A few days ago I brought home from our local library, nestled in Pennsylvania Dutch country, Milo Yiannopoulos’s self-published livre de scandale.
Dangerous is supposedly dynamite, because even Milo’s putative adversary Bill Maher praises the author as “a young, gay alive Christopher Hitchens.” Milo promises that anyone who makes it through his book can learn how “to fight back against campus commies, their enabling professors, the mainstream media, and establishment Republican bores.” All one needs to acquire this ability is Milo’s text, providing the reader can get though his frenetic prose centered on his activities as a self-promoting gadfly.
I’ll concede two things to Milo. One, unlike his erstwhile patron, the sulky Steve Bannon, he can turn a phrase; and although much of what he writes is vacuous, he says what he sets out to say with wit and verve. Two, he has spent much of his young, tumultuous life courting friends who could advance his career as some kind of conservative celebrity, from Bannon and the staff at Breitbart to David Horowitz and more recently, Tucker Carlson. I’m less impressed by the fact that Milo’s dashed around on campuses, challenging academic political correctness in the name of his notion of self-liberation. His adventures have not exactly been life-imperiling. So-called conservative speakers are invited to what are called institutions of higher learning by local Republican organizations, and these organizations, together with Washington-based groups, help pay for their trip and expenses. Since
Making Sense of the Al...
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these appearances are likely to create a ruckus and cause demonstrations, provisions are made to protect the speakers. But if the situation looks really threatening, then the presentation is cancelled, and the snubbed “conservative” (as a lavish consolation prize) is invited on to Fox News to tell his story. As someone who spent more than 40 years battling the PC and other intolerant Lefts on American campuses, without the slightest assistance from Republicans or the conservative media, I am hardly bedazzled by Milo’s daring or showmanship.
As a historian of the American conservative movement, I dove into Milo’s book because I was interested in what it conveyed about the Alt-Right, but my interest quickly dissipated after I read the relevant remarks. I would gather that there used to be an original Alt-Right, which “was the most exciting, dynamic and effective right-wing to emerge since the Tea Party.” This creation was so good that even an “Israeli-supporting former Tea Party member was in those days just as likely to be drawn to it as a Richard Spencer-devotee.” Unfortunately it’s never made clear what this wonderful thing was before Spencer and his confrères ruined it by identifying the Alt-Right with white nationalism and even Holocaust-deniers. In fact it’s hard to figure out much of anything about the movement that Milo credits himself with having founded—and which apparently his well-heeled patrons thought was super. For those who are curious about Milo’s topic, I would urge them to read George Hawley’s Making Sense of the Alt-Right. Unlike Milo, Hawley has studied the subject of his research and doesn’t bother to explore the contributions made by the author of Dangerous, whose formative influence on Hawley’s subject was less than negligible.
