to the racists, misogynists, and xenophobes who gather in darker corners of the internet. Ironically, this switch has come since he installed Stephen Bannon, the CEO of Breitbart, a leading alt-right outlet, as his campaign CEO. It has also produced positive results, with Trump reaching his high point of the campaign with just about 50 days to go.
But it’s still important to maintain the base, and that role seems to have fallen to Donald Trump Jr. Trump fils has been increasingly catering to the fringe right in his social-media statements and interviews.•
