It jumped out of 2017 and scurried into the darkest corners. It latched on to satire’s face, only to burst from satire’s chest with the most ludicrous headlines. Overall, it was a bad, weird year, but men —  especially — did not come off looking good in 2018, and it’s time to examine what lessons we should glean from these past 12 months to make our collective futures less bad and weird…maybe even better.

#1 Words vs. Conduct: Louis C.K.

In response to displaying his penis at non-consenting women, comedian Louis C.K. took time off to allegedly reconsider himself. “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” he said in November 2017. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”  

That lasted all of five minutes.

Mr. C.K. was back on stage just a few months later, and was recently recorded dressing up his white guy whines as comedy, including his chagrin when people with Down syndrome asked the word ‘r***rded’ not be used anymore (he felt his freedom was invaded); he mocked black and Asian men, berated trans people, and belittled the students of the Parkland shooting who survived a horrific massacre.

The question is not whether he’s allowed to say these things – as far as I know, he’s not been charged – but whether he should.

Despite admitting to the sexual misconduct, C.K.’s response showed no development. Indeed, all his response did was cast off the veneer of the self-reflecting white guy that made him important to many of us: His insights into white privilege and being a (cishet) white man, for example, were poignant, challenging other white people.

His admitting of sexual misconduct should have been the catalyst for Mr. C.K. to use those assets he had cultivated to grow and to teach, as we know he’s capable of doing. Instead, Mr. C.K. simply became another angry, entitled white man, who viewed criticism as intolerance, progress as immorality and bigotry as entertainment.

The Lesson

People reveal their true selves at their lowest point, not at the height of comfort; it’s easy to be the good guy when you have nothing to lose, easy to use the right words to convey a belief. It’s much harder to demonstrate those beliefs via conduct. Men can easily learn to say the right words and support the right values without having to put any actual effort into themselves. This is why we have many cases of so-called good guys revealing the cracks made by patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

No one is claiming to be a good person you need to be perfect. Perfection is unattainable. Instead, part of what makes a good person is owning up to failure and mistakes, improving yourself and encouraging others like you to do the same, working toward never committing those same failings again. Being good is a verb, not a state anyone reaches.

Having cultivated the image of a woke white man, with an audience receptive to his moral challenges, Mr. C.K. shrugged it all off and swam with the status quo; it was flowing in his preferred direction.

Being good is a verb, not a state anyone reaches.
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Mr. C.K. is an interesting example because he shows what men should avoid but also—in his past—how men can be better: He used his privilege to speak out and challenge those like him. We need more men holding mirrors and fewer holding hammers.

#2 Listening to Women: Aziz Ansari

Aziz Ansari was accused by a woman of being incredibly inappropriate toward her, making her feel unsafe, and repeatedly ignoring her rejections of his come-ons. Ansari and the woman went on a date, back to his place, then he became increasingly aggressive: he kissed, fondled and so on, almost as soon as she was inside. As babe.net put it: “Throughout the course of her short time in the apartment, she says she used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was.” After eventually leaving, she was in distress. When she messaged him some time later, he conveyed surprise and an apology.

In response to the whole story, many men pointed to the Weinsteins and Spaceys of the world as “actually” deserving condemnation, for their aggressive, criminal assaults – Ansari’s conduct was handwaved away as confusion, miscommunication, or somewhat fictional. He thought it was consensual and even apologized!

For many, Ansari’s bonafides as an outspoken feminist male comedian created a large fortress from such accusations: How could someone like that, who writes and thinks and discusses the nuances of dating, who proudly and vocally supports feminism, be at fault in this? Maybe this young woman has just reacted poorly!

What’s more important than the story however are the responses.

The Lesson

It’s easy for men to speak out against the criminal acts of Weinstein and Spacey. It’s far harder to reflect on Ansari’s situation. Yet, it’s precisely that the incident isn’t an obviously criminal one that makes it more troublesome. The reality is: More men have been an Ansari than a Weinstein.  

The chances are, if you’re a cis man that’s dated or dates women, you’ve done something to make a woman uncomfortable in your attempt to be sexy.

You can prevent a lot of that by reading and listening to women. Take a mild example, as noted by the brilliant Madeleine Holden: men who never ask their dates questions. As Holden notes, the men say the dates went amazingly, while the women note how these same men didn’t ask a single question about their dates. It wasn’t so much a date as an unprofessional, free therapy session. If men are not even reading the room when it comes to basic conversations in public, is it any wonder, in their—arguably—aggressively horny states, that men will not read or consider women’s comfort levels in private? Men can and must be better than this.

If you’re a cis man that’s dated or dates women, chances are you’ve done something to make a woman uncomfortable in your attempt to be sexy.
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Patriarchy has taught men to equate our experience with truth, relegating other experiences to the language of sensitivity or ridiculousness. Instead of viewing women’s experiences as additional windows on the same experience, we dismiss those experiences as mere finger paintings.

Listen to women, not just in the immediate sense, but as an active part of your life — seek out their perspectives, pay attention, and read the goddamn room. (Also, you’re an adult in control of your conduct — you can’t use horniness as an excuse.)

#3 Opposing Nazis Works: Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer

If you’re worried only bad men had a good year, take some comfort: Both Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer had a terrible year.

Yiannopoulos, it was recently revealed, is almost $2 million in debt, and has lost a great deal of the fame he’d cultivated from the poisoned Nazi garden he had managed. He was banned from Patreon, Venmo, and PayPal. He also dropped his lawsuit against former publisher Simon & Schuster, after they refused to publish his (terrible) book.  

Spencer didn’t fare better. He cancelled his speaking tour due to low audience attendance but high numbers of anti-fascist protestors. Spencer’s wife filed for divorce, alleging he is a domestic abuser. He has had to rethink his strategy for spreading white supremacy and pro-fascism to young men – he’s been trying desperately not to say he’s losing to passionate anti-fascist protestors.

The Lesson

Actively not listening to fascists and Nazis works! As Rachel Kraus notes:

“The fact that Yiannopoulos has found his reach and influence so depleted that he can’t get new gigs and takes to comments on Facebook to complain shows the real world effect that de-platforming a toxic public figure can actually have.”

Spencer has stopped trying to lecture at universities because it’s far too troublesome, and his audience’s passion doesn’t match the numbers or organizational skills of his opponents.

We do not need to give equal time under the guise of fairness. Not all political issues are conceptual discussions about the best economic theory; some involve the lived experiences and social aspects of particular groups.

Nazis and pro-fascists aren’t giving alternative opinions about race or gender, they’re spreading hatred. They dress their supremacy under the guise of civil rights, complaining that their power is being taken from them, while at the same time saying those taking away power are beneath them. They never quite square this Swastika but it’s not about logic: hatred can’t be debunked, it can only be opposed.  

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to bring logic to a Klan meetup. Listen to those affected by hate groups, work toward actively opposing those wanting to spread Nazism and fascism and don’t give them even an inch. Men, in particular, are the leaders of these movements and it should be other men—especially white men—who speak out loudly, passionately and with full voice to their emotions.

Hatred can’t be debunked, it can only be opposed.
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The Nazi’s call for debate is a cheatcode to get you to debate people’s humanity, dragging you down into the racist trenches. Stay out, stay firm, yell, oppose, bring your placards, report abuse. We need more men showing emotion for good causes rather than ridiculous/racist/sexist ones.

Following the election of an open sexual predator to the White House, there has been a powerful pushback against high-profile sexual abusers, including Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein, NBC political reporter Mark Halperin, directors Brett Ratner and James Toback, and actors Dustin Hoffman and Ben Affleck.

Which brings me to Kevin Spacey.

Actor Anthony Rapp came forward about previously being sexually assaulted by Spacey at the age of 14 (Spacey was 26 at the time). I personally didn’t expect Spacey to make a statement the very night that Buzzfeed broke the story, but he did…in true “the American people are gullible so let’s throw something really shiny in their face” fashion. Like Frank Underwood might.

And here’s how that went:

I have to hand it to the asshole. His plan kind of worked. The story should be that Spacey is an alleged predator who used his fame, accolades, and power to target young boys coming up in Hollywood. Instead, willfully obtuse news outlets are still running with the coming-out story angle, since this is the scoop they’ve been chasing for years.

It’d be easy to chalk this up to media asininity, but there are broader and more insidious forces at play here. Starting with this:

The conflation of queerness (i.e. homosexuality) with pedophilia has a long and ugly history.

The false myth that queer folx are more inclined to be pedophiles and child rapists is one that the queer community has been fighting against for decades.

Queer folx faced particularly strong opposition to their very existence in the 1970s, as the sexual perversion myth began tangibly influencing policy. In 1977, Christian songstress Anita Bryant orchestrated the successful repeal of an anti-gay discrimination law in Miami. Bryant argued that homosexuality was an “abomination,” and that if given equal rights, gay people would molest children or brainwash them into becoming gay. This anti-gay propaganda, which the modern religious right would soon adopt, didn’t stop there. In addition to religion being used against queer folx, many bigoted scientists opted to use science as well.

The false myth that queer folx are more inclined to be pedophiles and child rapists is one that the queer community has been fighting against for decades.
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Despite being a disgraced and discredited “psychologist,” Paul Cameron’s work malevolently linking homosexuality to pedophilia starting in the 1980s has been taken seriously enough to make an impact; just 10 years ago, he was used as an “expert” in a case in Colorado concerning same-sex adoption.

Still more recently, politically powerful institutions like The Family Research Council (FRC) have leaned on the child-molestation myth to push for the rejection of gay rights; as recently as 2010, FRC was peddling the patently false claim that science links homosexuality to pedophilia. Years later, high-profile figures continue to make this assertion — like NFL player Josh Robinson, who compared gay marriage to pedophilia and incest in 2015.

And then, of course, there’s our current political administration. Trump selected open homophobe Mike Pence — who thinks the existence of queer and trans folx will lead to “societal collapse” — to be his VP. Moreover, he appointed Sam Clovis — who once asked, “If we protect LGBT behavior, what other behaviors are we going to protect? Are we going to protect pedophilia?” — to be a Department of Agriculture Under Secretary, and has openly lauded Pastor Robert Jeffress, who has directly equated gay people to pedophiles.

Even if you wanted to give Spacey the benefit of the doubt here (which I do not), you would have to assume that he is not aware of how historically charged it is to mention both assault and his sexuality in his statement, or how such claims have political power still today. Anyone with an iota of understanding about history or politics should get this, though — which suggests Spacey is fully aware of the harm his statement could cause, and just doesn’t give a fuck.

I know what you’re thinking — surely someone who, like Spacey, is “choosing to live as a gay man,” would care that he is doing irreversible damage to the work that queer and trans folx have done to normalize our very existence. Right?

But while optimistic, this is painfully naive. Because if you believe that, then you know absolutely nothing about how Whiteness operates. Which is to say, this:

Cishet White men have long weaponized marginalization to carry out their abuses of power.

I had many discussions in college with other Black femmes who had peeped that White Americans, in particular, are always seeking some sort of victim status to avoid owning up to the influence and power they take up in modern society. Those conversations took on new meanings whenever I stepped into predominantly White, queer spaces filled with people determined to be more marginalized than I am — a tactic designed to create the illusion that they couldn’t possibly have power over me. And wouldn’t you know, this was most often deployed by cishet (cisgender and heterosexual) White men.

White People: I Want You To Understand Yourselves Better
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This is the strategy currently being deployed by Spacey. The actor has been a powerful and influential figure in both film and theater for decades, and during these decades, he’s explicitly used his power to prey on folx he suspected wouldn’t say a goddamn thing since they weren’t as powerful. In these situations, his marginalization didn’t benefit him; it’s only now that he’s been exposed as an alleged predator that he’s chosen to use his homosexuality to avoid facing consequences for his abusive behavior.

That is sick. But, it’s totally a “White man” thing to do.

I say this because Spacey is not the first person to do this…nor will he be the last. In fact, he is in great company with Milo Yiannopoulos, who for the longest time used his sexuality to excuse the gross misogyny that he has carried out against women (particularly during #GamerGate). One could argue that Milo has also used his sexuality and preoccupation with Black men to evade claims of racism, and he proudly employed this “trap card” when he started a misogynoiristic campaign to harass Leslie Jones.

Harvey Weinstein has also used marginalization to deflect from his White male violence. Except, in his case, that marginalization is also false. After being disgraced by countless women alleging he assaulted or raped them, Weinstein announced that he hoped he would be given “a second chance” and that he was checking himself into rehab for sex addiction. Experts were swift to denounce this self-diagnosis, which served to throw a legitimately marginalized and vulnerable demographic under the bus: addicts.

We Warned You About Milo And You’re Still Not Listening
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Which brings us to what is truly the most vile part of all this. Being marginalized is some way, shape, fashion, or form does not mean you cannot somehow hold power over others. This is a crude misunderstanding of the complex nature of privilege, and it becomes especially spurious when Whiteness is factored in. Spacey, Weinstein, and Milo have enjoyed the privilege of their Whiteness, and the wealth and industry power this has helped afford them, for years. It is only when they must own up to their predatory behavior that they rely on marginalization as a weapon of deflection — and ironically, this deflection hurts those who are actuallymarginalized within the power structures they operate in.

There are so many queer folx, and trans folx, and queer and trans folx of color especially, who are abused because of their identity and lack of societal power. Spacey, Weinstein, and Milo don’t represent these people; they represent the people who harm these people. And that distinction is everything.

In the end, the only way to stop this vicious cycle from continuing is by cutting men like Spacey off from the power they feed upon. And seeing as how Spacey is currently on the outs with Netflix and every other committee in Hollywood is taking turns stripping Weinstein of prestigious honors, I’d say that we’re off to a promising start.

But, it’s only that: a start.

While accepting, in the sober light of hindsight, that Yiannopoulos is irredeemable, his apologists refuse to admit there were obvious warning signs.

I n September 2014, writing perhaps the first editorial for a feminist publication about the nascent GamerGate hate campaign, I ended the piece with the following warning:

“What GamerGate showed us was how a small group of angry 4chan users apparently convinced a horde of well-meaning people to believe that they should silence certain women for the good of all. … Attention must be paid. This will happen again.”

And so it did; the right wing forces who exploited GamerGate’s vitriolic attacks on feminists, queer people, and anyone deemed “PC” in videogames were ruthless in applying those tactics elsewhere, all the way up the ladders of Western politics.

In the wake of Joseph Bernstein’s 9,000-word Buzzfeed report on the newly-revealed private emails of one-time Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, it’s instructive to remember that. But amid all the caterwauling from folks in the media about how “we should’ve paid attention to GamerGate,” it not only stings deeply (I and many other people, mostly women and queer people, were warning everyone about this for years, from every rostrum we could find), it also ignores a deeper history that men like Yiannopoulos exploited.

Everyone Who Enabled Milo Yiannopoulos Should’ve Seen This Coming

4chan didn’t discover reactionary politics in August of 2014, after all. For years prior, black women on Twitter had been targets of 4chan campaigns designed to sow dissension in feminist movements and prey on white feminists’ willingness to equate “activist toxicity” with being black, female, and opinionated about racism on social media. The revelation in Bernstein’s report, meanwhile, that several “liberal” men in media had collaborated with Yiannopoulos by feeding him ideas for stories or calling targets, wasn’t proof of any new phenomenon either. Liberal/feminist men being bigots and abusers in private is a tale as old as time; Harvey Weinstein naturally springs to mind. But there are always clear warning signs. You need only to look at how many women of color had the number of Hugo Schwyzer (a man who attempted to murder his girlfriend, slept with his female students, and routinely used dodgy and possessive language to describe women he worked with) long before he was drummed out of feminist circles.

GamerGate wasn’t new, it was an escalation and formal marshaling of longstanding forces (one can’t even say they were dormant, just disorganized). Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon saw the terroristic power of GamerGaters’ rage against something as simple as a gay videogame character, and it’s no wonder they set about trying to harness it for ever more consequential ends. What’s gobsmacking about Bernstein’s report is that it took incontrovertible proof that Yiannopoulos did things like use Nazi-themed passwords for his emails, and literally sent one of his most famous articles to actual neo-Nazis for line edits, for some people to go “oh, maybe we should’ve listened” (never mind that evidence of Yiannopoulos’ history of Nazi sympathy has been out there for a long time).

GamerGate wasn’t new, it was an escalation and formal marshaling of longstanding forces.

More grating still are people who actually worked with Yiannopoulos because they saw him as useful to their “anti-PC” crusade, now trying to cover their asses. There was a furious alacrity to Cathy Young publishing an article at Forward that pretends to be a mea culpa, at once saying she “take[s] full responsibility” for “enabling” Yiannopoulos, and then trying to find a way to blame her “PC Police” bugbear for him as well. “If people who gave Yiannopoulos a pass on bad behavior (myself included) were his enablers,” she wrote, “so was the politically correct culture that fueled his ascent.”

If everyone is to blame, then no one is. Which, one suspects, is rather the point of her writing this.

Young’s self-justification is required reading for understanding how fascism preys upon the minds of the morally weak. Her tortured attempts to separate contempt for Yiannopoulos-the-man from unwavering faith in the “anti-PC revolt” she so cherishes are instructive because they point the way to understanding why A) so many “liberal” writers cozied up to Yiannopoulos long after the breadth of his bigotry and vileness was known, and B) why this is, in all probability, going to happen again. Young is, after all, a person who — like so many liberals, centrists, conservatives, and even some leftists — sees a 19-year-old yelling about trigger warnings to be at least as great a threat to human liberty as actual Nazis.

She makes that clear at the end of her Forward op-ed when she likens a left-winger accused of harassment to those same Nazis, arguing “I don’t know that there is much of a moral difference between [her] and the hate groups Yiannopoulos has defended.” (Author’s addendum: While the person in question has been accused of harassment, it’s also worth noting that she is a woman of color and critic of racism who has herself been the victim of backlash that took the form of harassment and doxing, which Young entirely fails to address.)

And who says conservatives aren’t fond of moral relativism?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the popularity of ideas like this are why Charlottesville happened. You get the sense that Young learned to treat Yiannopoulos not as a moral problem, but simply as a PR liability for a reactionary cause she remains committed to. She’s treating him, in fact, the way that a white nationalist advised Yiannopoulos to treat his newfound openly Nazi fans: with “patronizing contempt.” Yiannopoulos responded gratefully, “I have been struggling with this. I need to stay, if not clean, then clean enough.”

Young is trying to stay “clean enough” in this regard, washing off the taint of Yiannopoulos’ approval and his championing of her pet cause. You cannot separate what made Yiannopoulos so singularly loathsome from those causes, however. Pointing out that he availed himself of the useful idiocy of people who fear neopronouns or kneeling black athletes more than Nazism is not self-defense, but self-indictment.

When ‘Free Speech’ Kills

Young, and many like her, will try to suggest that Yiannopoulos espoused worthwhile ideas while hiding a secret evil. They can’t accept that his evil was blatant. They will not face up to the fact that, despite his sophistry, his dog whistles to the extreme right were clarion clear in their meaning. They won’t admit they got hoodwinked by an embarrassingly transparent PR snowjob that did a poor job of hiding Yiannopoulos’ allegiances.

“Who’d have guessed,” Young writes with breathless incredulity, “that there was video of Yiannopoulos singing ‘America the beautiful’ in a karaoke bar to an audience in which some people gave Nazi salutes? Or that he used Holocaust-themed Internet passwords such as ‘kristallnacht’?”

Anyone. Anyone could’ve guessed that.

The Buzzfeed article did not reveal anything about Yiannopoulos’ beliefs that armies of women, queer folks, and people of color didn’t already know. It merely put faces, names, and words to events and ideas we knew existed in the abstract. People like Young appeared on stage with Yiannopoulos and boosted his profile, while defending him from criticism by the women of color who knew what he was about long before the “Dangerous F****t Tour” (which, I might add, still prompted fawning apologism and profiles). She sheepishly owns up to that much.

What Liberals Don’t Get About Free Speech In The Age Of Trump

But Young’s mea culpas ring hollow when she adamantly refuses to reflect on why white nationalists find views like hers ripe for exploitation. Belief in the “PC Police” bogeyman is not merely a useful tool to the extreme right, after all, but an article of faith: the utter conviction that transgender people, Muslims, people of color, Jews, all control some kind of world-historical force that keeps white people oppressed. Curtis Yarvin, one of Yiannopoulos’ neoreactionary sources exposed by the Buzzfeed report, gives it a touch of grandeur and calls this conspiratorial force “The Cathedral.”

The widely-shared willingness to find something redemptive in these reactionary, anti-PC spasms is what allowed Yiannopoulos to find so many willing apologists on the political center and the left, as well as among libertarians.

Belief in the ‘PC Police’ bogeyman is not merely a useful tool to the extreme right, after all, but an article of faith.

GamerGate, a movement he lent much strength and fire to, spiraled out of control in part because of his malign influence. He was attracted to it not only because he saw a group of young people he could exploit, but because he agreed with their fundamental vision of “PC gone too far.” It was a vision that was always charged with bigotry. Openly. Gaters borrowed neo-Nazi propaganda to attack their favorite targets, for instance — this tranche of examples comes from 2014. Their figureheads, like Davis “I’m a huge white nationalist on paper” Aurini, weren’t shy about Nazi-adjacent beliefs, either. Yet another GG stalwart, one of Yiannopoulos’ white nationalist sources and ghost-editors, Vox Day, tried to start a GamerGate-style campaign in the world of science fiction in 2015 using exactly the same arguments.

This was all out there, plain as day, years before Yiannopoulos’ fall from grace.

None of us who were attacked at the time, or who covered the harassment campaign, were surprised by Yiannopoulos’ association with white nationalism. And yet people like Young want, need, to find something redemptive in it all that proves that their “anti-PC” crusade is still worth fighting.

Easily-Triggered Privileged People Have Turned Society Into Their Own Giant Safe Space

In the words of critic Noah Berlatsky, “open Nazism is not very popular. But the idea that feminists, trans women, black women, need to be put in their place is very popular.” The thrust of Young’s argument is that all of us minorities bring it on ourselves, that if only we weren’t so loud or mean or pushy, we wouldn’t be making people sympathize with Nazis. Goodness, where have we heard that before? This isn’t an argument so much as it is proof that one is a moral invertebrate, squirming in pain from perceived insults and slights. A black woman said mean things, so maybe that guy who wants to kill the Jews has a point.

The hypersensitivity that reels from “trigger warnings” but thrills to Yiannopoulos’ joyful transphobia, that likens workplace diversity trainings to “gulags,” is what fuels the outrage culture about “outrage culture,” a screaming fury that can never be sated by giving it what it says it wants. It will merely demand we make ourselves smaller and smaller until nothing of us remains. Reactionary outrage about “PC” is not a philosophy as much as it is a burning sun that demands our compliance as its nuclear fuel, consuming it endlessly until it can feed no more and goes nova.

There is, of course, a middle ground in dealing with actual left wing abuse and toxicity. It’s a line I’ve tried to walk. For instance, I co-facilitated a daylong workshop-conference at Smith College with the scholar and reproductive justice elder Loretta Ross entitled “Calling In the Calling Out Culture.” Her and I, two women of color from very different generations and activist backgrounds, came together to give Smith lessons about ethical activism — and drawing a line between passionate advocacy and abuse. For years, I’ve written about dealing with the excesses sometimes produced by the zeal in our movements, and the failings caused by activist language or turning insights into inflexible rules.

Yet I’ve been able to do this without sharing a stage with or otherwise abetting a Nazi. It all puts the lie to the idea that empowering men like Yiannopoulos or the petty hate movements spawned by 4chan is the price we have to pay to have an open and fair discussion on progressive excess. Yet again, people of color have led the way and had this discussion for years. We converse without all the hyperbole that attends the usual “PC gone mad” shtick, unironically parroted by people with unassailably lofty media platforms. A world where Bill O’Reilly escapes with a golden parachute is not a world where “PC” can “ruin lives,” I’m afraid.

The revelation in Bernstein’s report that so many liberals cozied up to Yiannopoulos is not shocking in this light, however. Fear of the “PC” phantom is in vogue even on the left, where rants against the malevolence of “identity politics” (meaning, any political discourse that doesn’t center white men) are a dime a dozen. Leftist scholar Angela Nagle blames it for the rise of the “alt right” in her book Kill All Normies, for instance.

Why Your Criticisms Of Identity Politics Sound Ridiculous

It’s an existential terror that can seem like a bigger threat, in one’s mind, than actually-existing fascism. It’s why Jonathan Chait can write for days about those awful student activists “censoring” conservative views, but is utterly silent on right wingers stopping black academics from speaking in public, or using legislatures to strangle schools that teach or research things they are ideologically opposed to.

Such people, regardless of what values they claim to cherish, become enablers of the ugliest forms of reactionary politics — and it’s those enablers who are the key to its success, who look the other way, “play devil’s advocate,” who claim that there are “two sides” to issues that demand moral clarity. They are not, in any sense, Nazis. But Nazis find them useful.

Thus we were left with this grotesquerie: liberal men like David Auerbach passing gossip along to Yiannopoulos and whining to him about Wikipedia “censorship” (he has since issued several furious, if unconvincing denials), or a liberal journalist and TV producer like Dan Lyons yukking it up over transphobic jokes with Yiannopoulos, or Mitchell Sunderland, a writer/editor at Broadly, siccing the man on “this fat feminist.” While not mentioned directly, New York Magazine’s Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi also partook in email threads and tweets that egged Yiannopoulos on and fed him ideas; Sunderland publicly alluded to an email chain he and Nuzzi used to collaborate with Yiannopoulos.

They are not, in any sense, Nazis. But Nazis find them useful.

For her part, Nuzzi is also one of the only people caught up in this mess to try to justify herself. Bernstein publicly tweeted that Nuzzi had no part in the secret email list he reported on, but Nuzzi’s critics continue to point to numerous tweets where she expressed warm feelings for Yiannopoulos or pitched article ideas to him.

“I was friendly with Milo online before there was an alt right,” she tweeted, “when he was a silly troll. We never met or ‘collaborated.’”

Aside from the fact that I’d expect the Washington correspondent of New York Magazine to know “the alt right” has existed since long before 2016, the heyday of her friendship with him is when she — for instance — helped Yiannopoulos marshal rape threats towards feminist journalist Jessica Valenti. This was also a period where Yiannopoulos was posting Breitbart articles with half-naked photos of underaged trans women and trying to destroy the lives of GamerGate targets. Nuzzi hardly helps herself by implying this was all okay with her.

Lessons On Our Dark Future From The Rise Of The Religious Right

In this she merely paraphrases Cathy Young. In trying to defend David Auerbach from criticism, Young writes, “His last email to Yiannopoulos…was sent in early March 2016, several weeks before Yiannopoulos’s flirtation with far-right and neo-Nazi groups became public.” Evidently his behavior before March 2016 was all acceptable; omelettes, broken eggs, et cetera.

To both Nuzzi and Young, there were no real red flags, despite Yiannopoulos’ obvious malevolence and bigotry. In October 2015, when Nuzzi tweeted that she wished she was hanging out with the man, he’d just published, “Sorry, Girls! But The Smartest People In The World Are All Men,” libeled a critic of GamerGate as a paedophile (while posting underaged pictures of her), brought down harassment on a Houston Press reporter’s family, and spread the conspiratorial lie that Shaun King isn’t black. These attempts at ruining lives were, apparently, fine by Nuzzi. He was just “a silly troll” after all. Her ideas might’ve just inspired a racist article about Neil deGrasse Tyson, or led to a campaign to hound a trans woman into nearly killing herself; not, you know, Nazi stuff.

To both Nuzzi and Young, there were no real red flags, despite Yiannopoulos’ obvious malevolence and bigotry.

While accepting, in the sober light of hindsight, that Yiannopoulos is irredeemable, they refuse to admit there were obvious warning signs. Perhaps because the warning signs were uncomfortably close to cherished beliefs of their own.

To all these people, the terror of creeping “PC,” with all its starkly exaggerated shadows on the walls of their minds, was so great that they could see their way clearly to working with Milo Yiannopoulos. Cathy Young’s and Olivia Nuzzi’s responses are but the first of what I’m sure will be many attempts to redeem the utterly broken moral instincts that led to this happening. Thirsting for freedom from guilt, plenty of people will listen. They will learn nothing.

And therefore, as I said three years ago, this will happen again.

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