As the UK and U.S. trend ever further right in the wake of recent political disasters, we need to diligently track which publications also drift right with the political climate. A principled political outlet doesn’t sway with the times, it upholds consistent, immutable ethics. What’s more, any website worth its salt does not endorse political concepts and figures from the same schools of thought which gave us President Trump, Brexit, the anti-feminist movement, or any of the other brain poison seeping its way into the soil of our countries. No one publication necessarily needs to be written off because they played host to an article that was a little off-colour. We all make mistakes, and in any distinguished publication’s history you’ll find at least a few howlers, but when a respected outlet like The Huffington Post uploads a pro-Milo Yiannopoulos article, it needs to be denounced, and we need to become particularly sensitive to future red flags from that corner of the internet. I’m not going to crawl this landfill of a piece exhaustively, but the political commentary here is so egregiously poor it deserves to be called out in some form.
Just last week, Breitbart News editor and public speaker Milo Yiannopoulos saw one of his speaking engagements canceled when a protest against him at UC Berkeley turned into a violent riot. Rioters broke windows and even took part in brutal beatings of Milo’s supporters. […]
The violent rioters at UC Berkeley are representative of a phenomenon I and other actual liberals call the “regressive left.” The regressive left doesn’t truly stand for liberty. Instead, they stand for the idea that anyone that says anything which offends them or doesn’t fit their narrative can and should be silenced.
Considering Yiannopoulos himself frequently hides behind mischaracterisations of his political opponents while painting himself as a firm advocate of honest speech, it’s not surprising that our Milo fan here does the same thing. While Teitelbaum never outright says it, it’s clear he’s trying to conflate the individuals who protested Yiannopoulos’s visit with those who began rioting, but news sources make a distinction between the two groups. This isn’t a story of a cabal of violent leftists wreaking havoc on an academic establishment; this is a peaceful protest, infiltrated by a group of rioters with a history of socially disruptive behaviour.
I am a liberal because I believe in liberty. First and foremost, my most cherished liberty is freedom of speech. The entire idea of freedom of speech is predicated on the notion that one must protect not only speech which they agree with, but also speech they disagree with. That also extends to speech which *gasp* offends you.
What happens in this paragraph and the text leading on from it is that Teitelbaum carries out a series of slight-of-hand tricks to make him ostensibly seem to embody leftist values while doing anything but. When he says “liberal” here, he’s using it in the most “well, technically” polysci fashion possible and his definition is not equivalent with the “liberals” in the U.S. voter base we typically refer to. Also, if the whole Clinton-Trump election cycle should have taught you anything, it’s that someone just being “liberal” in no way vouches for them as a person who’s not going to let grotesque monster humans trample all over your freedoms and liberties.
The violent rioters at UC Berkeley are representative of a phenomenon I and other actual liberals call the “regressive left.”
And here’s part 2 of the trick. See, in a rational author-audience set-up, the author wouldn’t have to make big proclamations about how progressive they are before making their point unless their point was anti-progressive and they wanted to smooth over the incongruity beforehand. I’m not saying Teitelbaum is consciously trying to cover his tracks here, but the logic is ass-backwards. If all things were working logically, we’d be able to analyse what the author’s views were and conclude for ourselves whether they were progressive, pro-freedom, and pro-liberty. However, reactionary right writers like Teitelbaum expect to be able to tell us they’re progressive upfront and have all of their opinions cast under the cleansing light of progressivism in retrospect, no matter how clearly anti-progressive they are when analysed alone.
Teitelbaum also faces a classic problem which plagues so many other right-wingers in his position. How does he reconcile the idea that he’s progressive with the reality that other progressives hold an opposing view to him? The stock solution is that the other liberals are not real liberals, they’re part of the “regressive left”, while the author, an actual liberal, is part of the progressive left. The fact that he introduces these eye-rolling, well-worn concepts like “Supporting the alt-right is free speech” and “Oh no, regressive left!” as though they’re original ideas shows exactly how disconnected Teitelbaum is from the surrounding political conversation. Again, this shouldn’t be that surprising coming from a Yiannopoulos fan, though. Milo has made a career out of pretending that the most mind-numbing status quo opinions imaginable are somehow break-out, left-field subversions, which brings me to:
Milo is not an oppressor, he’s a messenger. I don’t agree with every aspect of his message. However, I must admit, I agree with some of it. And that’s important. It’s important for people from different sides of the isle to listen to one another. That’s how you find common ground and come to a consensus. It’s how you change minds and strengthen your movement.
Here we reach the inevitable claim that letting a toxic idiot spew forth in the direction of your community is intellectually constructive. The theory is that even if you disagree with all their ideas, those disagreements build strong political pillars for your movement, leaving you as part of a Socratic utopian ideology. One of the problems with this idea is that yeah, if you’re tackling an argument for the first few times, it can help you strengthen your sociopolitical principles, but once you’re tackling iteration #164045 of the same argument, all you’re doing is wasting time. It’s typical of the “free speech” crowd to paradoxically advocate the most predictable, run-down arguments possible. This is typically because they are poorly versed enough in politics to believe that “Modern feminists are the devil” or “The white man’s days are numbered” are original ideas. We’re not discovering anything new by seeing that far-right viewpoints like this are bad, we already knew that. All that giving people like Milo a platform does is legitimise those viewpoints.
When Milo is faced with a tantrum from a protester who disrupts his events, he mercilessly mocks them to no end. However, and this is crucial to my view of Yiannopoulos, when faced with a respectful challenge to his ideas, he’s extremely polite and gives very well thought out answers to genuine questions from liberals.
Remember when Milo went into full-on pisspants mode after losing his Twitter checkmark? Teitelbaum evidently doesn’t because his description of Yiannopoulos here is one where he’s the bastion of calm reason while his opponents cannot stop throwing childish tantrums. It’s not even that I think Teitelbaum is propping up Milo’s view here, even Yiannopoulos describes himself as an outrageous troll. Heck, he appeared in a photo shoot dressed up like a clown. This is Teitelbaum’s vision of a cool-headed academic. Additionally, note that Teitelbaum doesn’t stop to consider here why there might not be that many people talking respectfully to Milo in the first place.
This regressive mindset is not only wrong, it is incredibly dangerous. […] And when they’re not throwing tantrums, these regressives resort to the next most destructive thing, name-calling. You’ve all heard it over the course of the past year. Conservatives are racist, sexist, islamophobic etc.
I want to close with these quotes because they’re reflective of how blind Teitelbaum and many other Milo fans are to the danger that Yiannopoulos poses to those that his rhetoric targets. While Teitelbaum and Yiannpolous ostensibly uphold the position of free speech and expression for all, Yiannapoulos vehemently supported a candidate who not only worked to silence Muslims but locked them out of the country entirely. In fact, Milo himself said that all Muslims should be deported and that Islam itself is comparable to terrorism. He brings to us the profound wisdom that women should just get off of the internet and has helped the rise of a group of gamers who doxxed and harassed various individuals in a deliberate attempt to silence them. And now we can put all the pieces together to see how many nonsense hoops alt-right ideology has to jump through to maintain the illusion of coherence.
It’s important to note that never has Yiannpoulos’s or almost any other alt-righter’s freedom of speech actually been threatened; they just haven’t been given the supreme privilege of talking about whatever they’d like on any university platform they’d like. In the minds of people like Teitelbaum, other people not being at your beck and call to give you an unconditional megaphone for your views is anti-freedom of speech. However, supporting people who harass individuals into silence, want to deport political opponents, and actively shout at entire demographics to exit the conversation space is pro-free speech. In fact, the most destructive thing we can apparently do is name-calling which is purportedly anti-free speech despite being a form of free speech. Even though Yiannopoulos compares Islamic extremism to Islam as a whole and says that Muslims should be sent out of the U.S. on planes, the term “Islamophobe” is also apparently unwarranted here. Keep in mind that Teitelbaum opened his article by scoffing at those who were offended by the speech of others and tried to police it, leaving us to conclude that his Irony Meter is broken.
Look, maybe being called names is the most destructive thing that Teitelbaum can imagine happening as a result of other peoples’ speech, but for those who Milo and co. target, that’s the tip of the iceberg. Speech like Milo’s has the power to influence whether people are allowed into their own home country, whether they get to hang onto basic well-being, whether they get to feel safe and be supported in their educational environment, and whether they get to speak and be heard. The warped anti-logic in effect here is that true advocates of freedom support those spouting fascist views and silencing free speech, while the real supporters of fascist ideology are those who oppose the people praising fascism, to begin with. The logic is that genuine advocates of liberalism are those clamouring for a platform for people spreading far-right views, while anti-progressives are those trying to keep toxicity out of educational spaces.
I’m frequently reluctant to comment on Yiannopoulos because, even for an alt-right personality, he’s more of a public presence than he is a body of ideas and so giving him publicity does significantly fuel him, but I fear that silence is by far a worse option. When you look at the state of freedom and liberty in U.S. politics we are beyond the eleventh hour; there is no time to sit around a table with the fine china and decide if far-right views are maybe not too bad after all, they’re already tearing lives apart. Platforms need to be given to those who genuinely enrich the intellectual space and work against the spread of bigotry, not for it. The Huffington Post should know that by publishing embarrassingly destructive and poorly-founded rhetoric like this, they damage real lives. Learn to make actual arguments or get out of the debate hall.
