Get in Faggot We Are Making America Great Again
Story highlights
- Milo Yiannopoulos, editor at far-right Breitbart News, says he's touring colleges to fight political correctness
- His events have sparked protests over his inflammatory comments about women and minorities
Sacramento, California (CNN)It's a recent Friday night in downtown Sacramento, and there'southward a man in a hotel lobby wearing a fur vest and sunglasses. He has a British accent.
A line of college-age fans stretches out the door.
They're waiting for autographs and selfies. Some are wearing "Make America Keen Again" caps.
"Milo I love you lot! Oh my god, thank you -- I love what yous do," says 1 woman to the man in the fur vest.
"Thank you for what y'all're doing," says another college student wearing a Donald Trump hat.
The subject of their adulation is non a rock star or a crusading politician but Milo Yiannopoulos, 32, an outspoken editor for the far-right Breitbart News. He's on a flamethrowing tour of college campuses -- including an event Wednesday night at UC Berkeley that was canceled afterwards protests became fierce -- and has made it his goal to accept on the traditionally left-leaning college establishment.
"I just want to burn it downwardly," Yiannopoulos said in an interview terminal month with CNN. "I am speaking on college campuses because didactics ... is actually what matters. It's a crucible where these bad ideas are formed. Bad ideas like ... progressive social justice, feminists, Black Lives Matter ... that I call up is so cancerous and toxic to gratuitous expression."
This professional provocateur, who was banned on Twitter afterwards his harassment last summer of "Saturday Night Live" star Leslie Jones, has been making a proper name for himself with his "Unsafe Faggot" jitney tour. In campus appearances across the nation the openly gay Yiannopoulos has fabricated disparaging remarks about Muslims, minority students, members of the transgender customs and other groups -- all in the name of free speech and the fight against political correctness.
His many detractors say he is a hatemonger. But Yiannopoulos believes he offers an important perspective that is missing at universities where liberal ideas typically go unchallenged. And he'due south inspiring other far-correct speakers to visit college campuses in the hopes of swaying young minds.
"People are tired of being told how to alive, how to speak, what language they can use," he said. "The strength of feeling in my crowds, the enthusiasm for me from the audiences is the same -- the same instinct, the same sort of motivating force (that) put Trump in the White House."
'It'south almost cool to be Republican now'
Almost everywhere he appears, Yiannopoulos, who has started a college scholarship program open but to white male person students, causes a ruckus.
Final month protests erupted before his oral communication at the University of California, Davis, forcing sponsors to cancel the result, citing security concerns. (Yiannopoulos afterward led a march on campus instead.) A scheduled advent this calendar week at UCLA was also canceled, partly for condom reasons.
On January 20, the night of Trump'due south inauguration, a man was shot during protests outside Yiannopoulos's consequence at the University of Washington in Seattle. Co-ordinate to the Seattle Times, Yiannopoulos briefly left the phase to confirm the shooting earlier returning to say, "If nosotros don't proceed, they have won."
In his campus talks, Yiannopoulos spares few targets. He's gone later on Black Lives Matter activists and has argued rape culture on campuses doesn't be. He portrays white males every bit victims and views social justice as a course of cancer. He has said people become feminists because they are "securely physically unattractive."
Sometimes Yiannopoulos mocks individual people. While talking virtually the transgender bathroom debate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in December, he displayed a photo of a transgender female person student from that school and told the crowd, "the mode that you lot know he's failing is that I'd nigh nonetheless bang him."
He'south also implied Americans take good reason to fright Muslims and said that liberals believe that they can make Muslims accept gays if but they "hug them difficult plenty. Well, news wink ladies, it's not a boner, it's a bomb."
Yiannopoulos is typically invited to speak past bourgeois educatee organizations such as College Republicans and Turning Indicate Us. He claims he charges no speaking fees and that his travel expenses are paid for by Breitbart News and wealthy donors. A handful of people besides take started GoFundMe pages to cover the costs of hiring extra security for his events.
Tickets usually sell out fast. Some fans evidence upward in suits and ties. Others wearable Trump hats and T-shirts, making the event experience like a campaign rally even though the ballot is long over.
Outside the halls, the spectacle sometimes includes police in riot gear and crowds of anti-Milo demonstrators chanting "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist U.s.!"
"[College students] understand that in that location'due south something exciting and dissident and mischievous about this," he said. "It's virtually cool to be Republican now."
'A troll and a provocateur'
Yiannopoulos is often identified with the alt-right, a far-right political movement rife with white nationalist, anti-Semitic and racist ideologies, although he rejects the label.
His tour has coincided with a flurry of hate crimes around the country post-obit Trump's election victory -- many of them on higher campuses. In the month after the ballot, the Southern Poverty Police Middle said 172 hate incidents were reported at colleges and universities nationwide.
The SPLC attributes the spread of alt-right propaganda on campus to the "increased confidence that these groups are feeling following Trump's victory," which they say is besides being fueled by figures like Yiannopoulos and white nationalist Richard Spencer.
"What'due south new is Donald Trump. There'due south somebody on the national stage who'due south ... helping to encourage and give enthusiasm to this effort to proselytize and get to campuses and get new recruits for a new conservative motility," said Kevin Johnson, dean of the law school at UC Davis.
Universities have faced force per unit area to cancel Yiannopoulos' events. But many have decided to let his show to go on in the name of free speech and the Start Amendment.
"We're a public university, spring by the US Constitution. And we're not supposed to be censoring oral communication and then it'south not really up to us to say who tin can say what on campus," said Johnson of UC Davis.
"In our view, Mr. Yiannopoulos is a troll and provocateur who uses odious behavior in role to 'entertain,' but also to deflect any serious engagement with ideas," added Chancellor Nicholas Dirks of UC Berkeley, in explaining why the university allowed his event to be held on campus.
But, he added, "we are defending the correct to costless expression at an historic moment for our nation, when this correct is once over again of paramount importance. In this context, we cannot afford to undermine those rights, and experience a need to make a spirited defense of the principle of tolerance, even when it means we tolerate that which may appear to u.s.a. as intolerant."
Just some students who finish up equally the targets of Yiannopoulos'due south comments feel there should exist no identify for him or his views on campus.
A transgender UC Davis student, who asked to exist identified only as Barbara, told CNN she was too scared to be on campus during Yiannopoulos'south scheduled visit and was fearful of his potential issue on her classmates.
"The fearfulness is with the folks who are gonna see him," she said. "He leaves. Only the folks who are attending (his outcome) are the folks that I have to sit down next to in classrooms."
Hate speech as free oral communication?
Yiannopoulos isn't the only controversial speaker to effort and capitalize on what some are describing equally a "hate voice communication every bit free speech" motility.
Spencer, the white nationalist, told Mother Jones that watching one of Yiannopoulos'southward speeches at the University of Houston in September was a "huge inspiration" and helped him realize "what we are doing is known to people, information technology'southward edgy and dangerous, it'due south cool and hip. It'south that thing our parents don't desire u.s.a. to do."
Spencer spoke at Texas A&M University in Dec and says he's planning to do his own college tour.
Nathan Damigo, another white nationalist and founder of a group called Identity Europa, says he's hoping to join Spencer on the bout. Damigo says he also sees Yiannopoulos as an inspiration and showed up at his effect at UC Davis before it was canceled, hoping to find potential recruits for his own cause.
"In a way, we're all trying to do the same thing," Damigo told CNN. "We're all trying to bring narratives to these institutions that take been intentionally omitted. Nosotros are trying to combat the (liberal) narratives here that are merely beingness allowed to propagate here without whatever sort of confrontations."
For his function, Yiannopoulos says he has zippo to exercise with Spencer or whatsoever white nationalists.
"I don't accept unsavory opinions about pare color ... what yous are seeking to practise, by associating me with people who take odious and disgusting opinions, is suggest that I somehow in some way tacitly enable these people," he said. "I don't. F*ck you lot."
Merely Oren Segal, manager of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, believes Yiannopoulos "serves every bit a gateway" to more than dangerous ideas.
"When you see white supremacists hanging outside of Milo's events to poach potential recruits, it speaks to exactly why Milo is potentially unsafe. Milo is bringing his misogyny and hatred and racism onto campus, and people (are) sort of peradventure considering information technology, 'Oh, this is just ironic. He'south only being -- you know, pushing the envelope.'" Segal said.
"And so it enables his ideology, his letters to sort of seep in. The next level is maybe an openness to more white supremacist ideas, more hardcore believers. I think that'southward fundamentally dangerous."
But Yiannopoulos said he doesn't believe his statements are that far from the mainstream. He sees himself as a crusader for gratis voice communication.
"I have opinions that, frankly, a lot of people are thinking. They but won't tell people. They don't pollsters. They don't tell journalists. Just they think it, which is why you're all and then surprised when, you lot know, one-half the land voted for Trump. I hold perfectly respectable, reasonable opinions that half of America agrees with," he said.
"And then long equally people are prevented from proverb true things in public life for political definiteness, there'll however exist a need for me," he said. "And I'll never cease."
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Source: https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/02/us/milo-yiannopoulos-ivory-tower/index.html
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