How Breitbart Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into the Mainstream

Buzzfeed has been so great with some of their pieces lately.

 

Pretty informative and horrifying at the same time. How these people think and rationalize hate, especially hate we've seen before as a people, gives new meaning to history repeating itself. There is zero defense to being a Trump supporter. Zero.

 

Completely agree but it’s disturbing how many Americans are willing to turn a blind eye to overt racism.

 

My brother and his then-girlfriend were some of Milo's original targets about three years ago, at the relative beginning of his villainous arc. I wrote a quick Facebook post after reading the Buzzfeed piece, so I'll just copy and paste it here:

I spent years wondering if Milo was playing checkers or chess as he went from victim to victim in the GamerGate days, pursuing them with a baffling persistence that seemed driven in equal parts by ideological zeal and personal grievance (the latter almost certainly contrived to inspire a sort of twisted solidarity with his equally twisted readership).

I watched as people who once shrugged him off as a navel-gazing shit-kicker destined to forever mine the dregs of online culture wars for esoteric clickbait began to wake up to the real and palpable sway he seemed to hold over an ascendant far-right movement. While so few were paying attention, he grabbed the conch among amoral edgelords and cultural contrarians around the nation - and now we've learned that was the plan all along.

Seeing the unholy design behind Milo's transformation brought into stark relief is both illuminating and nauseating - yet ultimately not surprising. They built an awful machine at Breitbart out of misery and pathos, and we stood by while they fed it. But it always starts out as a joke, doesn't it? And it stays that way until the precise moment it isn't anymore.

And then it's too late.

 

This is really good and your last sentences are spot on. Thank you. It's really important that people start to realize that "internet jokes" don't exist in a vacuum.

 

I think this piece is really important. First, it's important to see that Milo had a ghost writer and to see that is a desperate narcissist. Reading this in the most cynical way: Milo isn't a white supremacist; he's simply a greedy narcissist who is a careerist, someone he would ostensibly rail against. To read it on the surface: he is a white supremacist. Either way: Fuck Milo. And I'm someone who didn't think they everything he said was meaningless or without profundity. Maybe I was blinded by his accent and how much I believe in free speech; I also thought he analyzed many of those on the left as self-serving, too. It takes one to know one, sometimes.

It was also important to see the billionaire rightwing machine in action. It's ironic how much social welfare these fools get. What market?

Thanks for posting this. I almost didn't read it because I thought: "who cares." It's important and I'm glad I read it.