REMINDER: IF YOU’RE A CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERTARIAN, BUZZFEED REALLY HATES YOUR GUTS:
[Milo] Yiannopoulos, who rode the angry gusts of GamerGate to become the inaugural technology editor of the far-right Breitbart.com, has sensed the potential of the Chanterculture better than anyone. He gives it a champion in the professional media. In an extraordinary November post called “Why I’m Winning,” he attributed his sudden rise in popularity to his willingness to go against the grain of a reflexively liberal internet media in thrall to the chilling forces of political correctness. And then he made a telling appeal to his audience:
“If you have ever felt bullied, or victimised, or harassed, or marginalised – not by bullshit imaginary concepts like the ‘patriarchy’ but by people who want to stop you expressing yourself and who call you a loser, a manbaby, a shitlord, a privileged cishet white male – then Milo Yiannopoulos is for you.”
Think for a moment about the demographic Yiannopoulos is appealing to as victims: young English-speaking white men, perhaps the least victimized group of people in the world, to whom popular and consumer culture have long catered and who are now angry because they are not doing so quite so much as they were, gosh, a year ago. This kind of reverse victimization politics feels more like the rhetoric you’d hear on the campaign trail (“Milo Yiannopoulos is for you”) than in the tech media. Now it’s everywhere.
I’ll bet this trolling Twitter update from Milo must have really struck fear in the hearts of BuzzFeed bullpen when it first appeared:
And they could certainly use him — just as a reminder: “[Editor In Chief] Ben Smith: BuzzFeed Is Pro-Gay Marriage — Neutral On Shariah.”