We Know the Truth: Milo and Breitbart are Platforms for Fascism

By Alexander Reid Ross (October 9, 2017)

A journalist who interviewed me recently asked if the recent revelations regarding Milo and Breitbart angered me. I find it difficult to imagine how I could be further angered by the present situation. Of course it’s maddening, but anyone who spent more than 60 seconds clicking into Breitbart for the past five years has taken a crash course in cold, hard rage. To be honest, I feel more vindicated than anything else.

I’ve been arguing for a while now that the supposed clear division between “Alt Light” and “Alt Right” is more of a porous membrane that provides political credibility to the former while bringing the latter access to power in a “creeping” process. Most anarchists have been arguing this, which is why we’ve seen so many out in the streets protesting the so-called “Alt Light” as hard as the “Alt Right.” Those people have been mercilessly ridiculed and wrung out through the press, as a number of scholars and reporters cultivated direct relationships with the Alt Right.

The BuzzFeed report is stunning but doesn’t show the extent of the phenomenon, just its most intense and obvious iterations. One might say, “we now understand that Bannon declared Breitbart ‘the platform for the alt-right,’ which was only true insofar as Breitbart became a nexus through which members of the alt-right could interface with the radical right and conservative movement on common ground…. [Milo asserted] a pro-alt-right position… Breitbart established not so much ‘the platform’ as a kind of porous populist membrane known as the ‘alt-lite’ through which fascism could creep in and out of mainstream discourse. In a sense, the white nationalist movement had been given a perfect medium.”

That’s actually what I wrote… in my book… last year. We had the facts, folks. We know the truth. What are we going to do about it?

alex

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