03/03/2017 The Mistake the Berkeley Protesters Made about Milo Yiannopoulos ­ The New Yorker

DAILY COMMENT

THE MISTAKE THE BERKELEY PROTESTERS MADE

ABOUT MILO YIANNOPOULOS
By Jelani Cobb   February 15, 2017

The Breitbart editor and alt-right darling Milos Yiannopoulos has emerged from the furor that scuttled his
appearance at Berkeley as both the putative victim and victor.

L ast week, PBS broadcast “Birth of a Movement,” a lm about the battle

between William Monroe Trotter, a rebrand African-American publisher
born a few years after the end of the Civil War, and D. W. Griffith, the lmmaker
responsible for the racist classic “Birth of a Nation.” Trotter, a contemporary of W.
E. B. Du Bois, was a Boston native and graduate of Harvard University, and an
uncompromising advocate for racial equality, if a bit of a loose cannon. Trotter’s
contempt for the accommodationist response to Southern racism championed by,
among others, Booker T. Washington culminated in his incitement of a riot when
Washington attempted to give an address in Boston. The pivotal con ict of his
career, however, was his attempt to prevent Griffith’s ode to the Ku Klux Klan from
being shown in the city. “Birth of a Nation” was not simply the rst blockbuster in
American cinematic history; its racialist propaganda inspired a rebirth of the
K.K.K., which had all but died out prior to the lm’s release. It was screened in the
White House, reportedly to accolades from Woodrow Wilson himself. Trotter found
himself caught between the First Amendment ideals that allowed him to publish his
newspaper, the Guardian, and ghting against the distribution of Griffith’s lm and,
by extension, the racial terrorism that it facilitated. He chose the latter approach,
appealing unsuccessfully to Boston’s political leadership to have the lm banned as
obscene. Griffith found the protests against his lm to be a form of intolerance.

It would be tempting to think of Trotter’s concerns as particular to that era. No lm

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03/03/2017 The Mistake the Berkeley Protesters Made about Milo Yiannopoulos ­ The New Yorker

It would be tempting to think of Trotter’s concerns as particular to that era. No lm

as egregiously racist as “Birth of a Nation” would be released so widely, and treated
as a mainstream hit, today. The current debates regarding free speech tend to center
as much on the rights of those making offensive statements as those potentially
affected by what is being said. Five days before PBS broadcast its documentary (in
which I appear as a commentator), a version of Trotter’s dilemma played out at the
University of California, Berkeley, when the campus erupted in violence on the day
of a planned speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart editor and gleefully acerbic
provocateur nominally distinct from the so-called  alt-right. Last year, Yiannopoulos
was permanently banned from Twitter for his role in a campaign of racist, sexist
harassment directed at Leslie Jones, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member. When
Twitter suspended his account, Yiannopoulos denounced it as “cowardly” and
declared himself a martyr for the cause of free speech. Twitter, he said, was “a no-go
zone for conservatives.” The tacit admission that Yiannopoulos sees targeted abuse
of a female African-American comedian as “conservative” is revealing, if only in that
it strips away the g leaf of euphemism separating the alt-right from the hive of
racism and sexism that de ned last year’s Presidential election. That it was the
Berkeley College Republicans who invited him to campus further supported this
association. No chemistry department would extend an invitation to an alchemist;
no reputable department of psychology would entertain a lecture espousing
phrenology. But amid the student conservatives at Berkeley—and along the lecture
circuit where he is a sought-after speaker—Yiannopoulos’s toxic brew of bigotries
apparently meets their standard for credibility. And this recognition is as big a
problem as anything he has said in his talks or in his erstwhile existence as a Twitter
troll.

An even more disturbing element of the Jones incident lay in Yiannopoulos’s

prediction that the Twitter ban would make him even more prominent than he was
prior to it—a prediction that has largely held true. Threshold Editions, an imprint of
Simon & Schuster, extended a reported two-hundred-and- fty-thousand-dollar
contract to him for a book adaptation of his lectures, titled “Dangerous.” Last
month, Roxane Gay, a black female author who has also been the target of digital
harassment, dropped her contract with the publishing house in protest of its
association with Yiannopoulos and the mainstreaming of his bigotry. Other authors
are considering following suit. (I currently have a contract with Simon & Schuster.)
The concern, however, is that in the Bizarro World of American recrimination,
every act of principle only furthers the perception that abusers are the real victims.
In the aftermath of the clash with Trotter, Griffith published a pamphlet titled “The
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In the aftermath of the clash with Trotter, Griffith published a pamphlet titled “The
Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America,” and directed a lm titled “Intolerance,”
which criticized not racism but people who were intolerant of it. Yiannopoulos is of
a blinkered tradition that sees no distinction worth examining between martyrdom
and limitations on one’s ability to attack others. Yiannopoulos’s act is the political
equivalent of an N.B.A. guard opping in the hope of drawing a foul, a rendition of
victimhood so aptly executed as to pass for the real thing.

The further fact of Yiannopoulos’s fervent support for President Trump is not, then,
surprising. Few gures in American history have better weaponized the imaginary
grievances of entitled people who consider themselves oppressed than Trump has.
This is precisely the reason the black-clad rioters among the protesters at Berkeley
who prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking—the school cancelled the event, citing
danger to the public—served his ultimate interests. It was a tactical error that
ignored everything 2016 should have taught us. As with Trump, who treats every
reasonable criticism of his Presidency as another nail in a cruci xion, and his
electorate, which eagerly co-signs that sentiment, Yiannopoulos has emerged from
Berkeley as both the putative victim and victor. In the wake of the debacle, his book
rocketed to No. 1 on the pre-order list in Amazon’s political-humor section. Scott
Adams, the creator of the comic strip “Dilbert,” stated that he was ending his
support for Berkeley, where he received a master’s degree, because he would not feel
“safe” on the campus. Most signi cantly, Trump weighed in, tweeting, “If U.C.
Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a
different point of view – ?”

The ordinary spectrum of hypocrisy is not broad enough to encompass Trump, who
directed the fury of his unruly admirers at speci c members of the press during his
rallies, and denounced the profession as “dishonest,” and threatened to “open up” the
nation’s libel laws, now adopting the pose of a protector of the First Amendment. At
issue here is not freedom of speech but the freedom to treat other people,
particularly vulnerable ones, badly; the freedom to whip up sentiment along the
predictable fault lines and to do so without facing any consequence; the freedom to
embolden forces that represent a tangible danger to people. While the digital cavalry
of the alt-right rode to Yiannopoulos’s defense, there was almost nothing said,
certainly not by Trump publicly, although he spoke to Justin Trudeau, the Canadian
Prime Minister, by phone about the six Muslims killed in Quebec City by a gunman
who shared many of the demagogic President’s views.
Lost in the hypertensive reactions to the incident was the fact that, before the
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 who shared many of the
03/03/2017 demagogic President’s views.
The Mistake the Berkeley Protesters Made about Milo Yiannopoulos ­ The New Yorker

Lost in the hypertensive reactions to the incident was the fact that, before the
violence, the university leadership supported Yiannopoulos’s right to speak, assigned
security to protect the event, and de ed requests from students and faculty to
withdraw the invitation. By most accounts, the rioters were not part of the campus
community and thus Berkeley was, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education noted, now being chastised for the behavior of people with whom it had
no relationship and whom it had little capacity to control. Whatever Scott Adams’s
hypothetical fears for his safety on Berkeley’s campus, they pale in comparison to
the realistic fears that many Muslims have about their places of worship being
targeted for arson, as was a mosque in Texas, the day after Trump signed his
executive order on immigration, last month, one near Seattle, two weeks earlier, and
one in Florida, last September. The Southern Poverty Law Center documented
eight hundred and sixty-seven incidents of harassment, many of which involved
people speci cally invoking Trump’s name, in the ten days following the Presidential
election. The largest group of these incidents involved anti-immigrant sentiments,
followed by instances of anti-black and anti-Semitic bigotry.

We know or ought to know that, in a hierarchical society, even civil liberties can be
used in ways that reinforce those hierarchies. We are witnessing the rebirth of
alchemy as a serious endeavor, an undertaking in which we transform abuse into
victimhood, billionaires into besieged outsiders, and the vulnerable into vectors of
mass danger. It is no more empirically sound than the old mutations of lead into
gold—but it is far more marketable. And it is far more dangerous than the inept
rogues who showed up on Berkeley’s campus that evening.

Jelani Cobb has been a contributor to The New Yorker and newyorker.com since 2012, writing
frequently about race, politics, history, and culture.

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