Are We Falling?: Rusty vs. Rod vs. Milo

Milo Yiannopoulos
Rod Dreher's recent post "Are We Declining? Are We Falling?" raised in my mind the spectrum of possible Christian responses to our cultural meltdown. Dreher quotes his friend Rusty Reno and then, as often, begs to differ. I beg to differ even further.

In fact I don't have much patience with Reno. I read his pieces now and then, waiting for one to impress me as more than just fluff. It hasn’t happened yet. Reno is like the David Brooks of First Things--so middle of the road he’s not on any road at all. But the column inches keep piling up, don’t they?

Sorry if that doesn't seem very Christian. I've grown exasperated with pundits who can’t see the cliff we’re heading toward.

Rod’s paragraphs in answer to Reno raise the real questions. (I won't summarize Rod's piece here. Go read it and some of the comments if you like.)

Just in time to save the day rather than answer those questions is "Kara", whose comment posted first, arriving brtight and confident in the findings of a decade of postmodern identity masturbation. Kara comes to show us the Maoists at the gates! Her eagerness to get the rehabilitation camps built ASAP for all those who don’t check the right boxes--it's actually palpable. And Kara may succeed too. Because the Maoists now have all the assets of Silicon Valley and the trendy corporations ready to flatter and virtue-signal their Miley-level dogmas to the Win. Gulags in Nebraska! After which, Rusty Reno (and maybe David Brooks too) will be led away muttering: “But can’t we talk about this?”

Which is why, though I subscribe to Rod’s general thinking on the Benedict Option, on the cultural front, when I encounter these SJW hordes online or in public, I’m in favor of a more Milo-Yiannopoulos-style In Your Face Offend All Their Sensibilities Glee.

Yes, we need to offend their sensibilities (calmly, collectedly, and with glee) because 1) we need to remind them as often as possible that their sensibilities do not have the authority over us they imagine, and 2) their sensibilities are offensive to us.

Debate is dead with these people, and we really have nothing to lose. Except this war.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

A Gay Man Returning to the Catholic Church?

It was in an online discussion of Milo Yiannopoulos’ interview with the Jesuit magazine America. Myself I thought Milo had done a great job of it. Matt, a 20-something gay friend of mine, who’d grown up in a very Catholic town, weighed in to say he was stunned a Jesuit magazine had even agreed to interview Milo. This same friend had recently surprised me with the news that he was attending Mass again. He'd even gone to Confession.

I’d describe Matt as brilliant, precocious, complex. Though part of Catholic culture, he’d always criticized the Church, and for the years I’ve known him was certainly far from being a “practicing Catholic”.

Our discussion that day, in chat, is very brief, but I want to post it because it allowed me to summarize a few points I keep wanting to make--points that also relate to Milo's interview.

Thing is, Matt was already despairing over his future as a practicing Catholic. Here’s how it went:

MATT: Meh. I probably won't go back to Church. I don't want to live a celibate life, and I can't be arsed spending time around people who consider me fundamentally immoral and spiritually disordered. Some crosses are too heavy to bear.

MYSELF: But here's the thing--the point, if I may raise it, that I think you're missing. I don't think any really serious Catholic will think you're "fundamentally immoral". Or rather: they will think we are all fundamentally immoral.

The mistake of post-1960s Westerners is to assume that we are fundamentally defined by our sexuality. This is why we’ve been subject to so much of the SJW cultural ranting regarding this whole question. I myself have come to realize that this shift in the definition of the person is more a late effect of Protestantism, bending toward Gnosticism, than anything else. The shift has taken in many Catholics too. But it's a mistake; it's a modern perversion of the faith. Even the coded definition of people as hetero or some letter of LGBTQwerty is a modern invention. Most cultures through most of human history have just recognized that humans are sexual.

Something eccentric is going on with us. We're out on a limb in our basic anthropology, and we're moving further and further out.

So if I were you, I'd keep thinking this through. And I don't think you're even close to fundamentally immoral. You're probably more fundamentally moral than plenty of the others attending Mass. Milo in his interview was right, I believe, to recognize that he has sin, but that the sin society defines him for is not his worst sin--rather that pride is a more dangerous sin.

One option is to, as it were, cordon off your sex life for the time being. By which I don't mean to actually become celibate, but rather to allow the contradiction to exist, but put it aside while you keep faith with those aspects of the Church's tradition that you can.

I haven't had coffee yet, so I'm not so sure these points are well put. But I think they're very important--that we've been more or less brainwashed by the culture into assuming that our definitional center is sexual behavior. It is not. Even most of the Christians around us are in this respect more "late modern Westerners" than they are Christian. But you don’t have to be.

MATT: Good points. And thanks for the advice! Maybe I’m being over-dramatic on this question.

I'm not all that obsessed with sex anyway. I just worked myself up into a tizzy thinking, "Who are THEY to demand that I be celibate!"--without realizing that, in theory at least, all Catholics could spend their lives celibate if they go unmarried.

I'll keep thinking these things through, and continue with my experiment. In any case, I'm not in a relationship at present.

* * *

And that was that. Myself I don’t know how most gays or lesbians will react to my points, but I do stand by them as important. The contemporary world, especially post-1960s, has sex on the brain in ways that warp what is essential in both the meaning of personhood and the meaning of faith. And, I'd add, in the meaning of sex itself.

E.M.

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest damn humor in the West.

Defending Milo

So CPAC has cancelled Milo’s speaking invitation. Which was predictable enough. Organizers of conservative conferences have their role, Milo has his.

More troubling in my mind is that Simon & Schuster has cancelled his book deal. It’s obvious they’re afraid of backlash, but I think they will regret it. If he doesn’t burn out, Milo almost surely has a brilliant future ahead of him.

In any case, the haters are jumping around in glee. And who has haters like Milo?

I’ve been a fan since I started following him not long ago, around the time Twitter banned him. Yes, I find problems with some of his shtick, but in general I’ve been sympathetic. Such deeply paradoxical characters usually grab my attention, but this one was also managing to play a few important roles at once.

Now in fact I’m even more sympathetic. Because one brilliant blogger, Rachel Fulton Brown, has made clearer what I was responding to--namely the infectious combination in Milo of dangerous truth-telling and being utterly himself, painful contradictions and all. (I came upon this piece via Rod Dreher's blog, where a pitched battle is going on over Milo as conservative.)

Brown begins as follows:

Everybody hates a bully, or so we say. Yesterday, the national media bullied into silence a young man who had risen to fame speaking to audiences of young women and men about the lies that the grown-ups had told them for decades.

Lies about the relationship between women and men. That women don't need men. That all men are potential rapists. That women should aspire to something other than motherhood or they are wasting their lives. That women should like casual sex with strangers, hooking up just for the sake of the orgasm. That the children will be fine if their parents divorce. That abortion is morally good.

Everyone knows these are lies. The young woman who wakes up in the morning having lost her virginity to a man who isn't there and will not marry her. The young man who is tempted into exciting and transgressive sex with an older man and finds himself trapped by his desire in a lifestyle he cannot leave. The young woman who spends her most fertile years working in a career that leaves her childless at forty because she can no longer conceive and has no husband. The young man who has no ambition to work because he has no wife to care for or children to feed.

But the grown-ups tell them to shut up, not to complain. Don't they know how awful it is that women don't earn as much over the course of their lifetime as men? Don't they know that men are still the ones with all the power, even though the number of men completing higher education has continued to drop? Don't they know that nobody should be able to force a woman to bear a child she does not want, even if she did enjoy the sex by which the child was conceived?

And then a young man comes along and tells them, they were right all along. The young women wanted to be pretty, not grotesquely overweight. The young men wanted to be strong and vigorous and manly. The young women wanted babies as well as careers, and were willing to make adjustments to their ambition in order to stay home with their children. The young men wanted to be challenged to be gentlemanly and chivalrous.

"Gender roles work," the young man told them. "Feminism is cancer. Abortion is murder." And the young women and men cheered for him, because they loved him for telling the truth.

But one really must read the whole thing. Her piece only gets better. Bravissimo, Rachel!

Milo has himself explained his taped remarks that led to the book and speaking cancellations, and I think he’s being honest. His words on that taped segment moved into dangerous territory, as he has acknowledged, but I don’t think the interpretation put on them by many who only hear the clips stands up to the context Milo’s other work provides.

I trust Milo’s honesty. It’s in some ways his main salient characteristic, the very reason he is such a paradox, and surely the reason he drives our fake-ass left out of their minds.

We need Milo, more Milos, if only to help fight the authoritarian poison being pushed by SJWs and their millions of brainwashed cheerleaders. Nobody is fighting this fight as well as he has. This is his key role.

But he has another important role, though it’s hardly noticed. If it weren’t for the somewhat novel fact that this time it is a gay man taking up this persona, he’d be more easily recognized as a 21st-century version of a central Western type: the court jester, the Rabelaisian carnivalesque joker, a character like Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”. These characters, in their willingness to boldly embody the most troubling paradoxes--central among which the paradox that we are spiritual beings trapped in flesh--are a necessary part of any vibrant Western culture. As Catholic "with issues", Milo is playing this role, though, as I say, the fact has so far gone unnoticed.

Milo’s “dangers” are a sign of life, and compared to the dangers represented in the SJW crowd, they’re small beer.

Or in other words: Fascist my ass.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Milo Yiannopoulos vs. America's So-Called Left: Front Lines in the Free Speech Battle

Let’s face it. The American left is a sick joke. I don’t even call it the left anymore. The “left” rather.

The current American left retains none of the positive aspects of the 20th-century left, but virtually all of the negative ones. It cares little about the serious social problems engendered by crony capitalism, focusing instead on the minutiae of political correctness vis-a-vis this or that clan of professional victims. It’s not so much interested in anyone’s actual rights. No, it is interested in groupthink and authority and its own ability to invent new “rights” to impose on society so as to demonstrate that authority. It is a cult, almost a new religion, of political correctness.

And worst of all, our left is now actually proud of the fact that it hates free speech. Its idea of progress--stated over and over in manifesto and university policy paper and demand list--is to ensure that every walking, breathing citizen agrees to its every ideological demand, and it will bully and silence them until they do so. It claims to champion diversity, but the only kinds of diversity it values are race or sexual preference. Diversity of thought is forbidden. Pro “diversity”, it is anti-pluralist and anti-liberal.

This left was on prominent display again last week at Berkeley, when SJW students threw a hissy fit that ended in a riot in protest against fact that Milo Yiannopoulos was going to speak there. And must of the left press gets it almost exactly wrong. Here’s David Kaye in the Guardian: "Our constitutional commitment to debate, dissent and freedom of expression is bumping up against hateful, attention-seeking speakers who rush up to, and often cross over into, incitement to violence, harassment and hatred."

The problem? The left has no “constitutional commitment to debate, dissent and freedom of expression". Kaye’s piece goes on, predictably, to blame the victims: Milo and those conservative students who wanted him to speak, and some of whom were seriously beaten by left protesters.

“Hateful, attention-seeking speakers”? “[Crossing] over into incitement to violence”? That is a description in this instance of the protesters, Mr. Kaye, not the conservatives who criticize those protesters.

University campuses are regularly visited by hateful speakers, employ hateful professors and are rocked by hateful gangs of students. But hateful as they are, and provocative as their speech might get sometimes, they are almost never called out as hateful and their comments are never called "harassment" or "incitement". Why not? Because these groups target, mock, or “call for action” against 1) men; 2) white people; 3) Christians. It’s not hate or harassment if you’re target isn’t one of the protected identities beloved of our SJW left.

I have spent plenty of time in these milieus, and the hatred that motivates these people is palpable. Yes, most of them do not call for actual violence in their pronouncements, but they do everything they can to shut up or ruin the careers of anyone who does not repeat their mantras. That this is true in our universities is depressing, but not surprising. But it is growing almost equally true in the corporate world.

Milo has never to my knowledge encouraged his admirers to engage in violence, but he has encouraged them to engage in scorn and laughter, neither of which (sorry kids) are "hate speech”. Scorn and laughter are elements of ridicule, and they fit with biting criticism, a necessary part in any democratic society. Ridicule or criticism is in fact what scorn and laughter ARE called when they come from the left. When Milo employs them, however, suddenly it is “hate speech”, and he must be shut up or shouted down or, if a lot of those Berkeley students had their way, beaten to death.

Let's be clear: Milo doesn’t consider black people, or transsexuals, or whatever group of people ridiculous or deserving of mockery per se. He doesn’t consider people ridiculous because of what they are. This is obvious to anyone who takes the time to listen to even a couple of his talks. Rather, what Milo seeks to ridicule are the hypocritical ways different groups politicize what they are through the playbook of our current left politics.

In America we have plenty of hard-edged satirists. One of them, a brilliant satirist on the liberal left, was Jon Stewart. Stewart employed the same arsenal of tropes and tricks used by Milo to make great fun of and throw scorn at: 1) political conservatives; 2) southern people; 3) rural people; 4) religious conservatives. But America called Stewart's work "comedy" or "satire", not "incitement" or "hate speech".

The lesson is: If you are on the left and point out the hypocrisy and stupidity of the left's favorite punching bags (southern whites, rural folks, Christians) it is “comedy”. If you are on the right and point out the hypocrisy and stupidity of left-wing campus ideologues, you are "inciting violence", "harassing", etc.

Our universities are in dire need of reform. It’s getting more obvious by the year. Universities must provide space for speakers or students or professors to speak their minds as long as they do not call for violence. But our campus administrations, fearful of the ire of the student left, functions by a glaring double standard. They do not apply the same standards to speakers on the left as it does to speakers on the right.

University administrations should enact strict policies ASAP that make it clear that protesting visiting speakers is any student’s right, but disrupting their talks or shutting down their talks through mass bullying is censorship and will not be tolerated. Campus police need to start monitoring events and protests and identifying those who seek to disrupt and censor in this way. I’m thinking: One strike and you’re warned, two strikes and you’re expelled.

In fact I'm not optimistic. Most American universities already are going out of their way to implement authoritarian speech codes so as to make everyone feel "welcome" and "safe". This is a grave mistake. University must be a place where young adults debate, where they are challenged out of their comfort zones and shaken out of their preconceived notions. University is not a place where students come to be coddled and celebrated.

It is time to stand up strong against this debased political movement that calls itself the left. Respect for open debate and free speech must be re-established in our public square and especially on our campuses. We need to recognize that free speech is not valuable when it protects popular opinions, but becomes valuable when it protects marginal opinions from being censored. Milo’s talks are well within the bounds of protected free speech. Universities that cannot protect his right to address students who invite him have failed in their most basic mission: to foster open debate between competing social or political views.

Pick up a copy of my collection Idiocy, Ltd. today, deadpan humor so dry it will make your eyes sting, your hair fall out, and paint peel from your walls.