Appearing on the Larry Kudlow show last Saturday, Breitbart Tech and Social Justice editor Milo Yiannopoulos discussed his suspension from Twitter, and how the Republican National Convention, which was held earlier in the week, had changed from previous iterations of the event.
Kudlow began by asking Milo where his “bad boy” reputation came from and why Twitter had banned him from the platform. Milo harkened back to the 1990s, “when people were banned from MTV… Madonna and some of these edgy pop artists [had] violated the social norms of the conservative ‘gatekeepers of culture’… There was a little bit of pearl clutching going on from the social Conservatives and the Christian right.”
Milo explained that today the reverse is true, in that those who are “doing the pearl-clutching are the progressive left. They are people who don’t like jokes very much, they don’t like it when you disagree with a woman or you disagree with a black person.” His Twitter suspension was directly linked to this, because all Milo had done was written “a very critical review about the new Ghostbusters movie”, and because Leslie Jones, who played one of the new Ghostbusters in the film “didn’t like it very much”, Twitter took his profile down. Unfortunately for Twitter, it had turned Milo into a “counter-culture icon… a free speech martyr. I am at a level of counter-cultural cool that artists who are banned from MTV in the 90s had. It’s a very remarkable thing. Twitter is very dumb to do it too, because they don’t realise the power they hand you when they turn you into a dangerous figure like this.”
Of course, writing a critical review of a film does not violate the Twitter ToS, so Kudlow pressed on, inquiring as to what “besides being politically incorrect insofar as your criticism and your mockery of … far left wackos” did Milo actually do that was worthy of removal from the network? In response, Milo first corrected Kudlow, as he is not “politically incorrect, [but] very politically incorrect! I make jokes about everybody – nobody is safe. I like to make jokes about people on the left, people on the right, men, women, black people, white people, you name it. I make jokes about everybody.”
For Milo, the problem is that “being politically incorrect towards one of the left’s protected victim classes is being characterized by the left as abuse and harassment and all of these other weird Orwellian phrases,” which is another way to “describe the fact that the left doesn’t have a sense of humour and does not like jokes very much. So to answer your question I did nothing wrong, absolutely nothing.” Milo noted that “Twitter has not been able to provide any evidence whatsoever that I’ve been responsible for any of the nasty things that Leslie Jones did receive. They are holding me responsible for the behaviour of others. They don’t hold Justin Bieber responsible when his fans cut themselves. They don’t hold Beyonce responsible when her fans go after Taylor Swift with death threats and rape threats. But they decided that because I am a conservative and because they don’t like me very much they decided to hold Me responsible for what other people do on on the Internet after I write a review of a movie. It is ridiculous.”
The immediate response of Kudlow was asking if Milo could sue them. He replied that it was possible, but that the really interesting part would be if “Twitter were be asked to provide all the emails that went into the discussion that contributed to the decision to ban me. I don’t think the company wants those public … can you imagine what would happen if somebody filed a lawsuit and gets discovery and says ‘right I want copies of all the emails and all the slack messages and all of the other things between Twitter executives that have gone into the decisions on who to ban on this platform.’ They would u-turn so quickly on this ban just to make it go away.”
Kudlow jovially remarked that the fact that shareholders know of Milo’s ban would send “Twitter’s stock [even further] down south!” Confirming this, Milo replied that Twitter had “turned me into a little rock star at the RNC. All anybody could talk about when there wasn’t stuff going on stage … was Milo Yiannopoulos.” Milo theorised that Twitter “probably thought they could sneak it out now hoping it will be buried by all of the news from Cleveland.” Unfortunately for Jack Dorsey, “the concentration of world media meant that I could do a little tour. You can probably hear my voice is all hoarse. That’s because I was doing interviews all day over the past 4 days.”
Moving onto the Convention itself, Milo argued that the atmosphere and style of the event proved that “Trump is building an entirely new party. The question for the next five years is whether the Republican Party can adapt itself fast enough to be able to catch up with what Trump is building, or is it just going to split in two and completely disintegrate? When you look at the audience at the RNC this week in Cleveland, it was so different from anything that happened at any Republican Party Convention in a decade.” What was the big difference for Milo? The composition of the crowd was a big clue for him it seems – “it was young, it was fun, and it was glamorous. It was a different kind of young to the DNC with the kind of angry lefty protester types – these young people were glamorous.”
Despite not wanting to “make it all about the gay thing”, Milo had to bring up the great example of Peter Thiel, the a billionaire Silicon Valley investor and one of the founders of PayPal, “who went on the stage and said that ‘I’m proud to be gay, I’m proud to be a Republican and I’m proud to be American’, [which] echoes Trump’s message [of rejecting] the identitarian politics of the left.” Milo finished by noting Trump’s reaction after Thiel’s speech, when he said how happy he was to “see a room full of Republicans cheering for a gay guy. That was a huge cultural moment, an enormous cultural moment, and that’s going to be so damaging and so awkward the left for so long. It gave me huge pleasure to see that.”
Jack Hadfield is a student at the University of Warwick and a regular contributor to Breitbart Tech. You can email him at jack@yiannopoulos.net.
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