I don’t always agree with Frank Bruni of the New York Times. But when I do, it’s because of columns like this:
If you halved Donald Trump’s age, changed his sexual orientation, gave him a British accent and fussed with his hair only a little, you’d end up with a creature much like Milo Yiannopoulos.
This habit that American media have developed of lavishing attention on our worst specimens solely for their entertainment value has really reached its apotheosis with the elevation of this hateful, self-promoting child to our “national attention.”
And just to be clear, I’m not just referring to the President, but this malignant little alter ego of his that’s found a spotlight for himself:
Trump the father and Yiannopoulos the son are both provocateurs who realize that in this day and age especially, the currency of celebrity isn’t demeaned by the outrageousness and offensiveness through which a person achieves it.
Both are con men, wrapping themselves in higher causes, though their primary agendas are the advancement of themselves.
Both believe that audience size equals value — and that having people listen to you is the same as having something worthwhile to say.
Yiannopoulos, has recently brokered himself into the national conversation with his full-throated defense of pedophilia, a stance which would rightfully relegate someone not affiliated with the hatemongering Breitbart news site and its legions of rabid right wing fanboys, most of whom apparently have too much “alone” time on their hands, to the dustbin of public disgust and disapprobation. As a darling of the “alt-right” generation of digital racists, his prior excursions in morality have included deliberately outing transgender students, mocking women who are assaulted by men, and denigrating ethnic minorities with paeans to white supremacy. For those paying him the attention he craves, he’s put on a big show of himself.
But the sad fact is we’re all being forced to live in Breitbart-land now, with our so-called President regularly tweeting virulent garbage that his white supremacist chief advisor and former Breitbart CEO, Steve Bannon, whispers in his ear during those sleepless hours in the early morning. In defending statements in which he basically said it’s A-OK for older men to prey on 13 year old boys, Yiannopoulous gave a noticeably Trump-worthy performance:
The point of the news conference, ostensibly, was to contain the damage from resurfaced recordings in which he jokes raunchily about having been sexually abused by a priest and makes light of pederasty, trafficking in the revolting, ridiculous myth that it’s no big deal in the gay world.
Containing the damage from re-surfaced recordings seems to be a pattern these days. Evidently Yiannopoulos felt that this was the New Normal for conservatives in this age of saying whatever fool shit comes into your head, no matter how repugnant or harmful, and waiting for page clicks to dilute and neutralize it:
The real Yiannopoulos kept bubbling up through the fake-sorry Yiannapoulos, who didn’t even pretend all that hard. Presenting himself as some kind of martyr and refashioning himself as some kind of hero, he couldn’t have had more of Trump’s DNA in him if he were Trump’s clone.
As Bruni points out, Yiannopoulos, whose purported “intellect” was fanned and encouraged by Bannon before the election (until today he was a Senior Editor at Breitbart), actually comes across as a microcosm of conservative Republican hypocrisy in the age of Trump:
Together he and Trump have exposed what a cynical, corruptible vessel modern conservatism is.
To hop aboard the triumphant Trump train, no small number of conservatives have mortgaged their belief in free markets, re-evaluated their attachment to free trade, muffled their professed concern for “family values” and basic decency, and put their wariness toward Russia on a shelf.
Indeed, his much-ballyhooed dismissal today from the CPAC conference (at which Trump himself will be speaking this Friday) was not due to any of his prior antics, which prompted his being scheduled in the first place, but due to the fact that even for conservatives, the embrace of pedophilia was just a bridge too far.
At least for this year.