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DePaul University Milo Meltdown


The Kurgan
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So this turns up in the "trending" section of my Facebook newsfeed today. You know, that part of Facebook that's supposed to suppress stories like this:

 

"Milo Yiannopoulos’ event at DePaul University had to be cut short Tuesday night after protesters stormed the stage, blew whistles, grabbed the microphone out of the interviewer’s hand, and threatened to punch Yiannopoulos in the face." - Breitbart

All whilst security remained in the back of the hall, not intervening. Turns out there's a reason why. - Huffpost

 

Yes, that Huffpost. The one that's usually against conservatives, for Black Lives Matter and the polar opposite of Breitbart.

 

(I get both in my newsfeed. Good to get both points of view, you know.)

 

"I talked to a few of the dozen Chicago police officers eventually called into the building, and they were irate. They were well-trained, and well-equipped to handle scenarios such as this. They wanted to do their job, and remove the protesters, but administrators demanded they stand passively and watch."

the Huffpost article goes on to say, "This is an incredibly serious issue. Students who go through US universities will lead our country through a challenging future. If they are not exposed to a variety of viewpoints, they are at a serious disadvantage in meeting those challenges. This is the rare issue where leaders from both parties, including Barack Obama,Bill Clinton and Donald Trump all agree; yet university administrators at DePaul, and across the country refused to confront the issue, afraid to take a stand against militant activism."

 

Mark your calendars folks. Breitbart and Huffpost, Obama, Clinton and Trump actually agree on something.

 

Huffpost also suggested that some of what went on there might actually be, you know, against the law. Or something. But it was feminists and Black Lives Matter who did it, after all, so you never know. If they can't be held to oppressive white male norms of civility and decency, then they can't really be expected to be held to discriminatory white male laws against threats, assault and colluding with law enforcement personnel to enable these acts either now, can't they? Damn Huffpost. They're usually so pro-black and pro-woman. So progressive!

 

Breitbart has also identified one of the ringleaders in the protest. Following a dramatic drop in DePaul's Facebook ratings and a flood of negative commentary all over social media, the College President issued an apology to the College Republicans. Sort of.

 

If you ask me, if Milo Yiannopoulos is the future of western conservatism, there may well be hope for the right after all. Why the neo-cons didn't have an academia that's been captured by progressive identitarian interest groups squarely in their cross-hairs for decades now, I don't know. Seems to me as though that's their key to victory in the culture wars. Had there been more actions like this and a lot fewer nutty religious conspiracy theories, they'd still be the kinds of major intellectual players that they were back in the 1980s and previously. Hell, there might not have been a president Obama. Or a president Bush, come to that. Fox News might have a reputation for having solid journalism. Imagine the possibilities!

 

This is gonna be a game-changer, folks. Perhaps the most significant event in academic politics since the 1960s Students for a Democratic Society (THAT sure turned out well!), and the days when the left actually fought FOR free speech on campus. Imagine that. Meanwhile, for good or ill, the drive to "Make America Great Again" just got a hell of a lot stronger.

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You make it seem as though the media weren't biased in favor of the protesters for the past couple of years. That college campus administrations haven't been complicit in shutting down free speech in the false name of protecting the right to protest, but is really the heckler's veto. That disruptive protests haven't become the common tool for shutting down alternative voices and that the unquestioning positive coverage of protests such as the Mizzou incident didn't happen. Not to mention the lives that were destroyed as collateral damage in the black lives matter movement.

 

I mean, these publications are welcome to the party. But you can ask any of the speakers on the campus circuit whether this behavior is new. It's not, not even close. I can pull up as many articles as you want of speakers, not all conservative, some just out of phase with some group's hobby horse, had their events illegally disrupted and cancelled by protesters who were not simply arrested and suspended from the school as they should routinely be.

 

The media might be turning on them now, but have no doubt that they propped up and helped create the problem in the first place.

 

 

 

If you ask me, if Milo Yiannopoulos is the future of western conservatism, there may well be hope for the right after all

 

I'm not sure what's all that different between him and a hundred other conservatives like him who have passed across the stage in the past 25 years.

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I'm not sure what's all that different between him and a hundred other conservatives like him who have passed across the stage in the past 25 years.
  • He's fun to listen to. Not grating or browbeating or relying on crude histrionics (see: Cruz, Fiorina, Levine, et al.)
  • He's openly gay, as opposed to the typical sekrit airport/intern homoerotic encounters most conservative men prefer.
  • Doesn't talk about the Christian God in a gross way (i.e. at all. Hardly mentions it outside of illustrating a point).
  • He is open about his bigotry, rather than hiding it behind the U.S. Constitution, "state's rights," or other dog whistles (maybe because he's not American?).
  • He has a sense of humor not only about others, but himself and his ideology.

That makes him different and far better than 99.9% of all conservatives currently taking up far too much space in this world.

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It also boils down to the fundamental differences between the neo-cons and the alt-right. Both of whom stink to high heaven IMO, but that's another matter.

 

The neo-cons might occasionally exploit cultural wedge issues to gain votes, but culture never mattered to them. The odd anti-abortion measure sneaking into a state legislature notwithstanding (and these were the result of grassroots pressure, not elite influence more often than not) the neo-cons never gave a toss about culture or identity. As long as oil was being traded in U.S dollars on the international market, the progressives could have the rest as far as they were concerned. Hell, they actually kind of liked feminism, multiculturalism and mass immigration. It's better and more cost effective to import large amounts of cheap labor than it is to have high domestic birth rates. The neo-cons were a fairly small enclave of business elites who, while being educated themselves, figured a dim witted populace served their interests best. Hence their public anti-intellectualism. And until the advent of social media, it worked fairly well.

 

The alt-right, on the other hand, is all about culture and identity. Much like the progressives, oddly enough, except in complete reverse. So it shouldn't surprise us that just about the first thing they'd do once they had enough political and social clout to try and pull it off is home in on the progressive capture of academia. They know full well that the Ivory Tower is the true bastion of their SJW enemies. So long as "degenerates" and "cucks" are in control of "the cathedral", they'll use it to impart their ideas into the credentialed class who will go on to positions of leadership and influence in society as a whole. And the alt-right are the guys to do it too. They don't go in for, or at least are not front and center about the kind of religious pseudoscience that made the religious right such easy targets of ridicule online. Now it's the SJWs who have opened themselves to ridicule, and are fast coming to the receiving end of no less a tarring than the new atheism gave the religious right back in the days when guys like Basil and Qui-Gon-Vodka were household names hereabouts. Which isn't to say the alt-right don't have their excesses and weak spots to ridicule too. But unlike religious conservatives and MRAs, for instance, they know the new-atheist online feminist playbook and are not hesitating to use similar methods themselves.

 

They don't shrink from the threadbare arsenal of "racist" "misogynist" and "homophobic" that the progressives hurl at anyone they don't like. In fact, they revel in it. Sometimes with the same kind of half-irony that the SJWs "bathe in white male tears" with sometimes played altogether too straight. No pun intended. And Milo himself is rather hard to tar with accusations of homophobia, for reasons that should not require elaboration, though I'm sure the SJWs have tried.

 

No, Milo and Breitbart are not William Kristol and National Review. Not at all. They have about as much in common as Richard Trumpka and Anita Sarkeesian do. Which is next to nothing.

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Yeah, basically that. LK, I have a few nit-picks here and there (not sure the alt-right is all about identity, for example), but good post overall.

 

Not sure what Poe is going on about. I think he's right that the Left has used tactics of this type for a while (perhaps amplified in the last few years due to SJWs), but Yiannopoulos isn't exactly cut from the same cloth as Buckley.

 

There is a pretty significant difference between the alt-right and what drove conservatism in the early 2000s (neo-cons), and from what drove it before then- Reagan style movement conservatism of the 80s, and what drove it before even then- establishment east-coast Rockefeller Republicans in the 50s-70s.

 

Really, the last time a movement like the alt-right existed in the GOP, it was probably the early 1900s, with Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party. Not a perfect analogy, of course, but probably the closest thing in the past century.

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I'm not sure what's all that different between him and a hundred other conservatives like him who have passed across the stage in the past 25 years.
  • He's fun to listen to. Not grating or browbeating or relying on crude histrionics (see: Cruz, Fiorina, Levine, et al.)
  • He's openly gay, as opposed to the typical sekrit airport/intern homoerotic encounters most conservative men prefer.
  • Doesn't talk about the Christian God in a gross way (i.e. at all. Hardly mentions it outside of illustrating a point).
  • He is open about his bigotry, rather than hiding it behind the U.S. Constitution, "state's rights," or other dog whistles (maybe because he's not American?).
  • He has a sense of humor not only about others, but himself and his ideology.

That makes him different and far better than 99.9% of all conservatives currently taking up far too much space in this world.

 

Some cosmetic differences that you think make him more appealing aside, I think he's pretty much in the mold of as the Ann Coulter's of the world. Matter of fact, Coulter's been making money off of protesters making idiots of themselves on college campuses for a long time now.

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Some cosmetic differences that you think make him more appealing aside, I think he's pretty much in the mold of as the Ann Coulter's of the world. Matter of fact, Coulter's been making money off of protesters making idiots of themselves on college campuses for a long time now.

It's more than that. You see, Yiannopoulos actually takes the identitarian left's capture of academia seriously. That's the difference. He's not merely trying to make money off of it. The reasons he ridicules it is because he understands how powerful a weapon ridicule is. He knows that this is where the culture war needs to be fought now. In fact, he knows that 'culture wars' aren't just a shell game that republican politicians use to get white working class votes. He knows that culture matters and that it needs to be taken seriously over the long term, or societies change beyond recognition, and that the radical SJWs are advancing a set of cultural ideals that are a very real existential threat to the civilization of the enlightenment. That's the heart and soul of what conservatism is. Milo Yiannopoulos understands this while Ann Coulter does not. The alt-right, however wrong it may be about a lot of things, is sincere and real. The neo-cons are charlatans, their ideologies a scam and were never anything other than that. He also knows that the biggest problems facing the polities of the English speaking world today are not stagflation, not overly powerful and militant unions, and our biggest enemy in the world is not the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics any more. Hasn't been for a while, actually. This would no doubt come as quite a shock to the William Kristols of the world. This is because unlike movement conservatism, Milo Yiannopoulos is not stuck ideologically in the late 1970s.

 

Conservatives could afford to be stupid back in the early 70s, when they first started courting the white southern vote. They could afford to ignore or dismiss academia back in the days when everybody didn't need a 4 year diploma, even to flip burgers, and the income earning advantages associated with being more credentialed were often enough to push those who did get degrees to the right, at least on economic issues, and that was enough to get the GOP vote and that's what mattered to them. You couldn't cut taxes for high income earners and project military power in resource producing regions if you didn't have movement conservative Republicans in elected offices. So that's what they prioritized. Mind the arts and humanities granola flakes, get your degree and go work for a policy institute or lobbying firm. Things got done that way. It worked. For a while.

 

Sadly, it ain't 1980 or 1994 anymore. Social media gave social justice a reach it could not have dreamed of back in the days when deconstructing Shakespeare's racism was considered important on the left. And a lot of the people working in media, communications and so on went through colleges where they taught that the western canon was racist and misogynistic. And the outcome of that is that Facebook, Twitter and other important social media sites will shut down stuff like "Disdain for Plebs" while leaving the shrillest misandry and "kill whitey" stuff alone (despite the fact that the alt-right pages are still a fraction of the size), if not actually promote it. This is because social media administrators, many prominent bloggers and no small number of journalists outside the Fox News, Redstate or Breitbart ghetto don't believe that marginalized people can be racist or sexist. Guess where they learned that? Hint: not at megachurches. Probably not at policy institutes either.

 

This kind of thing isn't frivolous anymore, if it ever was. Due to the internet and social media, the religious right - once a terrifying colossus driving America ever faster towards a totalitarian theocracy a-la a Margaret Atwood novel, has been reduced to a laughing stock outside of decidedly red states. Association with it pretty much guarantees that the White House will be out of reach. And it's just gone downhill from there. Refuse to serve cakes to gay couples and lose your job. Make a statement opposing gay marriage, transgender washroom rights or the like, and get blacklisted. The neo-cons, in their infinite wisdom, created an economy wherein education is necessary to be economically and socially successful, while maintaining a politics that throve off an uneducated populace, while ignoring the growing dominance and eventual hegemony of their political opponents over the academy. You do not, I repeat, DO NOT alienate and anger the intelligentsia if you want to keep your hold on power, unless you are seeking (as Milo is, and as the progressives themselves did back in the 60s and 70s) to discredit them in favor of your ideas. Your ideas rule among the intellectuals, or you at least have them on your side. That's rule number one. The neo-cons not only failed to do this, but the religious right aided them hand-in-glove in giving the media savvy, academic, technologically proficient progressives all the ammo they could ever want and more. Creation "science" in classrooms! Obama is the Antichrist, and he's coming to take your guns away! Just like all the democrats have been for decades now! YEE HAW!

 

And you know what else? A tax cut wasn't going to fix everything. People stopped believing that too.

 

You see Poe, Milo understands all of this. Ann Coulter does not. That's the difference.

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It's more than that. You see, Yiannopoulos actually takes the identitarian left's capture of academia seriously. That's the difference.

 

How exactly? By pointing it out? That's not new. I'd take David Horrowitz's decades of sounding the alarm on the matter any day over Yiannopoulos. By being snarky about it, throwing bombs, and then shining a light at the results? Again, been done before. Crazy excess on the left has long been known and made fun of (up to the point where it becomes mainstream and mandatory... usually without any vote or legislation attached). You can hear that any day on Limbaugh.

 

I don't dispute that the leftist takeover of academia is a huge problem. What I'm saying is that there's really nothing much new here in this guy that makes me think he's going to be any more successful. That makes me say that he's the future. The work of reforming universities will be decades long if it ever does happen and will be accomplished by the people in the trenches. Conservatives truly will need to infiltrate the bloodstream of the universities, which means people literally dedicating their lives in the same way that liberals happily have done themselves.

 

A few rearguard actions can be built upon (such as the flourishing Federalist Society in law), but a speaker isn't going to actually change anything as long as the professors are standing in front of the students and administrators are setting the standards.

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i have no idea what you said because it was way too long for me to read past the first few sentences but i have a feeling it was really good

 

I did. It was A+ work from LK.

 

Hey LK- question: I know we may disagree on several things, but we come down on the same side when it comes to the SJW wars. You ready to jump on the Trump train yet?

 

If it helps- he's the only candidate, Republican or Democrat (in the past 15, maybe 20, years) that seems to give a sh-t about blue collar wages and the fact that they've been pissed on both parties for decades.

 

Ready to Make America Great Again (even if you're Canadian)??

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Hmm ... with Bernie Sanders quite unlikely to pull this off now, I'd consider it. Not because I'm an enthusiastic supporter of Trump. I'm not. But what he's done, and what Sanders has done (to a lesser extent) that I think has been quite good is that it's forced a confrontation between the political class and the general public. It's exposed the very real yawning chasm that exists between the party machines and the party rank and file. On both sides of the isle, not to mention in the media and so on. I'd sooner go for Sanders than for Trump. I'm an economic socialist before I'm anything else. I'm called racist and misogynist by SJWs the odd time, but I'm called communist a good bit more. And while I'd contest an accusation of racism or misogyny, though I'm unwavering in my SJW stances, I don't argue when I'm called a commie. It ain't a smear if it's true.

 

If Trump is serious in his anti NAFTA, anti TPP, anti mass immigration stances, I'm in. Bring back manufacturing, and cut down on the amount of cheap, foreign labor people like me would be competing with in order to get in on it. Not only is the surplus labor force thereby reduced in size, but solidarity comes so much more naturally to a racially and culturally homogeneous labor force. Plus, you have less use for political correctness, diversity, multiculturalism, and similar drivel since you don't have to legitimize the continued importation of scab, er, I meant diverse surplus population. And since we're now having to rely on increased domestic birth rates to shore up population growth, we can probably kiss feminism good bye too. Which would certainly be the only kiss she and I would both enjoy.

 

Music to my ears, actually.

 

Something tells me that in a few decades, America would look a hell of a lot more like Britain in the late 40s or Sweden in the 70s than Italy or Spain in the 20s and 30s. Although I must admit that Catalonia circa 1936 would be a bit more up my alley. Who's to say what such a future might hold? Make America great again? You never were great. But you soon might be. Just make sure the real conservative in this election loses.

 

Alt-right dumbasses.

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What's startling to me is that the people who seem to gravitate towards Trump are the furthest removed from real power and influence. This tells me a lot less about the nature of the white underclass than it does about what's calling itself the left these days. We've discussed the despite that the "left" has for the white male working class before. It's a despite that the 1% can't express openly. You know, that whole bit about punching down vs. punching up. Much better that a black woman, say, do it for them. Now, said black woman might be a tenured prof at an ivy league college, making a salary in the lower 100k range, with a blog and an occasional column in a local or even regional magazine, and the white males she accuses of being privileged might be on unemployment insurance and food stamps. But we won't draw attention to that. You know, because she's saying what the real power can't say. Or would, at least, be in bad form if they did say it. Openly, at any rate.

 

I've noted the LBJ quote in your sig, Carrie. What I can't help but wonder is just when did the Clintons and the Obamas of this world figure out that college educated women will behave much like the "lowest white man" in your quote once she became similarly convinced of her superiority over the best males. Especially since her liberalism and progressivism will be much more focused on ego based identity politics and abstract notions of societal "power" and "privilege" based on race and gender than on anything like, say, a serious analysis of how the U.S government actually operates, how it works hand-in-glove with corporate power and so on. As long as there's more women and people of color on fortune 500 boards of directors, who cares about how said boards are exploiting sweat labor abroad and union busting at home? It's so much better when groups like Black Lives Matter aren't talking about who's profiting off of private sector involvement in prisons, the militarization of law enforcement and so on. Ditto for Occupy Wall Street, the Anti WTO protests and so on.

 

I suppose you could just call out the storm troopers and put down actions like that the old fashioned way. But that's messy and generates bad press. But wait! All of a sudden, these professional activists show up with their "progressive stack", no-platforming white male activists and turning consciousness raising discussions away from corporate power and influence in government and towards abstract social theories that equate being white, or being male, or being heterosexual, or being cisgendered, or being able bodied, or being thin with being powerful and privileged. So much for racism (or any "ism") being a tool of the bosses to turn the working class against each other. Why use racism to divide and conquor when "social justice" works so much better? So the group's efforts are disrupted and they consume themselves with infighting. At least there's more women and people of color in the movement now. From here on, it might be better referred to as "Indigenize Wall Street" or "Make Wall Street a Rape-Free zone!" That it's so much easier than, say, a general strike for the Milo Yiannopouloses of the world to make fun of is just icing on the cake, really.

 

That's pretty slick, actually. They've come a long way since COINTELPRO.

 

Hell, progressive academia has done such a thorough job that most "educated" women pretty much tune out when the discussion turns to political economy. The numerical majority of the working class is completely inured against anything even faintly resembling class consciousness. Are you actually suggesting she stand in solidarity (whatever that means) with some ... some male when she only makes 70 cents to each dollar he does? At least statistically. F**K that. Women aren't here to be nice, after all. Have a cup of white male tears, pal. After all, on the slight chance a spot in management opens up, he's slightly more statistically likely to get it than she is. Bloody patriarchy. All that talk of banks and interest and the federal reserve and free trade and the petro dollar and globalization is just so ... so ... neckbeard! Pretty good bet that dudebros who spout this kind of hate filled racism and misogyny live in their parent's basement, and can't get laid. Or at least that's what her "lean-in" mentor who's CEO ex husband's divorce settlement paid for her Ivy league tuition says. And since she's a fellow oppressed womyn in a patriarchal society, she must be right!

 

In the meantime, said white male neckbeards want nothing to do with unions, socialism, anarchism or anything like that because of the snobbish, effeminate "left" and its hatred for white males is all just a bunch of "cultural Marxism!" Like I said, slick.

 

With a "left" like this, who needs conservatives? Forgive me if I've strayed into a place where Alex Jones and Noam Chomsky might meet, but if you ask me, the SJWs are the best thing to ever happen to the ruling class. No wonder corporate media loves them so much!

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With a "left" like this, who needs conservatives? Forgive me if I've strayed into a place where Alex Jones and Noam Chomsky might meet, but if you ask me, the SJWs are the best thing to ever happen to the ruling class. No wonder corporate media loves them so much!




Hyman started college in the eighties. Her generation, she said, protested against Tipper Gore for wanting to put warning labels on records. “My students want warning labels on class content, and I feel—I don’t even know how to articulate it,” she said. “Part of me feels that my leftist students are doing the right wing’s job for it.”


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I have a former student that attends DePaul. He posted an email on Facebook from DePaul stating someone found a noose on campus today. $20 says that it was placed there by one of these protesters.

http://www.dangerandplay.com/2016/05/27/hate-crime-hoax-at-depaul-by-girl-who-wants-to-get-famous/

 

Just sayin'.

 

This reeked of attention-seeking. The threat was vague and without any specific target.

 

I have investigated hundreds of cases of harassment: racial, sexual, homophobic, etc. IN MY EXPERIENCE...only half is one-sided. The other 50% is back and forth or part attention seeking. Before I get accused of being insensitive, I want to be clear that these attention seeking stunts can be just as dangerous as real threats. It takes considerable time and cost to investigate these stunts which takes attention away from real threats of violence.

 

 

I have investigated hundreds of cases of harassment: racial, sexual, homophobic, etc. IN MY EXPERIENCE...only half is one-sided. The other 50% is back and forth or part attention seeking.

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