A day in the life of Milo Yiannopoulos:
Wake up. Switch on my Lil Wayne playlist. Do my hair. Put on an impeccably tailored suit. Do my hair some more. Have my driver take me to a TV station, where I’m scheduled to appear in a controversial cultural debate. Face calls for my arrest, and be accused of wanting to assassinate someone. You know, the usual!
I honestly don’t know why this keeps happening. People are like, obsessed with me or something. I’m not sure I can deal with the attention for much longer. See what you guys think.
The latest incident happened on BBC’s The Big Questions, a Sunday morning debate show where I had the pleasure of coming face-to-face with Connie St. Louis, the “science journalism professor” who attained infamy last year after her astonishing series of lies about the Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir. Tim Hunt were lapped up by the media. The resulting controversy dragged on for months, with Hunt — who initially lost several of his positions — slowly being publicly exonerated as her brazen untruths quickly unravelled.
I was on The Big Questions to discuss a serious topic: does the internet reveal men’s hatred of women? The answer is no, it doesn’t. In fact, the reverse is true, with research from the Pew Research Center and the Demos think tank both showing that men are more likely to be the targets of online hatred. According to Pew, 44 per cent of male web users have experienced some form of online harassment, compared to 37 per cent of female web users. Demos, meanwhile, found that high-profile men on social media were more than twice as likely to receive abuse when compared with high-profile women.
Men are more likely than women to be physically threatened (26 per cent for men versus 23 percent for women), called offensive names (51 versus 50 per cent) and purposefully embarrassed (38 versus 36 per cent). These are the most common forms of online nastiness by far, and the ones feminists like Smurthwaite typically complain about. Women are more likely to be stalked, but — you know where this is going, don’t you? — a lot of that stalking is done by women.
It’s far more socially acceptable to abuse men. They’re seen as being able to take it. Ironically, feminists who constantly whine about online harassment are reinforcing old ideas about weak, fragile women. They’re making themselves into damsels in distress.
Modern feminism had created an environment in which it’s open season on men, with hashtags such as #KillAllWhiteMen and memes about “male tears” endorsed even by journalists major media groups. Is it any wonder, with such female chauvinism proliferating on social media, that some men reciprocate with harsh words? Anyway, as I say, the problem online isn’t men. It’s women.
The most you could say as a feminist while sticking to the facts is that online abuse isn’t a strongly gendered issue. Social media certainly doesn’t reveal men’s hatred for women: rather, it reveals women’s hatred for men, women — and themselves.
It’s interesting that female trolls are almost entirely ignored by the media. When, at the end of July 2013, Labour MP Stella Creasy and the campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez “were subjected to a torrent of violent abuse on Twitter,” it was only the male trolls who initially got the spotlight. The woman who went to jail — for longer than the bloke, because she had form — was ignored until her plea and sentencing.
A Google News search query shows that no media outlets reported on the woman’s arrest, despite heavily featuring the simultaneous arrests of men. They only reported on her conviction. 318 articles cover the male arrests; none cover hers.
Of course, none of this matters to feminists, who have a narrative to maintain. St. Louis and Smurthwaite decided that instead of addressing my points, they’d engage in slander instead. In a bizarre claim, St. Louis alleged that I had been unverified on Twitter because I’d called for someone’s “assassination.” Naturally, she couldn’t produce any evidence for this extraordinary statement, the same way evidence of some of the claims on her CV didn’t exist — a serial fabricator to the end. I asked her multiple times to elaborate on her allegation. She avoided the question.
Perhaps I’m being unkind. Maybe the dotty old bird has mistaken me for Charles C. Johnson, who was kicked off Twitter a while ago after a metaphor was mistaken for a death threat. I’m not sure if St Louis is affected by age, or whether it’s the dreadlocks tumbling across those appalling glasses of hers, but last I checked I’m not a ginger blogger from California. In fact, if I woke up ginger I’d probably kill myself.
To tell the truth, I don’t know how or why St. Louis mistook me for Chuck Johnson. I guess we white people all look the same.
If you want to know why just 7 per cent of British women and 18 per cent of American women consider themselves feminists, you don’t have to look much further than these two clownish examples. Smurthwaite is of course a professional provocateur and troll who likes to play the victim when she loses debates. But St. Louis is a more sinister figure.
Firstly, there’s the embroidery and sexing-up she’s done to her CV. St. Louis has in the past claimed that she has written for the Independent, Daily Mail and Sunday Times. These claims are false. Digital archives for the three newspapers, stretching back over 20 years, show no bylined articles by St. Louis. She claims membership of the grand-sounding “Royal Institution” as a science qualification: the Royal Institution is a museum.
She claimed to have won a prize for the series Life As A Teenager. The real winner of that prize was the series producer, Erika Wright, whom St. Louis later badmouthed. She claimed to have secured “the first interview with Bill Gates” in the UK. Another lie: that was conducted by Roger White in 1993. Some mark the first print appearance in the UK of Bill Gates even earlier, in September 1988, when journalist Alan Cane of the Financial Times met with him for the newspaper’s “Monday Interview.”
St. Louis was elected to the WFSJ (World Federation of Science Journalists) in 2015. As part of her election she had to submit a 6 Page CV, this had many glaring discrepancies. She writes: “I am a regular contributor to ABC News Worldview TV programme.” Yet ABC News Worldview has not aired for five years. Factiva shows that her last contribution to ABC News Worldview was in May of 2006.
She has claimed to be a “scientist.” Well, only in the very loosest sense. The last time St. Louis saw the inside of a lab was in whatever far-flung alien lie factory that birthed her. She does not “present and produce a range of programmes” for Radio 4, as she used to claim on her CV. And so it goes on, and on, and on.
City University, at which St. Louis is — get this — the director of the MA in science journalism, had to remove her resume from their website for an “update” which in fact simply excised many of these false claims after a report from the Mail on Sunday.
And then, of course, there’s St. Louis’s grotesquely untruthful witch-hunt against Sir Tim Hunt.
It is by now the stuff of journalistic legend: St. Louis lied and lied and lied about Hunt, a Nobel prize winner who works on cancer. She said that Hunt had “ruined” a lunch with sexist comments, omitting critical context that showed that Hunt was actually laughing at his own expense.
She claimed that an awkward silence descended on the room when in fact, as an EU official later reported, “I didn’t notice any uncomfortable silence or any awkwardness in the room as reported on social and then mainstream media.”
St. Louis’s claims about Hunt have now been totally and utterly debunked. It’s now crystal clear: she lied. If Tim Hunt was expected to step down over sexist remarks that never existed, why is St. Louis still in her post, training the next generation of journalists?
I’m not going to lie, St. Louis freezing up when I called her to the mat about lying on her CV was priceless. Mostly, thankfully, because her dishonest campaign has failed utterly. Hunt is off to Japan with his wife, who has accepted a top job there. I did have to wonder, though: considering that country’s fascination with huge, terrifying fire-breathing lizards, why St. Louis doesn’t live there already.
The other feminist on the panel today was Kate Smurthwaite (or, as I like to call her, sweetie darling). Smurthwaite spent the majority of the show in the classic feminist quantum superstate of aggressor and victim: a strong, independent woman who don’t need no man… right up until someone says something she doesn’t like, and then it’s time to call in the patriarchy for help.
Like St. Louis, Smurthwaite wasn’t interested in addressing my arguments, so instead issued a not-so-subtle call for my arrest and imprisonment — over tweets she doesn’t like. “I think when we see a few high profile individuals – perhaps including some in this studio – locked up, it’ll be time for others to back off, and I very much look forward to that day.”
I consider it a great compliment, of course, that my opponents want me locked up. It’s the sort of thing that only happens to people telling truths that others don’t want to hear, or rugged heroic rebels fighting authoritarian regimes. Despite my unwavering conservatism, I’ve always thought Che Guevara was kind of hot. Also, the thought of being in handcuffs alongside a disproportionate number of black men isn’t entirely unappealing.
Without lavishing Smurthwaite, whose comedy career, such as it was, has been replaced by a subsistence funded by talk show appearance fees, more attention than she warrants: it’s worth pointing out that feminists are not above criticism just because they say so. If they brand you leader of a hate group, you have the right to object. And to laugh at them!
Smurthwaite doesn’t have the right not to be offended — nor to dodge the issue when observers rightly point out that she deliberately mischaracterises ridicule and criticism as “abuse” and “harassment.” She’s a perfect example of the sort of spoilt brat middle-class white girl who claims to stick up for women but whom most women absolutely loathe.
What do her tantrums on TV prove? One, that she’s unstable and therefore totally unsuited to her job. Two, that she’s an abject bloody failure as a comedian, preferring to feign offence rather than offer a witty comeback or a juicy put-down.
Notice the pattern in the debate today: St. Louis literally begging for them to take the camera off me. Smurthwaite angry at the show for having me on at all, and not allowing her to just monologue on the problems of being a woman in the first world and make up stories about other guests. A moderator who only allowed interruptions one way, ignoring stats and figures pertinent to the question in favour of, “Well, it’s not what happened, what we feel happened.”
Several guests grudgingly, repeatedly conceding how much more famous I am and coming up with bullshit reasons why that might be. St. Louis called me “desperate” for social media fame and Spiked’s Ella Whelan said I was an “egomaniac.” No arguing with that last one, I guess — but it’s telling that both women declined to acknowledge that I am a senior staff editor and star columnist at one of the largest and most influential media companies in America. (They do that to delegitimise you.)
And, of course, the brilliant, insane suggestion from Smurthwaite that I should be thrown in prison for cracking jokes on Twitter about feminists. I can see the trial now: I’ll be forced to sign a communist-style confession under duress. It’ll go: “I have committed great and heinous crimes against womanhood with my hilarious, obviously not a bit true, except they do ring a bit true, don’t they, essays…” Boy they really want me to shut up. Good luck with that!
But anyway, I said I wasn’t going to bang on about it, so enough about shrill, lesbianic armpit hair enthusiasts. And hey! before you have a go at me for the word “shrill,” just listen to the debate for yourself. There was a lot of screeching. My opponents were probably incensed by my calmly-delivered facts (such as the fact that more people would want their child to have cancer than feminism — 22,000 votes, the public made up its mind, not my fault!).
It got so bad that host Nicky Campbell had to call for 10 seconds of silence. I don’t know for sure, but I think that may have been a first for the programme. Or any programme, frankly. I was mortified, obviously.
I don’t know why I make people so excited, really I don’t. Maybe it’s because I’m so hot.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter and Facebook, or write to him at milo@breitbart.com. Android users can download Milo Alert! to be notified about new articles when they are published.
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