After the violence in Charlottesville this weekend, commentators on the Left and the Right are penning columns and blog posts as fast as they possibly can, trying to make sense of the whole thing. Antifa thugs showed up to confront white supremacists waving Nazi flags on American streets, and ugliness was inevitable. For what it’s worth, my take hasn’t changed in the past year or so: This is what post-Christian politics looks like, and we should expect more of it.
In the wake of what appears to be a domestic terrorist attack—an alt-right fanatic ramming his vehicle into a crowd of protestors, killing one and wounding nineteen—conservative commentator Ben Shapiro released two columns contextualizing what had taken place. One was titled “7 Things You Need To Know About The Charlottesville Violence And White Supremacist Terror Attack,” and details the worldview of many prominent alt-right figures, mentioning that provocateur and self-described free speech warrior Milo Yiannopoulos has been an “apologist” for the alt-right, which is true. A laudatory column he co-wrote profiling the alt-right last year has been sent to me over a dozen times in response to my own writing condemning the movement.
Shapiro also reposted a 2016 column titled “An Actual Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right: 8 Things You Need To Know,” which describes Yiannopoulos as the alt-right’s “media cheerleader” who nonetheless does not identify as alt-right himself, which is also undeniably true, even quoting Milo copping out of questions by insisting that he “doesn’t care about politics.” That’s a rather strange admission from someone who is trying to make his cash by transforming himself into the Kim Kardashian of Trumpworld.
It was this last column—not even authored by Shapiro himself—that seems to have set Milo off. He posted the article to his Facebook page with the furious comment “Vile imp,” setting off a firestorm on both his page and Shapiro’s Facebook page of readers demanding that they get along. For some reason, many of Milo’s followers seem to think he is somehow comparable to Shapiro as a genuinely insightful commentator and writer, which is bewildering to me.
It’s first important to note that this so-called Milo-Shapiro feud is almost entirely of Milo’s making. When Shapiro’s wife gave birth to his second child, Milo tweeted a photo of a black child at Shapiro, insinuating that he was a “cuck”—a pornographic term that refers to a man watching his wife have sex with a black man that has been politicized by the alt-right and used to describe conservatives. Milo has released details of Shapiro’s speaking contracts in order to make him look bad, claiming that Shapiro is less flexible than Milo. Which makes sense, considering that Milo is a party animal while Shapiro is a family man with more important things to attend to.
Milo Yiannopoulos seems rather obsessed with Ben Shapiro. At his book launch, he had dancing midgets with yarmulkes on, purportedly to mock Shapiro. He constantly posts videos contrasting the two. He’s even tried to get Shapiro to show up at his events, overtures which Shapiro has understandably ignored considering Milo’s past viciousness. In one of his rare comments on the matter, he said simply that Milo “doesn’t know anything about conservatism” and that “being a provocateur for the sake of being a provocateur is useless,” which seems to sum up Milo’s career pretty well.
Shapiro’s dismissive approach most likely cuts right to the heart of Milo’s obsession with him: Milo is very, very jealous. Ben Shapiro is a brilliant writer who skipped two grades, graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at the age of twenty and then cum laude from Harvard Law School at the age of twenty-three. He’s launched his own media empire with millions of faithful readers and listeners, has written ten best-selling books, and is respected by conservatives far and wide. Milo, on the other hand, was expelled from school and failed to obtain a degree, dropping out of both the University of Manchester and Cambridge. His past business associates consistently accuse him of dishonesty, he was fired from the Daily Telegraph, and he was forced to resign from Breitbart in disgrace after footage surfaced of him appearing to defend sexual relations between young boys and older men. Only one of the books Milo is always claiming to be writing has ever actually been published.
But in 2017, social media followers allow you to recreate yourself, and Milo has since resurfaced with a popular, self-published book Dangerous and has refashioned himself as a celebrity. He only comments on politics in the most generic and frankly boring terms—feminism and Islam are bad, the wage gap doesn’t exist, we hate political correctness—and for the rest posts pictures of himself in various outfits and videos of himself partying with his entourage in his Florida compound. Nothing Milo says about anything hasn’t been already said, more intelligently and eloquently, by Shapiro. Shapiro has respect—Milo has a shtick.
Which is precisely why I find it hard to understand why so many online commentators were so disturbed that Shapiro and Milo were in public disagreement again, with Milo as usual immediately blasting Shapiro with crude name-calling. Milo isn’t conservative. He doesn’t even pretend to be. And if he did pretend to be, how is it that he is still garnering the affection of so many conservatives, considering that his public lifestyle defies everything it used to mean to be a conservative?
Consider just a few examples:
His relaunch party, which signaled his comeback after his meteoric fall from grace and rejection by the conservative movement, featured an entire horde of strippers. So did his book launch. Strip clubs and events with strippers used to be the sort of thing conservatives (and decent people in general) frowned upon. No more, apparently. We’re in the era of post-Christian politics, and Milo is cashing in.
In response to the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida last year, Milo gave a press conference at which he decided to manifest his oh-so-intellectual critique of Islam by making out with Gavin McInnes. McInnes, it must be mentioned, is married. Conservatives once frowned up on people canoodling with people they are not married to.
Milo has quite literally admitted to occasionally moonlighting as a gay prostitute. From his Bloomberg profile: “He says he also hangs around a lot of rich people, some of whom were his sugar daddies. Last time he was in Los Angeles, he says, a white man at the Sunset Tower bar hit on him and gave him $10,000 after having sex with him twice and another $10,000 the following night.”
His campus tour speeches were under-researched, poorly delivered, and not particularly insightful, as I learned upon attending the Michigan State stop of the Dangerous Faggot Tour. To make up for this, Milo’s costumes—he often dresses in full drag—and his constant references to his love for giving black men fellatio fill in the spaces and keep his bros chuckling and coming back. For crudeness, he nearly outpaces Dan Savage.
So, for those who seem torn in the feud between Ben Shapiro, a family man and intelligent commentator who lives the values that he seeks to promote in the culture and Milo Yiannopoulos, a shallow pseudo-celebrity who hosts strippers at his events, has occasionally sold himself for sex, and keeps his audience by telling jokes that should barely qualify as funny for hormonal teenage boys, the answer should be pretty clear. In fact, it’s an indictment of so-called conservative consumers that Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos are even being compared in the first place. Yiannopoulos isn’t anywhere close to Shapiro’s league, and he knows it. Long after Yiannopoulos goes the way of all celebrities and falls from grace (again) or simply gets too old for his shtick, Shapiro will still be behind his microphone and writing his books, with the brains to back him.
That’s why Milo hates him so much in the first place.
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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.
9 thoughts on “Ben Shapiro versus Milo Yiannopoulos”
John says:
I know a number of members of the alt-right and they are very dangerous people. I fully get it that most normal people are sick of political correctness and the campus crazies but as so often happens, the neo nazis go too far the other way. Their racism and casual anti-semitism is sickening.
I went to both Milo’s parties, “Coming out conservative”and the book launch party, and wrote about them for The Daily Caller.
There were no strippers there, or at least none at work and stripping.
There were a variety of people, especially at the book launch, doing theater. This included 3 women wearing Moslem head coverings with black bikinis (not very skimpy ones incidentally), high heels, and fish net stockings. They were described as Moslem strippers, one of many visual jokes at the event. But they were not stripping.
I suppose if you’re going to get super nuanced about what stripping is, that’s your right. Milo described them as strippers, and they were taking clothes off.
I despise Milo. I have no problem with strippers at book events. I published 33+ books on such topics as Saudi Islam and its role in 9-11. Kindly inform me when Ben Shapiro ever debated a leftist of any sort anywhere. The two are equally fraudulent, Shmilo and Yappyro.
Shapiro claims he can destroy leftists in debate? Let him debate me, I was a Stalinist, a Trotskyist, and a neocon, but never a liberal. I have returned to revolutionary left politics in the face of the fascist wave in which Shapiro is the “good fash” who merely says all Islam is evil and that trans people are insane. No Jewish scholar in history held to such a stupid posture. Ever hear of Ignaz Goldziher? Or Bernard Lewis? Or Daniel Pipes? Re trans people, look up Jan Morris.
You are a horde of professional virgins split between two closeted cults, or maybe three, counting Slimebach. You are little fanboys produced by a culture of gamers, manga, and other forms of porn. You work for Putin.
I gore-an-tee you, as the Cajuns say, Benny the fake Hebrew will never debate me. How about on the campus of UCBerkeley, of which I am an alum? Dare ya.
I broke with the radical left to work for Reagan. I did more in one minute to save America than you could do in 1k years.
Here’s a list of famous college dropouts:
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
Frank Lloyd Wright
Buckminster Fuller
James Cameron
Mark Zuckerberg
Tom Hanks
Harrison Ford
Tiger Woods
Put up or shut up, morons. I supported conserv politics at Berkeley when Max Boot was editor of the BERKELEY REVIEW, i.e. before any of you twits was born.
Dare ya, loudmouths. Bring it! Bring a cup; you’ll need it.
He’s debated Cenk Uygur and Sam Harris, both of them left-wing and the latter being a rather intelligent man. He also debated Blaire White (conservative, pro-Trump, and transgender). Just to name a few. I think the main reason leftists don’t debate him is because they choose not to, as they know they would lose very badly.
I think you’ve gone a touch far on your polemics, yet again.
On the word “cuck”. I don’t enjoy being the one to make this distinction, especially given the pornographic auspices you feel derive its usage, but that word does not mean what you think it means. Well, at least not to that degree. “Cuck” is simply shorthand for cuckold. It has no racial distinction. It does not involve any necessary observation of sex, either… though the connotations do involve sex, it is simply this: ‘a man that knowingly stays with his wife (meaning doesn’t divorce or separate) while she actively (meaning occasionally with his knowledge; not constantly with the subject bedside — I am bewildered that I should have to make that distinction) commits adultery’. I don’t know how you contorted that stretch, besides paying too close of attention to Milo, perhaps. It is an insult that designates a man without pride or honour. Contentment for contentments sake, a person who is content to compromise anything for the sake of avoiding confrontation. I have seen the word used umpteenth times, and never in the context you refer.
I don’t use the term myself, but to exaggerate its meaning as pornographic and racist is really something I would expect from the leftist-Democrat media who designate Deplorables, think a cartoon green frog is racist, and that the OK sign is a hidden white power symbol.
In fact, the etymology indicates that it is derived from a genre of pornography that involves a white man watching a black man have sex with his wife. If you check out what prominent alt-righter say about the origins of the word, they admit as such. It’s why they use it–it is a racialized term that they believe encapsulates what is happening to “White America.” Are many of the people who use it unaware of its origins? Sure. But that doesn’t change where the word came from, and why the term was coined in the first place.
I think Milo and Ben are both Dog and Pony Shows, racing against time, and the “next thing” coming around. Of course they hate each other! Actually, Milo is already long out of the race, if he were ever even in it. Shapiro has some substantial talking points, is at least not a fraud, and is quick, but if you put him on slo-mo, there’s not a lot that is sustaining there. To his credit, he doesn’t keep unpleasant company. There are far better Conservative commentators around.
I know a number of members of the alt-right and they are very dangerous people. I fully get it that most normal people are sick of political correctness and the campus crazies but as so often happens, the neo nazis go too far the other way. Their racism and casual anti-semitism is sickening.
I went to both Milo’s parties, “Coming out conservative”and the book launch party, and wrote about them for The Daily Caller.
There were no strippers there, or at least none at work and stripping.
There were a variety of people, especially at the book launch, doing theater. This included 3 women wearing Moslem head coverings with black bikinis (not very skimpy ones incidentally), high heels, and fish net stockings. They were described as Moslem strippers, one of many visual jokes at the event. But they were not stripping.
I suppose if you’re going to get super nuanced about what stripping is, that’s your right. Milo described them as strippers, and they were taking clothes off.
I despise Milo. I have no problem with strippers at book events. I published 33+ books on such topics as Saudi Islam and its role in 9-11. Kindly inform me when Ben Shapiro ever debated a leftist of any sort anywhere. The two are equally fraudulent, Shmilo and Yappyro.
Shapiro claims he can destroy leftists in debate? Let him debate me, I was a Stalinist, a Trotskyist, and a neocon, but never a liberal. I have returned to revolutionary left politics in the face of the fascist wave in which Shapiro is the “good fash” who merely says all Islam is evil and that trans people are insane. No Jewish scholar in history held to such a stupid posture. Ever hear of Ignaz Goldziher? Or Bernard Lewis? Or Daniel Pipes? Re trans people, look up Jan Morris.
You are a horde of professional virgins split between two closeted cults, or maybe three, counting Slimebach. You are little fanboys produced by a culture of gamers, manga, and other forms of porn. You work for Putin.
Here’s my email: schwartz@islamicpluralism.org
I gore-an-tee you, as the Cajuns say, Benny the fake Hebrew will never debate me. How about on the campus of UCBerkeley, of which I am an alum? Dare ya.
I broke with the radical left to work for Reagan. I did more in one minute to save America than you could do in 1k years.
Here’s a list of famous college dropouts:
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
Frank Lloyd Wright
Buckminster Fuller
James Cameron
Mark Zuckerberg
Tom Hanks
Harrison Ford
Tiger Woods
Put up or shut up, morons. I supported conserv politics at Berkeley when Max Boot was editor of the BERKELEY REVIEW, i.e. before any of you twits was born.
Dare ya, loudmouths. Bring it! Bring a cup; you’ll need it.
He’s debated Cenk Uygur and Sam Harris, both of them left-wing and the latter being a rather intelligent man. He also debated Blaire White (conservative, pro-Trump, and transgender). Just to name a few. I think the main reason leftists don’t debate him is because they choose not to, as they know they would lose very badly.
I think you’ve gone a touch far on your polemics, yet again.
On the word “cuck”. I don’t enjoy being the one to make this distinction, especially given the pornographic auspices you feel derive its usage, but that word does not mean what you think it means. Well, at least not to that degree. “Cuck” is simply shorthand for cuckold. It has no racial distinction. It does not involve any necessary observation of sex, either… though the connotations do involve sex, it is simply this: ‘a man that knowingly stays with his wife (meaning doesn’t divorce or separate) while she actively (meaning occasionally with his knowledge; not constantly with the subject bedside — I am bewildered that I should have to make that distinction) commits adultery’. I don’t know how you contorted that stretch, besides paying too close of attention to Milo, perhaps. It is an insult that designates a man without pride or honour. Contentment for contentments sake, a person who is content to compromise anything for the sake of avoiding confrontation. I have seen the word used umpteenth times, and never in the context you refer.
I don’t use the term myself, but to exaggerate its meaning as pornographic and racist is really something I would expect from the leftist-Democrat media who designate Deplorables, think a cartoon green frog is racist, and that the OK sign is a hidden white power symbol.
In fact, the etymology indicates that it is derived from a genre of pornography that involves a white man watching a black man have sex with his wife. If you check out what prominent alt-righter say about the origins of the word, they admit as such. It’s why they use it–it is a racialized term that they believe encapsulates what is happening to “White America.” Are many of the people who use it unaware of its origins? Sure. But that doesn’t change where the word came from, and why the term was coined in the first place.
Please guys, sign this on change.org if you want Milo and Ben to make peace: https://www.change.org/p/ben-shapiro-for-milo-yiannopoulos-and-ben-shapiro-to-make-peace-and-be-friends
I think Milo and Ben are both Dog and Pony Shows, racing against time, and the “next thing” coming around. Of course they hate each other! Actually, Milo is already long out of the race, if he were ever even in it. Shapiro has some substantial talking points, is at least not a fraud, and is quick, but if you put him on slo-mo, there’s not a lot that is sustaining there. To his credit, he doesn’t keep unpleasant company. There are far better Conservative commentators around.