Now Milo Yiannopolis Turns Up to Help Sargon Destroy UKIP

More from the continuing implosion of UKIP thanks to Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. As I’ve blogged about several times previously, Sargon’s one of the extreme right-wing bloggers, vloggers and internet personalities Kipperfuehrer Batten has recruited to boost UKIP’s electoral chances. The others include Mark Meechan, alias Count Dankula, of Nazi pug infamy and Paul Joseph Watson, late of American conspiracy news site, Infowars. As well as the vicious islamophobe and thug, Tommy Robinson. And rather than increase UKIP’s popularity and chances, these personalities are actually torpedoing it massively.

Sargon’s become infamous for a series of comments he made on social media. These include the tweet he sent to Labour MP Jess Phillips, saying ‘I wouldn’t even rape you’. This was bad enough, but then the Sunday before last the Mail on Sunday did a hit piece on him, reporting other comments Sargon had made which suggested he endorsed paedophilia. In one internet conversation, Sargon is supposed to have said that people could quote him as approving of adults have sex with boys. Because they did in ancient Greece, where it was called mentoring. In another chat with the Justicar, another vlogger, who claimed to have had sex before he was 11, Sargon had commented that it depended on the child whether this was right, and had to be considered on a case by case basis. When he was running The Thinkery podcast, Sargon had also made a broadcast with Singaporean vlogger Amos Yee, who genuinely believes that the age of consent should be scrapped.

And this is in addition to Sargon’s own use of racial slurs and his casual antifeminism. Sargon has attacked the media reporting these comments as ‘dirty, dirty smear merchants’, but he hasn’t disavowed them. Or at least, not the tweet directed at Jess Phillips, which he’s tried to defend, as has Batten, who claimed it was satirical. This has just made it all worse.

But, it seems, as Michael Medved used to say when presenting Channel 4’s The Worst of Hollywood back in the 1980s, ‘the worst is yet to come.’ How much worse? Milo Yiannopolis has announced that he’s coming to help Sargon out. That’s how much worse.

Yiannopolis is, you’ll remember, another extreme right-wing pundit. A former technology correspondent for Breitbart, Yiannopolis made his name promoting extreme Conservative views and policies. He was another anti-feminist, who also attacked Blacks, other ethnic minorities and has been accused of homophobia because of his comments about gays. And like Sargon, he tried to excuse it all in the name of ‘free speech’. He also hid behind his own identity as a half-Jewish gay man with a Black husband. A year or so ago he was touring America’s campuses as part of his ‘Dangerous Faggot’ campaign for the Republican party and Donald Trump. He also had a very lucrative book deal ready with the imprint of publishers Simon and Schuster specialising in right-wing politics.

Then it all spectacularly self-destructed. Like Sargon, Yiannopolis opened his mouth to make comments approving of child abuse. This was to Joe Rogan on his internet show, where Yiannopolis revealed that he had been molested when he was 13 by a Roman Catholic priest, called ‘Father Michael’, but claimed that he had been the active seducer. He said that sexual relationships between boys and older men were beneficial in that they helped these young gays with their sexual identity. He also claimed he had been to Hollywood boat parties where very young boys had been employed as prostitutes, but refused to name names. Under Californian law, failure to report sexual abuse is a crime. I don’t think Yiannopolis was formally charged with any offence, but his comments cost him his job with Breitbart, his book contract, and an invitation to the annual American Conservative gathering, CPAC. He has been declared bankrupt to the tune of £4 million. He was also hoping to go to Australia to do a tour there with Tommy Robinson, but the Ozzie authorities refused to let him in. But now Yiannopolis has sent a message telling everyone that he is flying in tomorrow to help Sargon on the campaign trail.

This is someone, who has destroyed their career through comments supporting paedophilia, coming to support someone else, who’s political career is being destroyed because they’ve allegedly made comments supporting child abuse. This brings to mind the old adage, ‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/05/ukip-enlists-disgraced-paedophilia.html

A few days ago, Kevin Logan, Kristi Winters and Steve Shives did a livestream together, in which they discussed and mocked Sargon’s utterly incompetent management of his electoral campaign. To say it is not going well for Sargon is an understatement. Thanks to Sargon, the Gloucestershire branch of UKIP have shut themselves down rather than endorse him as a candidate, posting this on their website. When Sargon went to Gibraltar to drum up support there, as apparently it’s part of the southwest England European constituency, governor Fabian Picardo refused to meet him. The good politico then issued a tweet stating that as far as he was concerned, Sargon’s views represented hate speech that had no place in his country.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73f1TYBlRo4

This is nearly two and three quarter hours long, and I haven’t watched all of it, so I can’t comment on the video as a whole. But the reports and screenshots of Gloucestershire UKIP are at the 38 minute mark.

Logan, Winters and Shives also believed that Sargon was also refused entry to a Beefeater restaurant when he went to my home city of Bristol the other day. He wanted to hold a meeting in it, but somebody phoned them up to warn them that a Fascist wanted to hold his meeting there. So they refused.

The trio also joked that Sargon was the reverse Midas. Just as the ancient King in Greek legend turned all he touched into gold, so Sargon turns everything he comes into contact with to ordure. Why, joked Shives, couldn’t he join the Tories? Quite. And while he’s at it, I’d also like him to join the Jewish Labour Movement and get a job with Gabriel Pogrund on the Sunday Times, writing articles about how Corbyn and his supporters are anti-Semites. That should destroy those organisations.

According to Logan and co, UKIP’s polling is about 2.4 per cent, which is just above the 2 per cent level needed to get one of the two listed candidates for south-west England elected. But Sargon is the second, and at this rate definitely won’t be going to Europe any time soon. But after his performance, and support from Yiannopolis, it’s going to be a good question whether there’s still a UKIP party after this election.

 

 

 

Alt Right Hack Milo Yiannopolis Heads Off to America, No-One in UK Bothered

Here’s another piece of cheering news for those on the Left. Milo Yiannopolis, a leading figure in the Alt Right, has declared that he’s leaving these shores and applying for asylum in America. Why? because he’s a gay man, and does not feel safe in an Islamized Britain. Or at least this is what he’s told the American right-wing Front Page magazine. According to Zelo Street’s article about this world-shattering event, Yiannopolis went on

“In 2015, I wrote the column that secured my place in the pantheon of Right-wing hate figures: ‘I’m A Gay Man And Mass Muslim Immigration Terrifies Me.’ Shortly afterwards, I left London, disturbed by the state of my capital city and hoping that with a megaphone in America I could sound the alarm about European Islamization”.

Like the rest of us, Zelo Street doesn’t remotely accept his claim that Britain has been Islamized, saying that they blinked and missed it. They also call bullsh*t on his tale that he left Blighty for America to warn them about the threat of Islam. The truth was that Yiannopolis was hired by Steve Bannon for the extreme right-wing news organization, Breitbart. They also pour scorn on his claim that he’s a member of any pantheon, on the grounds that he simply isn’t important enough to be one. And this same reason applies to his other claim, that despite being married to an American, he’s applying for asylum because, as a gay man, so many people want him dead. And so he goes on about friends of his having been assaulted by Bangladeshis in public parks simply for letting their dogs void their bowels. In east London, he says, you can’t buy booze after a certain time because it will cause the Muslim minority to start a letter writing campaign against anyone selling alcohol. A Muslim minority, he says, who are disproportionately unemployed and living in affordable housing paid for by the taxpayer. He also claims that

“Muslims with extreme, hateful views about gays and horrible opinions about women would be an irritant and not a menace but for the fact that they are routinely insulated from criticism by a politically-correct media elite that scoffs whenever you mention the appalling social problems that spring up, as night follows day, whenever the area hits a certain percentage of Islamic residents”.

Zelo Street is skeptical about these claims as well, noting that he gives no corroborating proof of Bangladeshi Muslims attacking people, nor that there are any Muslim letter-writing campaigns against shops selling alcohol. The commenters on this piece are also highly skeptical about Islam being the sole reason his unnamed friends have been met with anger because of their dogs. Many people get angry when dogs foul the pavement or public parks, not just Muslims. They also have met with zero problems while buying alcohol from Muslim owned shops. A couple of comments say that if Yiannopolis can’t buy booze after a certain time, it’s because of Lloyd George and the licensing laws than angry Muslims. Also, some of those shopkeeper rightly want to go to bed at 11 O’clock. As for living at taxpayer’s expense in ‘affordable housing’, well, no, they’re not. Affordable housing is not social housing.

Yiannopolis also rants about shariah courts and parallel justice systems, which also don’t exist. He also says that he looks forward to Tommy Robinson, formerly of the EDL and Pegida UK, and his ‘army of brave lads to topple the government and close the border themselves’. Zelo Streets says of this statement that it makes grifters heroic. Which is absolutely true. Robinson, unfortunately, has very many fans and followers, but they’re hardly so many that they’re a threat to democracy by organizing a coup or close the border on their own. And Robinson himself is a grifter. According to a recent hang-out between Kevin Logan and Mike Stuchbery, Robinson is raking in about 900,000 pounds a year in donations from his followers, and his house in Luton reflects that. He is not a poor soldier battling valiantly with limited funds against the well-funded hordes of Islam. The Zelo Street article concludes that Yiannopolis’ piece is a ‘crock of crap’, and that Yiannopolis himself wants a drip-feed of money, if only to pay the lawyer for his asylum claim.

See: http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/01/milo-yiannopoulos-leaving-uk-for-good.html

In fact, Zelo Street is entirely correct in calling Yiannopolis’ article a pile of ordure. I doubt very much if it is militant, intolerant Muslims forcing him to live to leave London and Blighty. The real reason is that Yiannopolis is spectacularly broke. A week or so ago he released a video on the Net from Australia laughing at the fact that he was not 2 million pounds or dollars in debt, as people were claiming but four million.

Well, if he is broke, it’s all his own fault. For a moment it did look as if he was going to be a major figure politically, until he spectacularly managed to torpedo his career with some very disturbing remarks he made on the Joe Rogan Experience, an internet news discussion show.

Yiannopolis is a half-Jewish gay man, whose husband is Black. There’s nothing wrong with that, but he uses his identity as a shield to deny accusations of prejudice when he makes racist, bigoted comments about Blacks, gays and women and feminism. He can’t be prejudiced, the line runs, because he’s gay and attracted to Black men. He’s just telling the truth, which Liberals are determined to silence through accusations of racism and homophobia. As a controversialist for the Alt Right, he was becoming increasingly popular. The other year he launched a tour of American college campuses entitled his ‘Dangerous Faggot’ tour. Obviously and unsurprisingly, this was also met with protests from college feminists and anti-racist protesters. He was so popular that he was offered a very lucrative book deal by the right-wing imprint of Simon and Schuster.

This collapsed with the rest of his career as a political pundit, after he made comments justifying, or appearing to justify, paedophilia on the Joe Rogan show. Milo said that he had been molested when he was 14 by a Roman Catholic priest. However, the priest, who he refused to name, was not the instigator of the relationship. He claimed instead that it had been him, as he was desperate to provoke outrage through relationships with older, adult men. He then went on to claim that such relationships with older men helped gay boys come to terms with their sexuality.

Rogan and his co-host were, like the rest of us, not impressed. They called it was it was: child-abuse. Or at least that’s what it was over in America. They didn’t know about Britain. Well, we can reassure them on that point. It’s called paedophilia over here, where it is also illegal. Yiannopolis also claimed that he had been on boat parties in Hollywood where ‘young boys, very young boys’ were there as prostitutes. He would not, however, say how young, nor who the Hollywood personalities using them were. Commenting on this part of the interview, Kevin Logan stated that it made him feel cold wondering how young these boys were, if Yiannopolis himself was 13 or 14 when he was molested by the priest.

This stopped Yiannopolis’ burgeoning career cold. Simon and Schuster withdrew their promise to publish his book. He had been invited to attend C-SPAN, the big American Conservative gathering. This was also withdrawn. He also found himself sacked from Breitbart, although he claims that he resigned. Apparently several of the staff objected to working with him, and said that they’d leave if he didn’t.

Yiannopolis then made a public apology, stating that he now realized that he was the victim of child abuse. He also denied that his comments support the abuse of children, claiming that gays use the word ‘boy’ to describe other gay men, and he was sorry for not being more careful about using the word to a heterosexual audience, who would not grasp its meaning within gay culture. Kevin Logan, commenting on this part of is apology, stated that Yiannopolis wasn’t telling the truth, as he had clearly talked about ‘boys’, meaning precisely ‘boys’, not adult men.

Yiannopolis had also gone to Australia this winter to do a speaking tour there. This too, however, was a failure, as no-one turned up. And so it seems very much to me that Yiannopolis is leaving the country, not because he’s afraid of homophobic Muslims, but because he’s dead broke and thinks that he might be able to salvage something of his career amongst the American Far Right.

Sweary male feminist and anti-racist vlogger, Kevin Logan, made this video about the collapse of Yiannopolis’ career, which includes clips from the Joe Rogan video.

In another video, Logan says that he was keen to ask Yiannopolis if he had ever acted on his conviction that sex with underage boys was beneficial. Because if he had, then he should just go to the nearest police station and hand himself in. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he’s really leaving London. Other people have also found out about his vile comments, and don’t want him around. Logan himself doesn’t have much sympathy for Yiannopolis’ treatment after he made his vile remarks on the Joe Rogan show either, despite Yiannopolis recognition that he was a victim of child abuse. This was for the simple reason that Yiannopolis had himself made it abundantly clear that he didn’t care about his opponents’ feelings either, even when they were a woman, who had been raped.

And Yiannopolis is another person, who has exploited his fans and followers for his own greed. When he was touring America, he announced he was setting up a fund to provide money for young white men to go to university, and appealed for donations. It was part of his attack on ‘political correctness’ and affirmative action to get more underprivileged Blacks in higher education. Except that it wasn’t. Yiannopolis didn’t set up a separate account, and all the donations went directly to his normal bank account. To date there have been no disbursements. It all looks very much like it was just another money-making scam.

Yiannopolis’ departure across the Atlantic is not that of a persecuted gay man fleeing Muslim persecution in a Britain overrun and dominated by militant Islam. It’s simply a far right propagandist going to try to get rich again after wrecking his career with vile and disgusting comments about the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Zelo Street is right that few people here know about him, or care that he’s going. And given his squalid views and behavior, this country has lost zilch from his departure.

Alt Right Star Milo Yiannopolis Gets Run Out Of New York Bar

Here’s another great video from the left-wing American news site, The Young Turks. It’s a video of Milo Yiannopolis, one of the stars of the Alt Right, being run out of a New York bar. Yiannopolis is gay, half-Jewish, and with a fondness for choosing Blacks as his romantic/ sexual partners. Despite this, Yiannopolis’ own comments and remarks are vehemently racist, as well as deeply anti-feminist and, bizarrely, anti-gay, quite apart from the real racism and misogyny at the core of the Alt Right movement itself. A few years ago he caused controversy when he went on a tour of colleges and universities all over America as part of his campaign to spread the ideas of the Alt Right. Or simply to wind up the left and anyone who takes anti-racism and women’s rights seriously. He styles himself a ‘virtuous troll’, you see, which is supposed to justify him performing stunts and making comments that have absolutely no point except to cause offence. In this case, he succeeded, and Yiannopolis was very happy to talk about how intolerant leftists were on campus. Never mind the real intolerance Yiannopolis himself spouts and represents with his very White supremacist and misogynist friends in the Alt Right.

He was all set to have a book published by Simon and Schuster, I believe, until the footage went viral of him on the Joe Rogan Show apparently condoning child abuse. He was talking about his own abuse by a Roman Catholic priest, which he claimed at the time was a very positive thing, and spoke equally positively about how young boys in such relationships weren’t being abused, but were in fact being psychologically helped.

It was rubbish; vile, dangerous, rubbish. Yiannopolis got dropped by the publisher, sacked from one of his jobs and there was considerable anger within the Republican party. So Yiannopolis appeared a little while later to make a tearful speech declaring that he most certainly does not condone child abuse, and that he recognises that he was himself a victim of it.

But he’s still a racist, and no matter how much he complains about the intolerance of the Left, progressive Americans aren’t standing for it.

The clip shows the welcome Yiannopolis got when he went into a bar in New York for a drink. Unknown to him, the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America were already in there for a meeting. And they let him know exactly what they thought of him by chanting ‘Racist scum get out!’ Yiannopolis took their advice and left.

He turned up on social media to complain that the Socialists wouldn’t let him go to his chair or get his bag. The video shows that he made all this up. The Socialists in the bar don’t stop him from doing anything. They just stand there and chant, until Yiannopolis and what looks like a couple of his friends make their way out.

The hosts for this video, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, state that the Socialists called him a racist because, when he was defining what the Alt Right stood for, he did canvas and take on board the views of White supremacists and the Klan. It’s therefore entirely accurate to describe him as a Nazi. They also make the point that this exactly what he deserves because of his racism and bigotry.

I’ve no doubt that even now various Republican hacks and shills are probably writing articles about how intolerant the Left is, and how they’re blocking free speech and democracy. Just like the Daily Mail and the rest of the right-wing press over here a little while ago was moaning that ‘political correctness’ on British university campuses, and the ‘no-platforming’ of speakers with extreme right-wing, racist, misogynist or other offensive beliefs were a threat to free speech and the democratic free exchange of ideas at university. It’s all nonsense. What they’re really afraid of is the free enquiry they claim to be defending. They resent the fact that students do have and discuss left-wing beliefs, and are active challenging Conservative dogma and policy. And as Tweezer’s despicable treatment of the Windrush generation has shown, all too many in the Tory party are racist and support the institutionally racist maltreatment of non-Whites. From this perspective, it very much looks like their denunciations of ‘left-wing intolerance’ are merely another piece of camouflage to disguise their intention to legitimise real intolerance in the form of racism and right-wing bigotry on campus. All in the name of protecting Conservative values and freedom of speech.

Kevin Logan on Milo Yiannopolis’ Editor’s Notes

I’ve been avoiding talking too much about politics this week as I simply haven’t had the strength to tackle the issues in as much detail as they deserve. Quite apart from the fact that the issues that have been raised in the media this week – the continuing running down of the NHS, the growth of food banks, homelessness and grinding poverty, all to make the poor poorer and inflate the already bloated incomes of the Tory elite, all make me absolutely furious. I’ve been feeling so under the weather that, quite simply, I couldn’t face blogging about them and making myself feel worse mentally as well as physically.

But this is slightly different.

Slate has published a piece about the guidance notes Alt-Right Trumpist cheerleader Milo Yiannopolis has got from his publishers at Simon and Schuster. In this short video, scourge of anti-feminists, racists and general Nazis Kevin Logan goes through the notes, and it’s hilarious.

There are pages and pages of them. And the more you read, the funnier it gets.

You remember Milo Yiannopolis? He was one of the rising stars of the Alt-Right. He’s anti-feminist, anti-immigration and in many peoples’ eyes, racist, although he’s denied that he actually has any Nazi connections. All this despite the fact that he was filmed in a bar getting Hitler salutes from a party of Alt-Right fans.

He was the IT correspondent for Breitbart, many of whose founders, managers and leading staff are racists, and have been described as such by the anti-racism, anti-religious extremism organisation and site Hope Not Hate. Yiannopolis has constantly denied that he’s racist or bigoted by playing the race and sexuality card. He’s half-Jewish, gay, and his partner is Black. And so he argues that he can’t possibly be prejudiced against people of different ethnicities and gays. Well, possibly. But he has said some extremely bigoted, racist and homophobic comments, quite apart from his anti-feminism.

He describes himself as ‘a virtuous troll’. Others just call him a troll. That’s all he is. He’s only good at writing deliberately offensive material, but is otherwise completely unremarkable. But he’s British public school elite, and so Americans, who should know much better, assume that somehow he’s more cultured, knowledgeable, better educated and insightful than he actually is. Sam Seder commented on Yiannopolis that if he wasn’t British, nobody would take any notice of him. I think it’s a fair comment. But it does show the snobbery that goes with class and accent. Incidentally, when I was a kid reading comics, my favourite characters were the Thing in the Fantastic Four, and Powerman, in Powerman and Iron Fist. And it was partly because of their accents. Stan Lee has a terrible memory, and to help him remember which character said what, he used to give them different voices, sometimes based on who was in the media at the time. He made the Thing talk like Jimmy Durante. He was a space pilot, but his speech was that of New York working class. I liked him because he was kind of a blue-collar joe, like my family.

The same with Powerman. He was a Black superhero, real name Luke Cage, who had been subjected to unethical medical experiments to create a superman by a corrupt prison governor after being wrongly convicted. I didn’t understand the racial politics around the strip, but liked the character because he was another lower class character with a working class voice. He also had the same direct approach as the Thing in dealing with supervillains. Whereas Mr. Fantastic, the leader of the Fantastic Four, and Cage’s martial artist partner in fighting crime, Iron Fist would debate philosophically how to deal with the latest threat to the world and the cosmos, according to the demands of reason and science in the case of Mr. Fantastic, and ancient Chinese mystical traditions, in Iron Fists’, the Thing and Powerman simply saw another megalomaniac, who needed to be hit hard until they cried for mercy and stopped trying to take over the world or the universe.

But I digress. Back to Milo. Milo was due to have a book published, but this fell through after he appeared on Joe Rogan’s show defending child abuse. Yiannopolis had been sexually abused himself by a paedophile Roman Catholic priest, but believed that he had been the predator in that situation. From what I understand, the victims of sexual abuse often unfairly blame themselves for their assault, so I’m quite prepared to believe that something like that happened to Yiannopolis. What was unusual – and revolting – was that Yiannopolis appeared to feel no guilt and regret at all about the incident.

Very, very many people were rightly disgust. He got sacked from Breitbart, along with a lot of other companies, his speaking tour had to be cancelled, and the book deal he had managed to finagle fell through.

Well, as Sergeant Major Shut Up used to say on It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot, Mum, ‘Oh, dear. How sad. Never mind.’ It couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke, and Yiannopolis got a taste of the kind invective and vitriol he poured on the ‘SJWs’ and the Left.

He appeared later on to ‘clarify’ his statement – not an apology – saying that he now knew he was the victim of child abuse, and stating that he didn’t promote or approve of the sexual abuse of children. But the damage was done.

Now it seems Yiannopolis’ book deal is back on, though Simon and Schuster really aren’t happy with the manuscript.

Comments include recommendations that he remove the jokes about Black men’s willies, doesn’t call people ‘cucks’, and stop sneering at ugly people. One of these is particularly hilarious, as his editor writes that you can’t claim that ugly people are attracted to the Left. ‘Have you seen the crowd at a Trump rally?’ Quite. I saw the front row of the crowd at BBC coverage of the Tory party convention one year, and they were positively horrific. It seemed to be full of old school country squire types, as drawn by Gerald Scarfe at his most splenetic.

The guidance goes on with comments like ‘No, I will not tolerate you describing a whole class of people as mentally retarded’, and then factual corrections. Like ‘This never happened’. ‘This never happened too.’ ‘No, you’re repeating fake news. There was no Satanism, no blood and no semen’. At one point the editor demands that an entire chapter be excised because it’s just off-topic and offensive.

Here’s the video.

There probably isn’t anything unusual in the amount of editing that Simon and Schuster require. Mainstream publishing houses often request changes or alteration to the manuscript. It happens to the best writers and academics. Years ago I read an interview with the editors of some of the authors of the world’s most influential books. One of them was Germaine Greer’s. Greer had sent in a manuscript about cross-dressing in Shakespeare. A fair enough subject, as there’s a lot of female characters disguising themselves as boys in the Bard’s plays. But she had the insight that Greer was far more interested in gender roles, and suggested she write about that instead. And the result was The Female Eunuch.

At a much lower level of literature, Private Eye had a good chortle about one of ‘Master Storyteller’ Jeffrey Archer’s tawdry epics. Apparently the gossip was that it went through seven rewrites. Ian Fleming’s editor for the Bond books, according to one TV documentary, was a gay man with a keen interest in dressing well. Which is why some of the sex in Bond was less explicit than Fleming intended, but also why Bond became suave, stylish dresser fighting supervillains in impeccably cut dinner suits.

No shame in any of this, then. But what makes it funny is that it’s happened to Yiannopolis, who seems to have been too much of an egotist to think that anything like it could ever really happen to him. Looking through the comments, it’s also clear that the editor really doesn’t like his bigotry, and the invective he spews against racial minorities and the disadvantaged. I got the impression that he or she really didn’t want to have anything to do with book, but has presumably been told they had to work with Yiannopolis because the publishers were going to put it out anyway, no matter what anyone else in the company felt.

And the editor’s clear dislike of his bigotry is a problem for Yiannopolis, because he’s a troll, and that’s just about all he does: pour out sneers, scorn and abuse, like a male version of Anne Coulter, another right-winger, who’s far less intelligent than she thinks she is. And I know that grammatically standards are a bit looser now than they were a few years ago, but when you have the comment ‘This is not a sentence’, it’s clear that Yiannopolis is failing at one of the basic demands of any writer from the editors of small press magazines to the biggest publishing houses and newspapers and magazines. They all insist that you should write properly in grammatically correct sentences. But Yiannopolis has shown that he can’t do that either.

As for the kind of literary snobbery that used to look down very hard on comics and graphic novels, while promoting opinionated bigots like Yiannopolis as ‘serious’ writers, my recommendation is that if you’re given a choice between going to comics convention or seeing Milo, go to the comics convention. You’ll be with nicer people, the comics creators on the panels are very good speakers, and themselves often very literate and cultured. I can remember seeing Charles Vess at the UKCAC Convention in Reading in 1990. Vess is a comics artist, but he’s also produced cover art for SF novels. He gave a fascinating talk about the great artists that have influenced him with slides. And one of the highlights was listening to the publisher of DC, Roy Kanigher, who was very broad New York. Didn’t matter. He was genuinely funny, to the point where the interviewer lost control of the proceedings and Kanigher had the crowd behind him all the way.

Which shows what a lot of people really know already: just because someone’s got a British public school accent, does not make them a genius, or that they’re capable of producing anything worth reading. Comics at their best can be brilliant. They open up children’s and adults’ imaginations, the art can be frankly amazing and quite often the deal with difficult, complex issues in imaginative ways. Think of Neil Gaiman, who started off as one of the writers at 2000 AD before writing the Sandman strip for DC. Or Alan Moore.

Yiannopolis is the opposite. All he does is preach hate, trying to get us to hate our Black, Asian and Latin brothers and sisters, despise the poor, and tell women to know their place. He has no more right to be published, regardless of his notoriety, than anyone else. And the editor’s demand for amendments show it.

Oh, and as regarding publishing fake news, he’d have had far less sympathy from Mike, if by some misfortune Mike had found himself as Yiannopolis’ editor. Proper journalists are expected to check their facts, which Mike was always very keen on. It was he was respected by the people he actually dealt when he was working as a journalist. The problem often comes higher up, at the level of the newspaper editors and publishers. In the case of Rupert Murdoch, I’ve read account of his behaviour at meetings with his legal staff that shows that Murdoch actually doesn’t care about publishing libellous material, if the amount of the fine will be lower than the number of extra copies of the paper the fake news will sale. Fortunately it appears that Simon and Schusters’ editors don’t quite have that attitude. But who knows for how long this will last under Trump. The man is determined to single-handedly destroy everything genuinely great and noble in American culture.