Milo
Yiannopoulos, vulgarian, alt-right’s telegenic token gay and
Breitbart’s polemical senior editor, last appearance on a
national stage may have finally come. And, the bridge too far for
even his audience wasn’t Yiannopoulos’s misogyny,
xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or homophobia, to
name a few, but rather his flippant and snarky remarks condoning if
not giving a sly and coquettish nod to pedophilia and pederasty in a
January 2016 clip of his interview on “Drunken Peasants.”
“I’m
grateful for Father Michael,” Yiannopoulos told his audience
defending his molestation. “I wouldn’t give nearly such
good [oral sex] if it wasn’t for him.”
In
advocating relationships with older men as beneficial for young gays
especially without family support and denouncing the “arbitrary
and oppressive idea of consent” Yiannopoulos further expounded
his point of view in the January 2016 interview.
“We
get hung up on this sort of child abuse stuff to the point where we
are heavily policing consensual adults.”
In
a moment of contrition or perhaps a last-ditch effort to salvage his
job, after a tsunami of criticism from even his co-workers at
Brietbart, Yiannopoulos went on Facebook and uncharacteristically
took responsibility for his faux pas.
“I'm
partly to blame. My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I
could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how
outrageous,” Yiannopoulos wrote.
"But
I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and
gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for
other victims or, worse, ‘advocacy.’ …I
am certainly guilty of imprecise language, which I regret.”
For
too long Yiannopoulos felt he was unstoppable when it came to his
unfettered free speech as an exercise of his First Amendment right.
And why should Yiannopoulos not with a $250,000 book advance for his
memoir “Dangerous,” an exploration of the issues of
“political correctness" and free speech with Threshold
Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster as the grand prize for
trash talking.
"I
met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and
spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and
outrageous opinions. I thought they were going to have me escorted
from the building — but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow
full of money, Yiannopoulos boasted to The Hollywood Reporter.
Simon
& Schuster has now canceled Yiannopoulos’s “Dangerous.”
It comes, however, not after several of its top authors voiced their
protestation or pulled their books, like feminist author Roxane Gay,
but rather because Yiannopoulos’s huge platform Threshold
Editions was going after vanished with his exposed 2016 barbs about
pedophilia.
Before
Yiannopoulos became alt-right’s perfect poster-boy- gay and
Jewish- who denounces identity politics and “political
correctness” a backlash from the Tea Party movement had been
afoot for over a decade. But Tea Party and now alt-right folks are
not alone expressing how “political correctness”
infringes on their life, like the war on Christmas. The controversy
first shows its face every early December with the inanity over the
new design of Starbucks holiday cups that don’t have a
Christmas theme or the greeting “Merry Christmas.”
According to last year’s Public Policy Polling(PPP), if you
say, “Merry Christmas” you insult a liberal and if you
say, “Happy Holidays” you vex a conservative. PPP
revealed that 57 percent of Republicans believe there’s an
ongoing war on Christmas. The ongoing feuding back and forth
revealed that a July 2016 Pew Research Poll revealed that 59 percent
of American’s agree that “too many
people are easily offended these days over the language that others
use.”
Liberal
colleges and universities have been in the bull’s- eye of this
ongoing debate with conservatives now emboldened with Trump’s
presidency to challenge aggressively the politics of “political
correctness.” Yiannopoulos’s cancelled visit to Berkeley
due to student protests were spun by conservatives as antithetical to
free speech and viewed by liberals as hate speech.
Before
Yiannopoulos was recently disinvited to attend the upcoming
Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC) due to his recent
remarks Matt Schlapp, chairman of the group which sponsors CPAC, was
Yiannopoulos’s loudest and fierce advocate.
“An
epidemic of speech suppression has taken over college campuses,”
Matt Schlapp told the Hollywood Reporter of Yiannopoulos’
scheduled appearance at Berkeley after it was cancelled. “Milo
has exposed their liberal thuggery and we think free speech includes
hearing Milo’s important perspective.”
Yiannopoulos
has been uniquely positioned in transforming his public vitriol and
provocation as the symbolic voice and victim of the not “politically
correct” oppressed. He has deliberately exploited the tensions
between the two camps, employing his brand of hate speech, to stretch
the perimeters of how far he can go protected not only under the
First Amendment, but also with his audience.
As
an infamous internet troll, for example, Twitter suspended
Yiannopoulos account only after an onslaught of targeted racist and
sexist diatribes hurled at Saturday Night Live comedian Leslie
Jones was derided by an explosion of celebs coming to Jones’s
defense.
I
believe free speech not only has its limits, but that it also has a
level of responsibility to promote civil discourse for the welfare of
others, and reject hate speech which is a precursor to violence.
While we know, we cannot scream “fire’ in a crowded
cinema, because of the potential harm it could create it is equally
inappropriate to hurl epithets and threats which Yiannopoulos did
unapologetically. And he engages in hate speech aimed at historically
disenfranchised groups and individuals with the sole purpose of
enflame divisions not only on college campuses but also across the
country.
When
hate speech becomes an accepted norm we have a problem.
Hate
speech is not a passive form of public speech. And one of the signs
of an intolerant society is its hate speech, whether used jokingly or
intentionally, aimed at specific groups of people.
Also,
when this form of verbal abuse becomes part and parcel of the
everyday parlance and exchange between people, we have created a
society characterized by its zero-tolerance of inclusion and
diversity, and where name-calling becomes an accepted norm.
Language
is a representation of culture, and it perpetuates ideas and
assumptions about race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation that
we consciously, and unconsciously, articulate in our everyday
conversations about ourselves and the rest of the world, and
consequently transmit generationally.
The
liberation of a people is also rooted in the liberation of abusive
language in the form of hate hurled at them. Using epithets,
especially jokingly, does not eradicate its historical baggage, and
its existing social relations among us.
Instead,
using them dislodges these epithets from their historical context and
makes us insensitive and arrogant to the historical injustices done
to specific group of Americans.
They
allow all Americans to become numb to the use and abuse of the power
of hate speech because of the currency these epithets still have.
And
lastly, hate speech thwarts the daily struggle in which many us
engage in trying to ameliorate human relations - something
Yiannopoulos was antithetical to.
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