We can all stop pretending that Bannon and Milo aren't Nazis. https://t.co/vQ5rd718I7
— Zedward Tweeterhands (@ZeddRebel) October 5, 2017
Per Mic, the blowback has begun:
Vice has cut ties with a senior writer from its feminist vertical Broadly after a BuzzFeed report revealed that the writer pitched story ideas to then-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, and once requested that Yiannopoulos mock a “fat feminist” writer.
Mitchell Sunderland, who at the time he sent emails to Yiannopoulos was managing editor of Broadly, was spotted departing Vice’s offices with a box of his belongings. (Mic saw a photo of Sunderland departing.)
A Vice spokesperson confirmed to Mic that Sunderland was let go Friday, and that Vice is continuing to look into the matter…
I’m sure that Mr. Sunderland would never encourage genocide, euthanasia of the disabled, or the invasion of Poland. But, c’mon — doesn’t “everybody” hate those “fat feminist” SJWs?
If you didn’t have a chance to read that Buzzfeed report when Cole posted about it earlier today, it’s well worth your time this weekend:
… During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”…
It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.
These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.
They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way…
Milo is definitely not a Nazi. https://t.co/YWtZ9etXfL pic.twitter.com/FIEpJ5RDFM
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) October 5, 2017
For the record, Yiannopoulos claims he didn’t see those Nazi salutes, because of his “severe myopia.” (Murphy the Trickster God remains an unsubtle scripter.)
… A year and a half ago, Milo Yiannopoulos set himself a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech, 10 months before the alt-right’s great hope became president, and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the country’s politics and culture.
At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life…
“Finally doing my big feature on the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a March 9, 2016, email to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer, and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. “Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”