In effect, the extremist fringe of the alt-right and the leftist media worked together to define “alt-right” as something narrow and ugly, and entirely different from the broad, culturally libertarian movement Bokhari and I sketched out. This wanton virtue signaling was wholly unjust to young members of the movement who were flirting with dangerous imagery and boundary pushing. Bokhari and I called them “memesters,” and those are the people I will always speak up for. God knows I’ve dabbled with dangerous iconography myself. I wore just about every political symbol you can imagine in my teens and early-twenties experimentation phase. Not because I have any particular love for the regimes they came from. I just like pissing people off!
There are lot worse things you could do in your youth than shock National Review writers on Twitter. As many realized during the 2016 election, National Review needed a little shocking.
For the record, flirtation with the alt-right is nowhere near as deplorable as the left-wing extremist youth movements of the 60s and 70s. If you currently attend Columbia University, you might find yourself in a class led by adjunct professor Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground terrorist who served twenty years in jail for assisting in the murder of two Nyack, New York policemen, including the first black officer in the precinct.
Even before her release, Harvard Educational Review was publishing her articles. Surprise, surprise: if you join a left-wing extremist organization, your life is not going to be ruined.
And of course, if you were a student at the University of Illinois in the early 2000s, you may well have found yourself taught by Obama associate William Charles “Bill” Ayers, an unreformed communist and co-founder of the Weather Underground, responsible for dozens of terrorist attacks on targets ranging from police precincts to the Pentagon.23
At least he never compared a black person to Harambe on Twitter.
I have no sympathy for Ayers and others who took part in and directed terrorist violence in the 70s. I would be sympathetic to someone who hung a Weather Underground flag in their dorm-room because of the rebellious appeal it represented in that era. Young people have always dabbled in radical, dangerous ideas, and so long as such dabbling was only a phase and did not extend into violence, they shouldn’t be punished for it later in life. Maajid Nawaz, former member of the Islamist group Hizb Ut-Tahrir and now one of the world’s leading anti-extremist campaigners is a perfect example of why we should be lenient about what people do in their youth.
My support of dangerous memes holds, by the way, even if your desire to explode polite taboos includes taking aim at the Holocaust. This is where I lose some of my conservative readers, but hear me out.
What a lot of conservatives don’t realize is that no one aged 21 knows anyone who was alive during World War II. And because they’re not educated properly, they don’t regard anti-Semitism any differently from racism or sexism.
I happen to disagree, strongly, that anti-Semitism is just like racism or sexism. I think it’s a unique case, and in my college talks I often underscore what I think is a particularly virulent history of bigotry against Jews. Since there have been Jews, it has always been dangerous to be one, somewhere in the world. But a lot of teenagers I talk to regard right-wing journalists complaining about oven jokes with the same contempt they have for left-wing complaints about racism and sexism. They think it’s all a load of crap cooked up to save people’s feelings. And when you look at what has passed for anti-Semitism in the age of identity politics, they have a point.
It’s simply a fact that Jews are disproportionately well-represented in the media, entertainment industry and in banking. We perform well in those industries! And merely pointing out that statistical success should not be considered anti-Semitic. When you attack people for telling the truth, you lose credibility—and young observers might just lump you in with the race-baiters of Black Lives Matter and the dishonest professional victims who make up the majority of third-wave feminism.
I understand why so many young people find jokes about the Second World War attractive: they drive establishment types, especially conservatives, absolutely crackers. And I will defend to the death their right to tweet jokes about gas ovens, no matter how badly their words may burn.
THE ALT-RIGHT DECLARES A HOLY CRUSADE—AGAINST ME
From day one, the media had an agenda with the alt-right: turn it into a synonym for “Neo-Nazi,” and then accuse all young conservatives of being members of the movement. It’s an old game, and it’s growing exceedingly tedious.
Because I was guilty of writing the only even-handed analysis of the alt-right—in other words, I gave them a fair hearing, as I thought journalists were supposed to do—the mainstream media decided to crown me queen of the movement.
I publicly stated numerous times that I was not a member of the alt-right but it didn’t make a difference. Nothing would make the media tell the truth: journalists simply lie and lie until their enemies are beaten into submission. I won’t be beaten into submission by anything other than a BBC.
The only people who want me at the head of the alt-right are the mainstream media, who have variously described me as a “leader,” a “self-proclaimed leader” and a “face” of the movement. These include NPR, BBC, Bloomberg, Daily Beast, Daily Telegraph, Prospect, Evening Standard, The New Republic, and many, many more.
On the one hand, these guys are declaring the alt-right to be a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic hate group. On the other, they’re saying that a gay Jew with a black boyfriend is the head of it. Something doesn’t quite add up. But consistency has never been a strong point of the liberal media.
I’m willing to accept there are a few idiots working at NPR and Daily Beast who simply don’t know better. The rest are just outright liars. No matter how visually appealing my face is, the alt-right does not want me associated with them. Perhaps some of the younger, less serious memesters wouldn’t mind, but the hardline, white supremacists are unequivocal about it.
“I am hereby declaring a Holy Crusade against Milo Yiannopoulos, who is the single greatest threat our movement has at this time,” wrote Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin last year.24 “He is our archnemesis. We need to stop this kike.”
Frankly, I am overjoyed that both infantile communists and internet Nazis all hate my guts. All the worst people in the world—feminists, cyclists, Black Lives Matter activists, vapers, vegans and, yes, the couple thousand Bitcoin brownshirts living in their parent’s basements really, really hate me.
To the idiots at NBC News, USA Today and CNN: the editor of the most hard-core alt-right site on the web declared me the movement’s “archnemesis.” I will personally pay $10,000 to any of these failing outlets that report this fact (I know they need the money).