"In politics, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were, and maybe still are, daddies. A daddy-in-training is New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani..."

"... who Gates says 'hasn’t aged into daddyhood' quite yet. What all daddies have in common is the notion of or desire for a power imbalance — a dynamic at play in real and metaphoric, honorific paternal relationships.... Milo Yiannopoulos... began calling Trump daddy in 2017. At an October 2024 rally, speaking before Trump took the stage, Tucker Carlson compared Americans to naughty little girls who have misbehaved. 'When Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now,' Carlson told the crowd, in perhaps one of the creepiest moments of the campaign. 'And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you.' 'Daddy’s Home' shirts featuring Trump and the White House began circulating on Etsy shortly after his November win... We seem to have entered a deeply submissive era. Everyone is being well-behaved for Daddy, lest they be spanked.... But power and wealth are not all that a true daddy possesses....."

Writes Maura Judkis, in "Who’s your daddy? These days, who isn’t? Mack daddy, leather daddy, sugar daddy, Daddy Trump: The fraught and Freudian journey of a domineering archetype" (WaPo).

Gates = Bransen Gates, an Instagrammer who lipsynchs to Trump audio and demonstrates, comically, that Trump was born to be a gay man.

Perhaps you, like me, remember the phrase "Daddy's Home" as the title of a lovely doowop song from 1961 by Shep & the Limelites, so: here.

Even better:

"It makes no sense. Somebody who’s such an extraordinary friend of Israel, whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew, whose grandchildren are Orthodox Jews—I cannot explain..."

"... why he would want to have dinner with an overt anti-Semite and dinner with a white-supremacist Jew-hater, an ugly, ugly scum like Nick Fuentes. And Trump says, 'I didn’t know who it was.' Even if I take him at his word, that he didn’t know who Fuentes was, fine, now he knows. Why doesn’t he say, 'Fuentes is a despicable scum whose beliefs have no place in the United States of America'?"

Said the head of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein, quoted in "A Right-Wing Zionist Digests Trump’s Anti-Semite Dinner Party/Can the former President be the 'best friend Israel ever had in the White House' while also legitimatizing 'Jew-haters'?" (The New Yorker). The Z.O.A. recently gave Trump an award designating him the "best friend Israel ever had in the White House." 

Does this help make sense of what happened: "Milo Yiannopoulos claims he set up Fuentes dinner ‘to make Trump’s life miserable’/Rightwing provocateur says he helped arrange for white supremacist to attend dinner with Trump and Kanye West" (The Guardian).

"[Kanye] West said that following his 'Death Con' comment, Alex Jones’ producer introduced him to [Milo] Yiannopoulos, who in turn suggested West 'bring in' Fuentes."

"The artist said he was 'impressed by Nick' and asked him to join the dinner, stating that 'Trump had no idea who Nick Fuentes was.'"

From "Kanye and His Antisemitic Friends Storm Off Live Right-Wing Podcast After Pushback on Offensive Views/West, Nick Fuentes, and Milo Yiannopoulos abruptly walked off the Timcast IRL podcast after pushback to antisemitic claims" (Rolling Stone).

Here's the show, with Ye and friends exiting after 20 minutes or so: 

 

I listened to the show for about the first half hour. I don't think I'd ever noticed Pool before, but I think I understood him to say that the show has a format — discussing the news — and West knew that but West just went ahead and took over and seemed to feel entitled to rant from subject to subject however he wanted. Pool seems to have been more deferential than usual but had to break in, not merely to preserve his own concept of the show, but because West was indulging in general statements that Pool knew would be characterized as anti-semitism. Pool wanted West to name particular individuals, not speak of the group in general.

West had one good point: Why are people allowed to speak of "the black vote"? Why is it okay to speak about black people that way?

Somebody needs to be famous again.

I'm reading "Activist Milo Yiannopoulos is now ‘Ex-Gay,’ consecrating his life to St. Joseph/‘Secular attempts at recovery from sin are either temporary or completely ineffective. Salvation can only be achieved through devotion to Christ and the works of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church'" (LifeSite). 

Milo: When I used to kid that I only became gay to torment my mother, I wasn’t entirely joking. Of course, I was never wholly at home in the gay lifestyle — Who is? Who could be? — and only leaned heavily into it in public because it drove liberals crazy to see a handsome, charismatic, intelligent gay man riotously celebrating conservative principles. That’s not to say I didn’t throw myself enthusiastically into degeneracy of all kinds in my private life. I suppose I felt that’s all I deserved. I’d love to say it was all an act, and I’ve been straight this whole time, but even I don’t have that kind of commitment to performance art. Talk about method acting.…

"'No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,' john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me."

"'What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.' Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. 'I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,' he said. 'My family was not pleased with me, but I said, Look, they have First Amendment rights, too. So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?'... In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. 'These days, we’d say, That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,' powell said. 'But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.' He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. 'The knee-jerk response is Nothing we can do, it’s speech. ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ What harm? It’s just words. That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.'"

From "How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley Into a Free-Speech Circus/Public universities have no choice but to welcome far-right speakers seeking self-promotion. Should the First Amendment be reinterpreted for the digital age?" by Andrew Marantz (in The New Yorker).

Is "self-promotion" a special right-wing motivation? Is there some idea that a left-wing speaker promotes his ideas, but a right-wing speaker promotes only himself — that left-wingers are earnest and sincere and bring substance to the campus milieu but right-wingers are demagogues who belong in the hinterlands, braying to some mob?

There's a lot about Milo Yiannopoulos in that article, by the way.

As for john a. powell, he's saying things that are scarcely new. They were standard fare in the legal academy a quarter century ago. That is, it's already "a generation later." His sarcasm at "It’s just words" sounds straight out of "Only Words," the book Catharine MacKinnon published in 1994, and "Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment (New Perspectives on Law, Culture, and Society)" a collection of essays some Critical Race theory lawprofs put out in 1995.

These ideas have been pushed for a very long time, and there's still an intense effort to clear the campus of competing ideas about freedom of speech. I was utterly surrounded by those left-wing views back in the early 90s, and I find it wonderful that they're still so outré that a lawprof today presents them as intriguingly new. What a miracle that Americans still believe in freedom of speech!

ADDED: The NYT has a very similar article today, "The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience" by a philosophy professor, Bryan W. Van Norden. He wants elite institutions to embrace forthright viewpoint discrimination — justified by portraying the ideas he finds offensive as "ignorant":

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has complained that men can’t “control crazy women” because men “have absolutely no respect” for someone they cannot physically fight. Does this adolescent opinion deserve as much of an audience as the nuanced thoughts of Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of “himpathy” in supporting misogyny?...

There is a clear line between censoring someone and refusing to provide them with institutional resources for disseminating their ideas... What just access means in terms of positive policy is that institutions that are the gatekeepers to the public have a fiduciary responsibility to award access based on the merit of ideas and thinkers. To award space in a campus lecture hall to someone like Peterson who says that feminists “have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination”...  is not to display admirable intellectual open-mindedness. It is to take a positive stand that these views are within the realm of defensible rational discourse, and that these people are worth taking seriously as thinkers.

Neither is true: These views are specious, and those who espouse them are, at best, ignorant, at worst, sophists. The invincibly ignorant and the intellectual huckster have every right to express their opinions, but their right to free speech is not the right to an audience. 

Millions of us took that Facebook quiz myPersonality, that scored you on Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and gave access to our Facebook profiles.

"Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook 'likes' across millions of people.'... They had a lot of approaches from the security services,” a member of the [Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre] told me. 'There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked "I hate Israel" on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats. There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat.' The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research... But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including [Christopher] Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the [UK] Lib Dems.... 'And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data. And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.'"

From "The Cambridge Analytica Files/‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower/For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate" (by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian).

Obviously from that title, there's a lot more to that article that the candy that jumped out at me. I invite you to think about this nefarious predation on the sweet gathering place that is Facebook.

There's also this about Wylie meeting Rebekah Mercer:

“She loved me. She was like, ‘Oh we need more of your type on our side!’”

Your type?

“The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. It’s why he was so into the whole Milo [Yiannopoulos] thing.”

I'm not sure if I ever took the myPersonality quiz, but I did once take a quiz based on those 5 personality traits that purported to tell you which U.S. President you're most like. Meade took it too. Both of us were most like Barack Obama, even though we had different results on 4 of the 5 qualities. I called bullshit on the test. But maybe things like this really are valuable and politicians could target their communications more squarely at people who would be receptive to them. Is that more frightening that the terribly crude sorting of people by political party? I've been favoring things that break up the old partisan boundaries, perhaps because I'm "above average on openness."

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin says:

You don't need an accurate result to get people to hand over their data. In fact, the two results most likely for you to repost and ensnare others are probably the one that gives you smug satisfaction and the one you cannot believe could be true.

But only 40% of those who took the myPersonality test gave access to their Facebook profiles, so inspiring trust that this was a serious scholarly endeavor (connected to Cambridge University) was a crucial step in getting to the data. I don't think Facebook opens up the profiles routinely.

"Here’s something Milo Yiannopoulos probably wasn’t expecting when he filed a lawsuit against Simon & Schuster for breach of contract for canceling the publication of his controversial book...."

"Public mockery of his manuscript and its edits.... On Wednesday, writer Jason Pinter tweeted a screenshot of Simon & Schuster’s rebuttal. And on Thursday, software engineer Sarah Mei, after realizing that the documents filed in the case were now publicly available, paid a visit to the New York county clerk’s website for herself and shared even more scathingly choice editorial nuggets online, to the delight of Twitter....."

So begins "The Most Scathing Editor Comments From Milo Yiannopoulos’ Manuscript" at Slate.

This is a excellent setup for a comic/serious exercise. Instead of hating on Milo (if you hate him) or (more tediously) defending him (if you like him), imagine editorial comments on some other book, some book you think is great.

Many of these editorial comments are more normal than you may realize. For example: "This is definitely not the place for more of your narcissism." I'm certain that the greatest books ever written could have elicited this comment from an editor (and I mean a serious editor who was trying to make the book as good as it could be).

It's too bad Milo didn't stay with his publisher and try to meet the challenges presented by these comments. I have tried to read the rushed-out book he self-published. It's a brainstorm of a rough draft. I scanned it with some thought of blogging it. I don't think I got one blog post out of it, and I tried.

It needed way more work, and I assume he knows that, but he needed to cash in early, and he got his payday. I don't really care, and I think it is indeed funny when a lawsuit lays bare things you'd rather keep hidden. When this phenomenon besets lefties, righties like to say "Streisand effect."

The NYT gives its readers definitions for "alt-right" and "alt-left."

In the transcript (NYT) of yesterday's press conference, we see Trump talking about the "alt-right" and the "alt-left" and challenging a reporter to give a definition:

REPORTER: Senator McCain said that the alt-right is behind these and he linked that same group to those that perpetrated the attack in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Well, I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I’m sure Senator McCain must know what he is talking about. When you say the alt-right. Define alt-right to me. You define it. Go ahead. No, define it for me. Come on. Let’s go.

REPORTER: Senator McCain defined them as the same group —

[cross talk]

TRUMP: What about the alt-left that came charging at — Excuse me — What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? [cross talk] Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. So, you know, as far as I’m concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.

Define your terms — it's a way of slowing down an interlocutor who's letting labels do too much of the work. Trump combines the demand for a definition of one thing that is said with calling attention to what is unsaid: You've got a label for one side but not for the other side.

Perhaps reacting to that demand for definition, the NYT has "Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language" (by Liam Stack).

First up is the definition of "Alt-Right," and I think this definition pushes the word into a much uglier zone than some of the people who have popularized the term deserve:

"Google CEO Sundar Pichai canceled an all-hands meeting about gender controversy due to employee worries of online harassment."

Recode reports.

Pichai was set to address the search giant’s 60,000 employees in 30 minutes in an all-hands meeting about a recent post by recently fired employee James Damore....

Wired reported earlier that conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos “posted on his Facebook page the Twitter biographies of eight Google employees who criticized Damore’s post.”...

Sources inside Google said some employees had begun to experience “doxxing” — online harassment that can take various forms and is defined “searching for and publishing private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.”

What a mess!

The Milo Yiannopoulis interview Milo says NPR doesn't want you to hear.

Via Breitbart, "NPR reportedly refused to air a radio interview with former Breitbart Senior Editor MILO despite verbal and written assurances to the contrary because he 'sounded too reasonable.'"

ADDED: Newsweek examines whether NPR is silencing Milo but doesn't get very far:

Yiannopoulos said he believes McEnroe and WNPR “were expecting a low-rent troll — someone who would assure the broadcaster’s ossified audience that anyone sympathetic to the president must be a redneck or an idiot.”...

[The NPR interviewer Colin] McEnroe did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did a producer who worked on the Yiannopoulos interview and communicated with members of his staff. A representative for NPR, which rented studio space in New York City to WNPR for the interview, noted that it has nothing to do with McEnroe’s show.

“I am waiting to hear back from WNPR when they’re expecting to air this interview,” the press representative said.

On whether they are silencing Milo, they are silencing themselves. That gives free rein to all who want to say NPR was flummoxed by the troll who wouldn't troll on cue but spoke rationally about the value of a troll.

"If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain."

"That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it. That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse.... On the other hand, when the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. it is offered as a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose.... [W]e should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence."

Writes psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain," in a NYT op-ed titled "When Is Speech Violence?"

No comments permitted on that piece for some reason. I'd like to see some responses from other experts on the brain.

I mean, isn't all our hearing, thinking, and remembering done with brain cells? It's freaky, if you think about it, the way everyone who speaks to you is doing something deep inside your most precious internal organ, at the cellular level, but it's just crazy — my brain cells are getting remodeled by this thought — to think that everyone who says something to you is having a physical impact on you, the equivalent of a touching, and that those who speak in a way that isn't nice enough are committing physical violence.

By the way, the NYT doesn't say this, but Lisa Feldman Barrett was (if Wikipedia is correct) born and educated in Canada, where free speech is less well valued and protected.

"I intend to return Berkeley to its rightful place as the home of free speech — whether university administrators and violent far-left antifa thugs like it or not."

"I will bring activists, writers, artists, politicians, YouTubers, veterans and drag queens from across the ideological spectrum to lecture, march and party."

Says Milo Yiannopoulos (and he won't say who's inviting him or backing him).

The argument for putting the label "punk" on Trump.

Drudge linked to this piece in The Week by Scott Galupa, who talked to Daniel Wattenberg, an author  who "bounced around the punk-rock scene of New York City in a variety of bands" and wrote a 1996 Weekly Standard essay on "the unorthodox right-wing roots of punk rock."

New York-centered punk began as "an intramural insurrection within the counterculture," he says. It was the punks vs. their somnolent, sententious hippie older brothers and sisters, who had for years propounded what Wattenberg calls the "reverse pieties" of anti-Americanism and anti-commercialism and white guilt.

That does sound Trumpish.

Wattenberg says Trumpism was "an insurrection against Conservatism Inc." — a political establishment that had become flabby, complacent, and self-indulgent in the same way that 1970s progressive rock music had grown bombastic, pretentious, and long-winded. 

In this analogy, the GOP establishment corresponds to hippies.

Then there's Trump's seeming amateurism — his "inexperience and rawness," Wattenberg says. Just as punks weren't trained musicians, Trump is frequently assailed for not playing politics the right way, that is, the professional way. 

Very good point, though it credits ordinary politicians with more structured skill and expertise than they deserve.

When Wattenberg hears the media establishment pounce on Trump for falsehoods, misstatements, or exaggerations, he hears echoes of musical sophisticates belittling punk rock for its primitivism. Trump may get lost in the details, but he gets the big things attitudinally right. Put another way: He may know only three chords, but Wattenberg says his followers hear the "right three chords."...

"There's power in [the rejection of political correctness]. Punks were also occasionally misrepresented as harboring fascist sympathies. Once they call you a fascist, there's nothing more than they can say. That's the source of excitement Milo [Yiannopoulos] generated on campus: 'We're free again.' That's the thrill and the power of busting taboos."

Excellent analogy. This article turned out to be much better than I thought it would be.

A hot new Bloggingheads episode.

I can't figure out how to embed it, so you have to go here.

Topics:

How bad were Milo’s pedophilia comments? 8:21
Are evangelicals demonized? 5:40
Debating the limits of free speech 18:35
Is the media’s coverage of Trump unprofessional? 7:38
Is Trump anti-Muslim? 7:26
Ann’s “hypothetical Trumps” thought experiment 11:10
How not to oppose to Trump 3:36

ADDED: This might work:

Bill Maher proclaims himself the "sunlight" that served as the best "disinfectant" to Milo Yiannopoulous.

Here's the interview with Maher (in the NYT).

I said, specifically, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Then we had Milo on, despite the fact that many people said, “Oh, how dare you give a platform to this man.” What I think people saw was an emotionally needy Ann Coulter wannabe, trying to make a buck off of the left’s propensity for outrage. And by the end of the weekend, by dinnertime Monday, he’s dropped as a speaker at CPAC. Then he’s dropped by Breitbart, and his book deal falls through. As I say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. You’re welcome.

I think Maher is wrong. I watched the show and thought he made Yiannopoulos look good. My observation at the time was that Maher saw something of himself in Yiannopoulos. Maher's boosting of Yiannopoulos may have contributed to the timing of the release of the edited audio recording that crushed Milo, but that's all. Speaking of "emotionally needy," Maher is taking credit he doesn't deserve.

The Times interviewer does challenge him: "Could there have been more accountability in your segments with him? For instance, it seemed like he was allowed to grossly understate his role in harassing Leslie Jones on Twitter." Maher went easy on himself:

It’s not my job to hold him accountable to everything he’s ever said or done. I had eight minutes with him, on the show itself. Sorry I don’t have time to go over everything everybody else would want to do.

And he kind of goes easy on Milo:

I don’t think he frankly knows what he’s going to say half the time, or knows what his philosophy is. But to see him as this monster is a little crazy. You know what he is? He’s the little impish, bratty kid brother. And the liberals are his older teenager sisters who are having a sleepover and he puts a spider in their sleeping bag so he can watch them scream.

ADDED: And now Maher has smoked out this disastrous old video in which he actively supports a woman "who is in jail, because she is in love." "That's how I view it," he says about a 35-year-old woman having sex with a 14-year-old boy. Maher announces that that the women — who is having a second baby with this boy — is being punished because "she won't conform to what society feels should be the perfect American family."

if bill maher thinks sunlight is the best disinfectant then here's him saying the same shit as milo, that it's ok for adults to fuck kids pic.twitter.com/tqPAzbGY3J

— warrior cop (@wyatt_privilege) February 22, 2017

Nice to see Henry Rollins talking sense... as Maher mocks him for siding with a conservative woman on the panel. The woman calls it "rape," and Maher scoffs at her: "How can a woman rape a man?" (Yes, "man," to refer to a 14-year-old boy.)

"But let’s be clear what is happening here. This is a cynical media witch hunt from people who don’t care about children."

"They care about destroying me and my career, and by extension my allies. They know that although I made some outrageous statements, I’ve never actually done anything wrong. These videos have been out there for more than a year. The media held this story back because they don’t care about victims, they only care about bringing me down. They will fail. I will be announcing a new, independently-funded media venture of my own and a live tour in the coming weeks.... Don’t think for a moment that this will stop me being as offensive, provocative and outrageously funny as I want on any subject I want.... I’m proud to be a warrior for free speech and creative expression."

From the transcript of Milo's press conference.

I blogged the press conference yesterday, here, with just the video, and there are 200+ comments over there. I'm blogging again because I'm seeing a transcript for the first time, and I wanted to forefront that passage.

And let me propose a thought experiment, in the style of my Trump hypotheticals, 2 posts down.

What if there were a young, handsome, smart, funny provocateur who'd spiked into popularity spouting left-liberal politics, stirring up young people on college campuses and irking older liberals who didn't think he knew enough or had served his elders long enough to deserve his place in the spotlight? And what if then his antagonists dropped some edited audio of late-night podcasts he'd recorded some years ago in which he revealed that when he was 14 he'd had a sexual relationship with a 24-year-old priest but that he refused to think about himself as the victim and he displayed his rationalization of the victimhood experience by characterizing himself as the sexual aggressor and by claiming that the priest had actually helped him?

How would Leftist Milo be treated?

Milo speaks, embracing victimhood, seriousness.

Milo needs to solve his own problems, but...

... to be fair, let's look at all the pedophilia talk that public figures have survived. I'll offer up Madonna:



Madonna jokes about asking her son (who was 14 at the time): "Do you have any friends you could introduce me to?"

That was easy for me to find because I blogged it at the time and I have a tag for pedophilia.

What should Milo do now? These Drudge screenshots suggest an answer. Yesterday:



Today:



I don't know how far Milo had gotten into writing an actual book. It seems to me that he was preoccupied with promoting an unwritten book and that the sensible way to cause the promised book to come into existence would be for someone else to cut and paste from transcripts of his many spoken-word performances and edited them into something as readable and amusing as possible.

But the life of Milo has taken a darker turn. This is a new and rich source of material. If the man is any good and worth listening to at all, he needs to sit down and write, really write — not just an object that can be sold as a book, but something true and worthy. Work through all of your experience, who you are and why you are here.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee brings up "The Vagina Monologues," and that got me looking back in my archive. I found this post from October 2006, just before the midterm election that was harshly affected by the Mark Foley scandal. David Brooks had written a column criticizing liberals for their celebration of "The Vagina Monologues," which includes one story of a woman who (like Milo Yiannopoulos) had as a young teenager been initiated into sex by an adult and who spoke of the experience in an excitedly positive tone. Brooks wrote:

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl’s mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina Monologues."

Foley is now universally reviled. But the Ensler play, which depicts the secretary’s affair with the 13-year-old as a glorious awakening, is revered. In the original version of the play, the under-age girl declares, “I say, if it was a rape, it was a good rape, then, a rape that turned my [vagina] into a kind of heaven.” When I saw Ensler perform the play several years ago in New York, everyone roared in approval. Ensler has since changed the girl’s age to 16 — the age of Foley’s pages — and audiences still embrace the play and that scene at colleges and in theaters around the world.

Is this the downfall of Milo?

"Milo Yiannopoulos Disinvited From CPAC Over Pedophilia Commentary."

Milo's defense of himself is included at that link:

I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim.

I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors. I am horrified by pedophilia and I have devoted large portions of my career as a journalist to exposing child abusers. I've outed three of them, in fact -- three more than most of my critics. And I've repeatedly expressed disgust at pedophilia in my feature and opinion writing. My professional record is very clear.

But I do understand that these videos, even though some of them are edited deceptively, paint a different picture....

Why aren't there some great anti-Trump humor books?

I was curious about the continuing sales of Milo Yiannopoulos's book (which isn't out until June 13th*). Looking around, I stumbled into Amazon's Best Sellers in Political Humor:



I'm not surprised to see 3 versions of Milo's book hogging the top row. What shocks me is that there's nothing really happening in what I would have thought was the rich field of anti-Trump humor. There are 2 books. One is just a compilation of Doonesbury strips from the past 30 years, and it came out last July, before the "pussy" recording, before the winning of the election. Essence of old and out of date. The other one is also from last July, "A Child's First Book of Trump." Cute enough...



... but where's anything even slightly up-to-date? Where's something that deals with Trump's success, something that takes him on without assuming he's a such an easy target that the laughs are already implicitly there? Two of the next 4 books on the list are about historical figures like George Washington. The one about "The Daily Show" is a history of a humor show, not new humor at all. And the Bill Bryson book came out in 1996 (and is about traveling through England).

If you go to the link and keep scrolling, you'll have to go to #21 to find another Trump book (and it's a trifle, "The Trump Coloring Book," from December 2015, probably intended as a joke gift, with Trump in a Superman costume on the cover).  Keep scrolling, and you'll find the next Trump item at #30, "2017 Donald Trump Out of Office Countdown Wall Calendar" (which isn't a book). Then there's something like "Trump Memes" around 40, and at #66 "Not My F*cking President" (and it's another fucking coloring book).

What's up, hilarious Trump haters? Where are the books?!
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* That's one day before Donald Trump's birthday, as I learned from Trump's speech at the rally yesterday. Maybe I'd heard about his birthday before, but I don't remember, and it made us perk up with what felt like new information: His birthday is on Flag Day. Interesting that he's never made a thing out of Born on Flag Day (which is close to the old brag "born on the 4th of July").

Some people think Donald Trump is a compulsive braggart, but the absence of bragging is hard to see, so I'm pointing it out. Now, there's good reason not to brag about the date of your birth: Show me the unborn child who even knows the date and I will humor your fantasy that this naive entity may have a plan to resist expulsion from the maternal enclosure or burst forth early to claim a desirable day for his birthday.

And it's not effective to say you're more of a patriot because of your birthday when your message is let's all be very patriotic together. Here, from the transcript, is how Trump dropped the reference to his Flag Day birthday:

The dishonest media... have their own agenda and their agenda is not your agenda. In fact, Thomas Jefferson said, “nothing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” “Truth itself,” he said, “becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle,” that was June 14, my birthday, 1807. 

But maybe he was subtly nudging us to think that patriotic holiday birthday means something. He'd just highlighted Thomas Jefferson, the person most famous for being born dying on an American patriotic holiday. But Jefferson didn't call attention to the fact himself. He wrote: "The only birthday I ever commemorate is that of our Independence, the Fourth of July."