I consider myself a liberal, in that I have more liberal views than conservative, though I do have both; I’m non-partisan and slightly left of centre. But, fucking hell, I’m ashamed of liberals these days, who I’d previously considered more enlightened than conservatives, when I look at some liberals’ behaviour. Antifa (anti-fascists) who hypocritically behave like fascists; so-called progressives who, completely lacking self-awareness, take regressive positions, refuse to listen to opposing views and readily employ aggression to silence dissent; Black Lives Matter who, in attempting to draw more attention to racism, have only made race relations worse and whose many members describe white people in the most horrendous terms - again, hypocritically, being as racist, if not more so, than the people they protest!
The list goes on: so-called feminists siding with the least feminist religion in the world, Islam, in which women are second class citizens who can be raped with impunity - many of them children! Progressives are pro-equality for all sexualities but they’re all for a religion where its practitioners routinely tie up gay people and throw them off buildings?!? The scores of moronic codewords to describe the ever-expanding number of gender identities, the propagation of the wage gap myth, the language policing, diversity quotas, the hypersensitivity of students to anything remotely challenging that would take them out of their “safe spaces” - as I said, the list sadly goes on and on.
So it’s no surprise that in such a strange political climate as the one we’re currently in that a well-spoken gay half-Jewish Brit engaged to a black man would be absurdly, and yet effusively, cast by his opponents as one of the most racist, anti-Semitic homophobes in the world, second only to President Troll: Milo Yiannopoulos.
Being known for “hate speech”(translation: anything remotely critical of regressive Leftist doctrine), the chapters in Milo’s first book Dangerous are appropriately labelled “Why Twitter/Feminists/Black Lives Matter Hates Me” etc. An astute thinker and clear writer, Milo runs through his criticisms of these various topics, exposing their contradictions as well as pointing out the double standards that exist in popular culture with the slant ever-increasing towards the Left and rising censorship of any oppositional voices.
Milo’s position boils down to him being 100% for free speech which, in theory, America also stands for. But he’s a controversial figure because 21st century America has unwritten rules about free speech, namely that you must be politically correct, and he most certainly isn’t - and is quite gleeful about it!
I won’t say I agree with everything the man stands for - I don’t believe abortion is wrong and his anti-gay marriage stance seems contrived and calculatingly sensational - but a lot of what he says is common sense and not at all shocking. I mean (assuming you had a visceral reaction to seeing his name and therefore knew something of the man’s laughable “infamy”), really ask yourself what it is he’s done that’s so terrible to garner such a negative rep.
Allegedly advocating for child molestation is probably top of the list (which he immediately deals with at the start of the book), where he first said on Joe Rogan’s podcast and later the Drunken Peasants, that he fondly remembered his sexual experience with a Catholic priest as an underage child. Milo later walked back the comments saying he was drunk but, while it seemed clear that Milo was playing his cheeky, provocative persona for shock laughs, I agree with Joe’s interpretation that, if true, that that was just how Milo had resolved the trauma of being the victim of a pedo in his mind. At any rate, the media selectively took clips from the podcasts to subjectively push a certain viewpoint which was unfair and the polar opposite of journalistic objectivity.
Trolling Leslie Jones on Twitter? He wrote a review of the latest Ghostbusters movie rightly panning it for the garbage it was, poking fun at Leslie Jones in particular, and got banned from Twitter. The reason Twitter gave was that he was inciting his fans to troll Leslie but he did no such thing - Leslie on the other hand definitely encouraged her fans to do so (this, like all of his claims throughout the book, are evidenced in the direct text or cited at the back) but she wasn’t banned.
GamerGate? Well, that’s far too long to get into here but if you only got the Leftist, biased perspective put out by the mainstream media, that only told part of the larger story. Suffice it to say that Milo’s notoriety is less to do with the actual content of his words and actions and more a reflection of today’s hysterical and heightened PC-atmosphere. If the Left hadn’t gone off the deep end like it has these past few years then Milo probably wouldn’t be a thing - hell, Hillary might even be President now!
As you can probably tell I’m familiar with all this stuff which is probably why I wasn’t as engrossed reading this as I’d already heard Milo expound on these topics before - and it is a summation of his well-trodden material with little that’s new. That and, while he makes a lot of sense, he does have the bizarrely conceited idea that he’s some sort of comedian, which he isn’t - aside from describing Tucker Carlson as “a badass warrior of the airwaves”, he didn’t make me laugh once and repeating that he’s good-looking isn’t the killer line he thinks it is. He’s definitely a clever man but the arrogant tone he strikes at times isn’t winning anyone over to his side.
Unfortunately in the anti-intellectual climate we live in, most people will incorrectly associate Milo with white supremacy, racism, etc. (and probably me by proxy for not outright condemning him!) because they only read headlines or short blurbs and are terrified of critical thinking; and to those people, or anyone looking to find out more information on who this Milo guy is, this book is worth reading. You won’t have screaming protesters trying to drown out his voice and you’ll have a more complete understanding of what he does actually stand for. You don’t have to agree with him but in the spirit of free speech and the robustness of democratic political discourse, it’s always a good idea to listen to opposing views and challenge your beliefs.
If you’re interested in the culture wars, Milo is very well-informed on the subject and provides an illuminating overview of it though obviously from more of a right-wing perspective. The obvious partisanship annoys me because I don’t think one side is inherently better than the other (they increasingly seem like two sides of the same coin) but in the broader sense, in the end, superior ideas always win and flawed ideologies fall by the wayside. “Dangerous” is an ironic title because Milo and what he stands for really isn’t and the sooner more people realise this and begin to move past identity politics, the better we’ll all be.
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