Milo professes himself a Catholic and wears a pair of gold crosses around his neck. He speaks about the importance of Christianity for the values of Western civilization. As he put it in one interview: “[Western civilization] has created a religion in which love and self-sacrifice and giving are the highest possible virtues… That’s a good thing… But when you remove discipline and sacrifice from religion you get a cult.”
.. None of these issues, most especially the civilizational roots of culture and virtue in religious faith, are typically addressed in modern college education in America. Rather, they are, for the most part, purposefully avoided.
.. while discussion of Christian theology may no longer be at the center of university education, religion still is—we just don’t call it that anymore.
.. Their minds are already open—and being filled with what they are given in place of religion: multiculturalism; race, class, gender; the purportedly secular ideals of socialism and Marxism. Particularly for those students, and faculty, who have little to no religious education outside of school, these ideals have become their faith. This is why students and faculty find Milo so threatening. He not only challenges them to examine beliefs they have never been taught to question.
Civilities: Why Milo Yiannopoulos is a man to be feared. (It’s not why you think.)
No, the reason to pay attention to the 33-year-old Breitbart editor lies in his ability to provoke otherwise decent citizens to put profits and publicity before civil discourse, and in how his hateful speech incites many to clamp down on the free speech that is a fundamental right in this country. That’s what we most have to fear from him: that we’ll lose ourselves and our values in this mud-wrestling contest.
.. How is a thinking person to reconcile the shameless profiteering of a magazine that supposedly serves the LGBT community with the knee-jerk reaction to suppress this admittedly outrageous voice?
.. I’m reminded of what the great U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, which is that the remedy for hateful speech is not enforced silence, but more speech. As much as I deplore what Yiannopoulos says and the greed that gives him a platform, we should not silence his offensive words. We can only face them with our ongoing message of inclusion and respect, drowning out his message of hate.
Milo Yiannopoulos’s Cynical Book Deal
Though he is often described as a troll provocateur, he prefers the label “free-speech fundamentalist.”
.. Yiannopoulos, too, has suffered an exile—from Twitter, which finally banned him in July, after the Jones affair. Evidently, the episode boosted Yiannopoulos’s sense of himself as a man not to be trifled with.
.. Getting kicked off Twitter hardly stopped Yiannopoulos in his tracks, but it did deny him a major platform for his provocations. That he would parlay his notoriety into some sort of book deal is an unsavory, if inevitable, prospect. The rude surprise is that a major company like Simon & Schuster would be the one to give it to him
.. a man who has helped define the Trump moment’s flippant bigotry in the service of brand-building narcissism.
.. “I met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building—but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”
.. Yiannopoulos’s motivation is not so much ideological as it is fundamentally adolescent; he spreads his bile for the sake of seeing just how much bile-spreading he can get away with
MILO: Lena Dunham Wants the ‘Extinction of White Men,’ While Hillary Plans to Import ISIS
MILO pointed out the similarity between Lena Dunham’s support for the “extinction of white men” and Hillary Clinton’s goal to import potential ISIS members during his talk at Ohio State University on Sunday, announcing “Here’s a taste of Hillary’s America. It’s Lena Dunham talking about the “extinction” of white men.”