Learning to love the brilliant and controversial Milo Yiannopoulos *UPDATED*

Milo Yiannopoulos

[And timing is everything. The day after I wrote an encomium to Milo, who speaks forcefully about (among other things) gender dysphoria and the danger to children in bathrooms, PJ Media claims he supports gay pedophilia — or, at least, being a provocateur, provocatively says things he implies he does. Milo is certainly firm in his outrage against the accusation. His defense makes sense to me, especially given how familiar I am with gay culture thanks to growing up and working in SF. This new data point doesn’t change the main points below. Here’s the deal: gay culture is different and one of Milo’s strengths is that he says America should not subordinate itself to gay culture.]

UPDATE: Milo seems to have been destroyed. Despite his books status as a best seller, Simon & Schuster has dumped it. Breitbart is silent about him.

As best as I can tell, thanks to Stephen Green’s research, these are the two worst things Milo said that would lead to an accusation that he’s a pedophile:

Milo’s money quote, which was edited out of the video, is this:

The law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age. I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way. In many cases actually those relationships with older men…This is one reason I hate the left. This stupid one size fits all policing of culture. (People speak over each other). This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys you know understanding that many of us have. The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex. In the homosexual world particularly. Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents. Some of those relationships are the most -”

And this was edited out as well:

“You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13-years-old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet. Who have not gone through puberty… That’s not what we are talking about. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you are saying I’m defending it because I’m certainly not.”

In other words, Milo never said that he had sex with little boys or that he intended to do so. What he did say was that older gay men often introduce younger gay men into sex. I certainly saw that enough when I was living and working in San Francisco. It was too common practice for sexually confused 20 or 22 year olds to be taken under the wing of a 30 or 40 year old gay man. It was not pedophilia, it was gay mentoring and it’s obvious that Milo is referring to that practice.

As for Milo’s comment about pedophilia being a perverted passion for children who have not gone through adolescence, he’s correct. He’s also correct that children mature at different speeds. In my neighborhood, one kid at 12 had a nascent mustache and a voice deeper than my husband’s. Another finally got his growth spurt when he went off to college, although he’s still not shaving. Having said that, Milo made it clear that, given this variability, he has no problem with the current age of consent laws.

It’s very disturbing that this take-down of one of the most effective voices for conservativism came from the #NeverTrump crowd having a petty pique fit over Milo’s invitation to CPAC. Having said that, the information was out there, and if the renegade right hadn’t published it, the Lefties would have and in a way that was even worse.

I’ve heard from friends that Lefties are already piling on to this man who did nothing wrong other than making observations about the realities of the gay world and the physical maturation process. More than that, I find it incredibly ironic that this tut-tutting comes from the Left. These are the same people who demand that condoms, birth control advice, and abortion information should be given to kids as young as 11 in their schools, and who insist that a child can get an abortion with an adult okaying it something that is, of course, the best possible way for a true pedophile to destroy any genetic evidence of his crime.

And by the way, if this seems familiar, you’re seeing the same takedown that the Left and #NeverTrumpers did to Trump. He observed accurately enough that, if you’re rich and famous, women will indeed let you do anything to them. He did not say that he took advantage of this reality, yet he was instantly called a molester and subjected to the harshest castigation. And of course, most of the screaming came from the same side that was fine with Clinton raping women and using the pressure of his fame and power to coerce a women young enough to be his daughter to engage in a sordid workplace affair.

This whole thing sickens and disgusts me. We are in a political sewer in our country.

And now back to my original post.

Milo Yiannopoulos — rude and crude, but also smart, brave, funny, and bitchy. He’s a necessary counterweight to Progressives’ lethal Political Correctness.

milo yiannopoulosWith a swirling debate about whether Milo Yiannopoulos will be a keynote speaker at this year’s CPAC, I have a confession: I didn’t like Milo Yiannopoulos when he first popped up on my radar. At a first, superficial, glance, he was everything that rubs me the wrong way: His humor seemed to rely on crude insults and too often to trade in racial and religious stereotypes, he relentlessly leveraged those insults and stereotypes into media face time which seemed to drag conservativism down not build it up, and he had that whole drag queen vibe. I have issues, which I’ll explain in a few minutes, with the drag queen vibe. Having reached these conclusions, I dismissed Milo. There. Done.

The thing is, if you’re a conservative, Milo is not a person who can be — or should be — dismissed. I first got an inkling of this from my teenage son. Sick and tired of being on the receiving end of misanthropic third-wave feminist tirades at his school (which cannot be challenged because doing so is an unacceptable manifestation of cisgender male privilege and domination), he headed to the internet looking for rebuttals to these feminists. Even if the school’s uber-liberal environment bans voicing the rebuttals, at least he had the comfort of knowing they were there.

My son’s research led him directly to Steve Crowder and Milo. He appreciated Crowder’s unflinching, and almost invariably funny, take Islam’s issues with the West and he was completely awed at Milo’s ability to (in my son’s words) “destroy those feminazis.” My son therefore insisted I watch Milo’s epic feminazi destruction in action. I agreed, somewhat worried that I’d get one of Milo’s unpleasant, uber-queenie, racist, shock-value moments. Instead, I got this:

I hope you see what I see: A young man in complete command of the facts, debating at a high intellectual level using arguments familiar to most conservatives, and politely, completely, and matter-of-factly destroying the feminist mantra. Without being in any way offensive, he left those two women looking foolish and uninformed.

Here was a young, hip, edgy, gay, Jewish/Greek/Catholic guy attacking the Leftist shibboleths that so irritated my son. Without my putting any pressure on him, my son regularly hunted down both Milo’s and Crowder’s videos. (Incidentally, my focus on Milo here is not meant to denigrate Crowder’s virtues. It’s simply that he’s a less controversial figure, so I don’t feel compelled to go to his defense.) No wonder, then, that my son, unusually for a kid his age in my “true Blue” county was remarkably sanguine when Trump won.

My son’s Milo discovery happened over a year ago. I still held off on feeling the love for Milo. I was a Cruz supporter during the primaries, and didn’t appreciate Breitbart’s over-the-top Trump support. The fact that Milo was part of the Breitbart machine and appeared to green-light the small number of despicable racist bottom feeders who attached themselves to the Trump train was not endearing.  And then things changed.

What changed was that Trump emerged from the primaries triumphant and I, a nice Jewish girl, had to have a “come to Jesus” moment with myself: Trump or Hillary. Actually, that exaggerates the situation. It was a no-brainer. I was always a #NeverHillary.

The actual “come to Jesus” moment was deciding whether I merely supported Trump because he wasn’t Hillary or if I could support him on his own terms. As readers of this blog know, the more I cut through Trump’s incredibly irritating speaking style (which still makes me crazy), the more I came away impressed that Trump is a man who, while not a doctrinaire conservative, truly loves America and Americans. Moreover, his Democrat past notwithstanding, I saw that Trump instinctively understands that borders mean something, that radical Islam is scary and aimed at America’s heart, that the climate has always changed, that a runaway administrative state destroys prosperity and freedom, that the press is not sacred, and that we Americans are one people, not a bunch of whiny little victim classes.

Re-framing Trump to appreciate his virtues meant re-visiting Milo to decide if he, too, is virtuous. He is.

In many ways, Milo is a direct descendant of three towering figures in American comic history: Don Rickles and Joan Rivers are his most obvious progenitors. They too cut through every social nicety to deliver the joke that made you laugh, but also hurt. Their jokes were mean but, as Homer Simpson says, “They’re funny because they’re true.” We laugh first, then we’re maybe a bit embarrassed that we laughed, and then we take a second look at what made us experience those two emotions. It’s that second look that leads to truth.

The third towering comic figure I see in Milo’s humor is Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks was outrageous, camp (in a straight way), and understood what everyone knew during WWII — you don’t go around trying to respect your enemy and his root causes. If you have an enemy, there are two types of propaganda you must use:  The first is to show your enemy as truly horrible and deserving of being destroyed; the second is to prove that he’s a pathetic, ridiculous object who, even if he puts up a good fight, can in fact be destroyed.

Certainly old-time Hollywood understood that reality. Even Disney got in on the act with the classic Der Fuehrer’s Face (the cartoon starts at 1:09):

Donald Duck’s dream and the laughs that came with it did not lessen the intensity with which Americans fought the Nazis nor decrease their understanding that Hitler and his Nazis were completely evil. They just reminded Americans that the Nazis, despite their destructive power, were vile, mean-spirited, stupid, evil little people who could be beaten.

Charlie Chaplin understood too that it’s easier to fight against an enemy you view as ridiculous, evil, and disgusting than it is to fight against one, no matter how evil, that you’re told you must respect and understand, and, thanks to that respect and understanding, you must excuse his evil acts (but still kill him). That’s a schizophrenic, and therefore dangerous, way to wage a war.

Mel Brooks, a young man during WWII, absorbed these lessons about using propaganda to cut an enemy down to manageable size. So it was that, 23 years after WWII ended, Brooks finally got the chance to expose the Nazis to fully deserved ridicule:

Sadly, I can’t find YouTube footage of Dick Shawn’s epic turn as a Hipster Hitler.

Well-aimed humor reminds us that no person or nation is so important, whether for good or evil, that the person or nation cannot be cut down to size. One of the Left’s most effective tactics in the last thirty years is to tell us that we are not allowed to make any jokes about their sacred issues.

Milo understands all of this. He plays it out in the vicious, funny, truth-filled verbal bombs he throws at feminists, gender warriors, Islamists, illegal immigration supporters, and all of their fellow travelers. And if he accidentally takes out some good and decent people on the way (as was the case with his Twitter attacks on Ben Shapiro), you can tell that Milo, still young and crude despite all his courage, wit, and sophistication, thinks “So what? In any war, there’s going to be collateral damage.”

He certainly would be right about the war part. As the increasingly hysterical and deranged Progressives demonstrate daily, we are at war. (Dennis Prager agrees — this is war.)

Milo made explicit his fealty to free speech and universal insult as a battle tactic during his recent Bill Maher appearance, when he showed up ready to bad-mouth everyone in the name of free speech and intellect,while livening up his otherwise ordinary attire with dainty pearls and eye-shadow:

During his time with Maher, Milo was a man in perfect control of himself with important, and often quite funny, things to say. He and Maher had something of a love fest because, for all that Maher’s wrong about any number of things, there are two important things that distinguish him from his fellow Progressive travelers: He recognizes that Islam is uniquely dangerous, over and above all the other religions he disrespects, and he values free speech and is willing to put his money where his mouth is.

What was actually a little more interesting than the love fest was seeing Milo’s effect on Larry Willmore. Had Willmore, an alleged comedian, had something useful or intelligent to say, perhaps he would have said it. He might even have copied Maher and responded to Milo’s baiting in similar terms: snarky, vicious, humorous, and factual. That Willmore — did I mention he’s an alleged comedian and considered something of a comedic “intellectual”? — was reduced to whining about his victimhood and then issuing obscene threats must have been infinitely satisfying to Milo (language warning):

There’s one more thing that strongly influences Milo’s presence and that the Left highly values . . . provided that it comes from a Leftist. Milo’s real shtick, when he’s not being serious (and then he holds his own with anybody) is to be a bitchy drag queen. I don’t just mean that he swans around in pearls or make-up. I mean the entire ethos of “I’m a drag queen so, not only can I say anything I want once I’m glammed up, I can be the meanest person on earth and you will laugh.”

You may recall that, when I started this post, I promised to explain why I’m not into the drag queen vibe. I spent the better part of my life in San Francisco, as both child and professional. I was a good Democrat during those years. Whether at school or at work, I was always in the presence of gay men, many of whom I counted as good friends. It was therefore entirely unsurprising that, when a “Dragapella” group emerged in the early 1990s, I not only knew the performers, but half my friends did too.

The Kinsey Sicks (a play on Kinsey’s conclusion that a 6 on his sexuality scale meant complete homosexuality) started when a group of friends, all highly active in the gay community and all at Ground Zero of the modern gay rights movement, went to a Bette Midler concert in drag as the Andrews Sisters. As they were the only audience members in drag, they occasioned a lot of excitement and people asked them to sing.

When the men discovered that, in fact, they were all talented singers who could hold their own in a cappella singing, they formally launched the Kinsey Sicks. One of the original members died fairly soon after that, so the group reconfigured itself as a quartet. Although several of the performers have come and gone, the group has remained a quartet to this day.

The original group, with which I was familiar, was very Jewish, very smart, very musical, very musically literate, and very clever with lyrics. The guys would dress up as the drag queen alter egos, come out on stage, and intersperse comic shtick with funny songs. Most of the songs had to do with being gay. During the first concert, I was impressed by their musicality and laughed at their jokes. Here’s an example of one of their early songs, although the guys made this recording (with so-so singing, which is disappointing) only recently as you can see from the ISIS reference:

Cute, right?

A lot of the songs were less cute, though, a trend that continued in the second, and last, Kinsey Sicks show I saw. Here are some titles showing the direction the group was taking during the 1990s:

  • The Anal Warts Sing-A-Long
  • Fetish
  • Be A Slut
  • A Lay In A Manger
  • Ode To A Mercy F*ck
  • Necrophilia
  • Gonorrhea
  • Why Can’t We F*ck

Not so cute. I was pretty open-minded back in the day, but even then I had some standards.

In the 2000s, though, the Kinsey Sicks got a whole new lease on life. It found politics. Anything nasty that they could say about conservatives, they did say, but they put it to music, sang it well, and were often funny — but always, always bitchy.

I was able to find on the internet the lyrics to the Kinsey Sick’s 2011 album, Electile Dysfunction. Feel free to check it out, but a few samples should suffice to give you an idea about their point of view. For example, their song “Eliminate The Schools,” sung to the tune of “Three Little Maids” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado shows that the panic over DeVos took root a long time ago:

If you missed the lyrics, here are just a couple of verses:

Teachers be gone; it’s necessary.
Solving our problems budgetary,
Feed kids and cash to the military.
(And penitentiary.)
Eliminate the schools!

Lest the elite think our kids are dumb
To simple trades we’ll apprentice some.
Teach all the rest how to use a gun.
We’ll break all the liberal rules when we
Eliminate the schools.

Although the group prides itself on how Jewish some of its members are, the antipathy to religion is overwhelming:

My friends, the end is clear.
Our land was founded by the Puritans.
Not Streisand, Richard Gere,
Or Hollywood libs,
Like slut Jane Curtin,
Who only want to lead us
On the Sodom and Gomorrah way.
But if you vote for me
I’ll vote with Yahweh.

Women’s libbers, mainstream news
And other sins I will not mention.
But the worst sin we can do
Is to decrease our tax exemptions.
A land that’s without guns
Can’t live the Bible and the Torah way.
That’s why we should live by
The laws of Yahweh.

Those lyrics should remind anyone who is wondering about Jews and Leftism, that being a Leftist Jew pretty much boils down to throwing around Yiddish words and eating bagels. To the extent the Bible factors into it, the whole Exodus story was simply a dry run for second wave (third wave? fourth?) gay liberation. The root cause is easy: Jews go to college. For fifty years, they’ve been marinated in America’s increasingly hard-Left institutes of higher education. This affinity for college also explains why Asians are also Leftists, even though it is against their interests, because they cannot complete with blacks, gays, Hispanics, and refugees in the ongoing “Who’s Most Pathetic” contests that define the Leftist world view.

But I digress. . . .

Other songs accuse conservatives of being hate-filled racists for enjoying vacations in Mexico while objecting to illegal immigration here at home; a truly grotesque (and, to me, unintelligible) song about noses, virginity, and some sort of weird sex; a plea for a visit from “Satan Baby”; and a song about suicide bombers that states outright that there’s no difference between Muslim fanatics, on the one hand, and rabbis, priests, and ministers on the other hand.

Milo, while he may not sing, is the good twin to these evil quadruplets. (Yeah, bad turn of phrase, I know, but I’m grooving here.) He’s also a bitchy queen who does political commentary. He’s vulgar and says things in the crudest, most shocking terms to make his point. The difference is that, while the Kinsey Sicks is dedicating its performance energies to sexual excess and Big Government, Milo has taken that same energy and turned it to exposing the tyranny that lurks behind that same Big Government we’re supposed to love so much.

When I watch Kinsey Sicks’ videos or read their lyrics, I can hear Milo’s voice in my heads, saying in bitchy terms equal to theirs, “No, Kinsey Sicks, all religions are not equally bad — and, by the way, those exploding Sheikhs think you should be thrown off a building and stoned to death.

“No, Kinsey Sicks, supporting unimpeded, illegal immigration is not a sign that you’re a good human being. It’s a sign that you’re a bad human being. You give aid and succor to corrupt, malevolent Latin American governments that send citizens on dangerous treks north so that the same people will send the money necessary to keep those governments alive. By encouraging the breakdown of the rule of law, you’re trying to turn America into a banana republic, something that always first destroys the poor and the minorities. And of course you support people who take jobs and social services away from real Americans, people with roots going back hundreds of years in America:

“No, Kinsey Sicks, pumping more money into schools that, no matter how much they receive taxpayer money fail communities, especially minority communities, is not virtuous — it’s cruel, even evil. It’s called the Department of Education, not the “Department of Public Schools,” or the “Department of Teacher’s Unions.” Returning power to parents and genuine teachers, rather than cycling it through the teacher’s unions and into the Democrat Party is the best thing we can do for students.”

Milo can say all that.

Me? I’m a 50-something, boring white lady, who too often doesn’t get today’s culture and has no idea how to talk to people like my son and his friends about the gross inequities forty years of escalating Progressive thought, policy, and censorship have visited on America. The Kinsey Sicks, with their colorful, obscene, topical performances, do know how to talk to the young and the hip.

Thankfully, so does Milo! Nobody needs me to try to explain things, but a young generation needs him. He’s intelligent, honest, possessed of incredible personal courage, and so goddamned flamboyant and bitchy that he can outdo the Left at its own game.

Also, last thing, now that he’s banned from Twitter, Milo’s Facebook page is an amazing repository for counter-narratives that, but for Milo’s prominence, wouldn’t make it out there. Take this video, for example, which got 16 million views once Milo posted it:

If you’re curious about that kid’s reference to Blue Pills, think of The Matrix: When Neo and Morpheus meet, Morpheus offers Neo a choice between taking a red pill and a blue pill. If he takes the blue pill, he will return to his old life without learning the truth about the world around him. However, if he takes a red pill, he will learn the truth — which is that humans are robots’ bio-electric Soylent Green who passively accept this slavery because the robots feed them a false worldview that hides their enslavement. Morpheus promises Neo that the truth will set him free . . . which it does.

Do I always like Milo’s style? No. I’ll never feel comfortable with the baser insults he offers. But as I said, in the vicious, to-the-death of America ideological civil war we’re seeing, we have a powerful ally in a young man who sees things as they are, has tremendous personal courage, and is a serious bitch.

Paul Joseph Watson offers a lively, obscene, offensive, and funny video that, had I know it existed, could have saved me writing this whole post: