The End Of Milo Yiannopoulos

0:00I woke up one day and I looked over and I thought, oh no, I don't want to do this anymore. Like hell is real, I don't want to go there. Baby you're in hell right now. You're in the realest hell you're ever going to experience right this second. I have a very sex in the city intro. I was like just like tip-top typing away like I couldn't help but wonder. Hello, hello and welcome back to a bit fruity. I'm Ad Bersien. I'm so happy that you're here. I'm wearing this sort of fishnet top today. Which context appropriate is I was going to say it's partially because I'm at the beach and just have a very limited wardrobe but it also feels very much like something Milo would have worn in the mid 2010s. I agree. I moved to New York City at kind of a weird time. It was the summer of 2017, some months into Donald Trump's first term as president of the United States.

1:00And while most of the country was grappling with the realization that much of the country's white working class was willing to elect an openly racist rapist, many in New York were having a community reckoning of their own. While it's true that a vanishingly small number of New Yorkers supported Donald Trump in 2016, there were some intentionally provocative countercultural figures who embraced the aesthetics of fascism because they thought contrarianism at any cost was cool. One such figure was an artist and troll named Lucian Windrich and openly racist white gay man then in his late 20s. Lucian went viral for a series of photographs called Twinks for Trump wherein he had a number of young slender mostly naked gay men pose in Trump merch in his East Village apartment. Those photos were displayed at the Republican National Convention.

2:01Time times have changed. Lucian has since faded into obscurity. You can only survive on a stupid ass bit like that for so long, especially when the audience you need to support your artwork is in the process of purging queer people from their coalition. One of Lucian's last big moments was in late 2016 when he curated a pro Trump art exhibition called Hashtag Daddy Will Save Us. Among the pieces on display were paintings of figures like George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. wearing Trump hats and a single pill with a $20,000 price tag on it by none other than Martin Scroely. But perhaps the most notable piece was a live performance of a British gay man wearing a maga hat and smoking a cigarette while bathing in a tub of pig's blood. That man was named Milo Yanopoulos.

3:03I really just wanted to introduce him in the tub of pig's blood. That was important to me. It's a fitting image. So what we call for shadowing. The bloody Milo Yanopoulos, as it turned out, would last a lot longer in the culture than Lucian Wintrich did. For years he's been an alternative right firebrand, a blogger, a manager to Kanye West, all while bouncing in and out of the closet so as to placate his fascist colleagues. But the fun could only go on for so long. Milo Yanopoulos was deported by ice last week, allegedly after his colleague and one time friend in Islamophobia Laura Loomer had enough of him. Today we're going to tell the story of Milo Yanopoulos, which I could naively call his Rise and Fall. But the truth is he's risen and fell so many times it's hard to keep track. There are articles from 10 years ago called The Rise and Fall of Milo Yanopoulos. Being a homosexual fascist requires an immense savviness and ability to pivot.

4:05And Milo might have been one of the savviest, and it still was not enough. So let's get into some of the worst gay lore there is. And to do that today I am so excited to be joined by Friend of the Show, burgeoning YouTube star herself Kattenbarch. Welcome back. Thank you so much for having me. And new Friend of the Show, Matthew Sitman, who you may know from The Know Your Enemies Podcast. I know we have a big overlap and many of you are probably excited to be hearing from him. Yes, I'm a little offended. This is my first invite. But despite all that overlap you're talking about. But I'm glad you thought we're talking about this terrible person. Who's the perfect guest? I was one of them. So that's an ambiguous compliment, but I'll take it, I guess. I mean, I needed a gay guy to back me up on this. I have been talking to each of you over the last few days since Milo's deportation back to the UK.

5:05And perhaps what's more interesting about Milo in the end is what he came to represent more so than what he actually did. But I'd love to hear your top line thoughts about everything that we are about to talk about. It's interesting listeners to know your enemy know I love poetry. And I don't know if you caught a couple days ago the great Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Barry died at age 92. And one of the poems of his that I love is titled enemies. And I'll just read the first line from it to you. He writes, if you are not to become a monster, you must care what they think. If you care what they think, how will you not hate them? And so become a monster of the opposite kind. And that poem has been reigned in my ears so to speak preparing for this because it is a kind of, you know, on the left my politics are universalist. Right. Or I strive for them to be that way. And my top line comment might be something like when I got the news that Milo was deported, you know, believe it or not a lot of friends sent that news story or Twitter post to me.

6:10My first thought was I do want to resist the shade and Freud, a scene a terrible person of something terrible happened to him because my politics, there's actually not like an asshole carve out for what I think how I think people deserve to be treated. Or there's not even like a wicked homosexual who takes out his shame and pain on vulnerable minorities himself, including other queer people. There's not even a carve out for that in my politics. So I guess I want to say that at the start that we will be very critical of Milo. I'm sure all of us will be, but I don't relish this. I was in the last few days I resent having to talk about him 10 years after Donald Trump was first elected and it was really the 2016 campaign when I first, you know, I'd probably heard of him. He's been Catholic media to which I was formerly an editor of Catholic magazine. So I've known about him for a long time, but it really was 2016 when I paid attention to him the most. And in some ways, it's like 2026 the year of our Lord 2026 and Milo, you know, Flus, we're still recording podcast episodes about him and for good reason, you know, this was a very revealing story in some ways, the person at the heart of it.

7:18I kind of hate that he's getting renewed attention, but in this case, I think it's worth it. No, I should not have let you gone first. I did really point on, didn't I really, where is your poem? I can't follow that. Well, what I will say, I completely grew to you on your point about not relishing it. I think that that is the instinct of so many people and understandably so. I think even my first thought when I saw the news was like, well, I hope he suffers. But I think that that is in fact the instinct that the Trump administration itself is channeling to, which is why they are creating so much social media content around this arrest and deportation and why they are enjoying and relishing it so much as well. I will also say my first time really encountering Milo Yunopolis in December 2016, I was a student at Ohio University and Milo came to our campus.

8:23And it was a big deal. Protests. Protests? Yes, it was a bad time. Trump had just won. And I was working at one of our student outlets covering campus politics. So I had sent a reporter to the event to cover it. And what sticks out to me the most about Milo's presentation is that he was like putting up all of the pictures of people who worked in our women's and gender studies department and just like mocking their appearances, their pronouns. It was so grotesque to witness and the feeling of like, oh my gosh, like these people have won the culture was like something I really remember like feeling that like, oh my gosh, like we're in such a bad, bad cultural moment right now. Of course, that was true. But I also think that in sort of watching what happened to Milo on a personal level since then and also seeing the ways that our culture has responded.

9:23And in some cases gotten better and in some cases gotten worse and then gotten better again. It's a reminder that like that real depth of depravity was not the end neither of like where we were at as a society and also where even Milo himself was at. Okay, that was gorgeous. So don't sell yourself short poetry of its own kind cat. Thank you. Should we talk about Milo? Milo, Milo, Milo's listeners of this podcast. No, I give context was born in Kent, England on October 18th, 1984, two days after my birthday. What I don't know is he a scorp. He's a Libra Milo and I are. One of your many commonalities. Yes. These court traits don't apply to him at all. It says Libras are fair minded and diplomatic. Well, he might be after all this. I get it now. And I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Another similarity I have with Milo is that he is according to Jewish law, a Jew. Milo's maternal grandmother was Jewish.

10:30He started his career out identifying as a gay Jew, same, but also says that he was baptized and raised Roman Catholic, which he continues to practice. You know that joke on Seinfeld where Tim Watley converts to Judaism the dentist, but he like formally was Catholic and Jerry says if he gets Polish citizenship who have total like saying offensive jokes immunity. That's what I was thinking about when you were describing while he kind of claims this in some moments and some others. And when it serves as purposes, a theme I'm sure will return to in this conversation. Milo's parents divorced when he was six and it seems like his father was pretty much gone with the wind. He grew up mostly with his mom who was not accepting of Milo's homosexuality and his stepfather who was physically abusive. So very open about his daddy issues. Of course, Trump would become his real daddy as he would proudly boast. And this is one of the things I do like about Trump. People have traditionally loved Trump.

11:32Don't be saying like, no, I do. I try to downplay your love. I do. I love Trump. I do love him. Milo, I think you have a keen sense of Trump's appeal because you call him daddy. Milo hates talking about his childhood. It is one of the few things that seems to genuinely make him uncomfortable. In a 2016 interview, he said, quote, someone want to give British accent their best shot. I can do it. Yeah, you do it. Everybody has badge. See, it's bad. I can't do it. No, that's good. Do it. It's good. Everybody has bad shit happened to them. And you either use it to turn yourself into see, it's so bad. I can't do it. All right. I thought it was good. I'm going to try one more time. Everybody has bad shit happened to them. And you either use it to turn yourself into a star or you become a victim. And I don't have time for victims. If you allow the bad things to define your life, you will only ever be a parasite. I sound like, I sound like Julia Garner doing anodelevy. That's good. I want your take on that quote though. It's pretty ironic. I think that like so many people on the right who have built these really bombastic personalities or not.

12:45So much of this is just like projection. Like the way that he talks about victimhood is a self-own as we will get into more and more throughout this episode. Like, this is exactly what happened to him. He has become like the parasite. And that is how he is defined in the so much of the public consciousness. Abuse and the way he handles it will be a theme throughout this episode. He repeatedly just always refuses to identify with a victim because he says that if you identify as a victim, like it'll take over your life. But I'm like refusing to identify as a victim in anything ever did take over your life. Yes. Yes. And that's a really common mentality that I think a lot of people who are abused or go through otherwise traumatic experiences have, which is like, if I accept the label of victimhood, then I'm letting them win and I'm degrading myself. But I think the reality around it is that accepting that you were victimized is not a bad thing. And in fact, it's one of the only pathways toward processing what actually happened to you and having any sort of positive outcome from that.

13:59Yeah. That's interesting, Kat. I just would add, you know, that quote you that was read in that lovely British accent. And it's kind of almost amusing now, not just because of Milo's story and what we'll get into, but like, what is the right now, but just like all they do is talk about their grievances, like they might not always call themselves victims in a certain way. But it is just the culture of the right. It's just nothing but grievance. There's little else these days, right? Their unfairness of them, the witch hunts, the unfair persecutions, the beer I like. Now there's a trans person selling it to me and like, you know, what is that, but grievance in a claim in its own way of victimhood over the decades since that quote, he said that like it's, it's only become more kind of ironical and absurd because that is all the right is. Like they can only really see victimhood where it isn't that's so spot on cat. I mean, think about the way now, someone like Elon Musk and others on the right talk about the quote what suicidal empathy.

15:02That's basically just acknowledging someone's been abused or hurt or mistreated in some way, AKA just like basically what they're saying is I object to having to think about someone not me or in my immediate circle or in my political team suffering in any way I refuse to. When you when someone calls themselves a victim, they're asking to be there almost saying, can you have a little empathy for me? Can you understand my situation? And that is the one thing the right absolutely refuses now to do. I mean, the idea that empathy is like poisonous and suicidal to a culture is just just absurd and ridiculous, but that's there one of their mantras these days. It has eaten Milo from the inside out from from the beginning. In fact, Milo was kicked out of his high school for what he later called absolutely outrageous behavior. And then he was able to attend Wolfson college in Cambridge, but was expelled there to for repeatedly missing class and work assignments. So in the early 2010s Milo enters the world as a freshly aggrieved openly gay, flamboyant, angry adult with no credentials or skills to boast of.

16:13And what kind of job Cater specifically to such a person conservative media, baby. Ultimately welfare state, welfare state is conservative media. It's jobs in for losers. You know who this reminds me of and I am so sorry. I know we're only 20 minutes into the episode, but I just have to say it. He reminds me so much like this backstory and what he's about to do with his life of Jeffrey star. Oh, cat. I know I'm sorry. I know. I think we're having a cultural divide Matthew. Do you know who Jeffrey star is? Yes, but only because my boyfriend Max. I know the reference, but I won't be able to add much beyond. But I don't really know his backstory. Actually, I'll send you a link to the interview. When we're done recording, I'll go down, have dinner with Max and ask him, can you tell me Jeffrey star's backstory? I think you should consider what kind of dinner you want to have before you do that. The only reason why I think it's worth bringing up is that it is not an unusual experience for a young queer person to experience childhood abuse and then sort of exhibit these behaviors that are very common in people who have been abused, like getting kicked out of school.

17:30Discipline like disciplinary issues outbursts things of that degree and then pivot that into a lot of like anger and bigotry toward the world around them. And you see this in the internet age in the form of like I think a lot of people's viral careers. 100% good parallel, Deborah messing Europe next. One of Milo's first jobs was at the conservative British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, where he wrote a tech column, but his real star began to rise in 2014 when a 28 year old Milo was picked up by Steve Vannon at his outlet Bright Bart News at just the right time. Steve Vannon scouted Milo, seeing in him his ability to champion online outrage politics. And Bright Bart has less than a million monthly readers nowadays and doesn't have nearly the same cultural sway it once did, but in the years leading up to Trump's first election in 2016, Bright Bart became the primary outfit of the burgeoning alt right.

18:36This was in large part because of the work of Milo, you know, who from 2014 to 2017 helped shape Bright Bart's brand helped shape Bright Bart's brand helped shape Bright Bart's great avoid supremacist and you not see media. Do you think your as well boss Steve Vannon chairman of Bright Bart and Trump now Trump's chief strategist, do you think he has horribly regressive as duty has been sky by some liberals and anti-Semite white nationalist. Have they got that wrong? Well, Bright Bart is a company staffed almost entirely by Jews. I am a gay Jew and he made me into a star. This stuff is ridiculous. What a lot of Brits don't always understand is how ugly and terrifying American politics can be. The name calling can be absolutely extraordinary and lots of Britain. And name calling by Bright Bart. I mean that is ugly. Look at his headline. Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer? Well, that's not. There's no hiring bias against women in tech. They just suck at interviews. That's extreme. That's our community. No, it's not extreme. They're my headlines. They don't Steve. Do you guys just want to paint a brief portrait of Bright Bart and the mid 2010s alt right for people who weren't there or need to be transported back there for some reason?

19:48Because I think now the alt right is sort of like a catch all for anyone who's like on the far right or has like wacky beliefs or something. But it came to be in a specific context. Yeah, it was just like a totally wild. Well, first of all, the presidential campaign in 2016 was absolutely wild. Like remember, like Trump brought out Bill Clinton's accusers, right? They had a press conference. Then he sat them in the audience right while debating Hillary Hillary passed out on the 9-11 anniversary event and we had to be like dragged in the back of a like white van by her handlers. Like it was crazy crazy things are happened. There was crazy people everywhere too. But it mattered because Bright Bart was you mentioned of Steve Bannon that recruited Milo. And then Steve Bannon became Trump's campaign manager. So like reading Bright Bart, if you were in, if you cared about politics or you were covering politics, you were following it a certain way, like you kind of had to read Bright Bart in a way because it was an insight into Trump's campaign managers thinking.

20:51And it was very much like you mentioned like we say the alt right now means X, Y or Z. But really like I think the distinction like the way the reason alt right has fallen out of usage in a certain way. And a certain descriptive values because the alt right has won. Like it kind of just is the right now. Yes, yeah, because think about in 2016 there were all the never Trump conservative intellectuals that you eventually did bend the knee or came on board or at least became very, very anti anti Trump. Right, there was Republicans who resist and remember Ted Cruz was booed at the 2016 RNC. They kind of had trouble filling spots. I think like Peter teal spoke. It was all very odd. But it was because you had the mainstream conservative think tanks institutions magazines intellectuals. And the mainstream Republicans who were iffy toward Trump, right Trump took over the Republican party. But now like we don't think of those terms exactly at all. Do we? It's kind of like it back when Trump took over the Republican party won the primary and then somehow won the presidency. It was a shock because of people like Milo, right all around him.

21:59These were it was like whoever Trump could get to kind of speak on his behalf in public do events spread the mega message like however it was a real island of the misfit toys in 2016. And so that's kind of what I recollect when I think back it was just like such a carnival. So many things that were like shocking but now seen not quite exactly but it's almost like there were these like outside thing that was like wow this isn't normal but now it's just totally look who the secretary of war is look who's like doing comms for the Trump administration look who you know is being elected to Congress in some cases like Pete Milo himself has risen and fallen many times but people like him of kind of triumph in terms of who's running the Republican party which is say running the country right now. Totally agree I think back like the alt right initially came to be meaning like oh these are Republican identifying people who aren't afraid to say things that are just like brazenly racist or anti-semitic. And I remember a lot of the objection to him at the time from people like Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro. I mean Ben Shapiro has always had a sensitivity towards anti-semitism or at least anything he perceives as anti-semitism.

23:11Which is funny because he's not to like make this about Ben Shapiro but he's always been very willing to be bigoted towards literally every other group of people but when it comes to Jewish people but in a way I feel like the Republican party before this 2016 era really fashioned itself as like high-minded people that like weren't racist that weren't anti-semitic that actually had an aversion to these things and maybe it was just about tax policy and like being anti-abortion. But I do think that the alt right and interestingly now mag is the establishment but the mag a party that it gave way to was a more honest look at what these people were doing with their policy and the way that it affected people. I view like this era of Breitbart and sort of like the media project of Breitbart news they explicitly positioned themselves as the opposite of the Huffington post. I also see them as sort of like the counter force to like Tumblr which is where I was as a teenager in the 20 early to mid 2010s like reading about social justice and like learning about all of these concepts like feminism.

24:18On that side of the internet there was just so much like progressive discourse happening like bringing in a lot of young people especially a lot of like women and queer people and associating it a lot of the time with like fandom and like cultural properties that were more diverse and that people were like really leaning on at that time and like sort of coming out of that era Breitbart is doing it but the exact opposite way. I've taken some time out of my busy schedule being fabulous and doing my hair to prepare a speech for you a few remarks really. Feminism is cancer thank you very much and Steve Bannon sort of ideology around this was like culture is the gateway to bringing people into these political moments that they would otherwise shy away from like they were of course extremely Islamophobic. They were of course extremely anti immigrant xenophobic they were of course overtly misogynistic aligned with white supremacists aligned with anti-Semitism but I think that what Breitbart did really really well is that they got people's attention with more like cultural stories and more like shocking and salacious stories which is exactly the model that you see all of these now now the right way media ecosystem has splintered in so many different directions and you have your canvas oh ends is and you have the right way to do it.

25:38You have your like daily wires which is already kind of itself on the way out like you have all of these different people and podcasters but that style of being like boom Hollywood story boom you should you should support banning immigration like that's what Breitbart did and it did it so well as a backlash to what more progressive places like Buzzfeed and Huff post and Tumblr were doing. And a backlash to kind of insufficient baseness in other parts of the right you know it's like we're not reading national review and valorizing Ronald Reagan anymore someone like bannons like I'm a lennonist claim like a kind of radical like this was an insurgency an ideological insurgency not just against wokeness and progressives and kind of like the establishment in that sense but against the establishment on the right as I was mentioning earlier and Breitbart was founded by Andrew Breitbart. I forget what year he died but it was you know one reason bannon took over was the founder of Breitbart like dropped out of a heart attack like on a sidewalk in LA but he was very friendly with like a lot of mainstream conservatives people at national review they still speak highly of him and it's almost like if Andrew Breitbart hadn't died you know dot dot dot maybe we could have avoided all this but it was a critique of the existing right too and because the existing right was anti Trump for the most part especially at this start and it was the Breitbart like bannon had this magazine this this public

27:05publication that he could you know kind of wield as a mega weapon. Now Milo was also openly gay the whole time and very much not in a if you know you know kind of way like how someone like Douglas Murray remains today Milo was openly gay in a bombastic hypersexual way he would often half heartedly reject accusations of his own racism by saying to crowds of people that he quote loves sucking black dick. Well I'm not just that I'm a gay Jew with a black fiance so attempting to crown me queen of this white supremacist movement is a bit of a stretch. I think you know I his 2015 and 2016 speaking tour was called the dangerous faggot tour not a bad name not a bad name. But I mean what do you what do you guys make of this type of character appealing to the right and in a social and professional circle populated by notorious homophobes and I I don't know I think there's

28:16something here about how the 2010s alt right but certainly not the traditional right created a space for eccentric figures like this to survive if they were sort of loud and bombastic enough about their racism and sort of finger pointing towards other minorities but I'm curious for your take I do think that a lot of people in Milo's audience thought that he was really funny because I think a lot of this is like oh well you're you're owning it but you're also like making fun of it and you're degrading yourself and you're degrading like your sexuality and what you do and you're doing it for our entertainment while also aligning with our worst and more serious like racist impulses so therefore like we think you're funny and we think you're entertaining and we're gonna like just kind of support what you're doing without actually supporting anything of course meaningful like for your community I don't think they look at it like that they just look at it as like oh Milo he's like hilarious and he says stuff that I agree with like 75% of the time that's

29:18very good I mean Matt this gets to the dangerous baguette title right of his tour like like the the self deprecating or self insulting I should really say nature of that right it's almost like saying I don't like you can laugh at me yeah that makes it okay at some level but I think it's really the idea that the kind of alt right right part etc kind of spaces made space for these people is true and it gets back to the island of the misfit toys it's kind of like you could be black you could be gay you could be like some a member of some group that the right doesn't like but if you were kind of absurd enough and and kind of almost self deprecating the way we're describing Milo being like that was fine yeah and it and it served the purpose of what you know you can say as a gay man right I you kind of vouch for the right always does this right there's women black people gay people right there's always whatever kind of minority any group that the right you think why would someone who is this be so supportive of these kinds of politics and policies well I mean that's very lucrative to be one of those if you're the the X Y or Z that the right chooses that's always

30:28a lucrative job there's a lot of money on the right but I think especially in this 2016 kind of early moment the bright part moment it really wasn't island of the misfit toys in some ways it was only going to be those kinds of people right if you were more sober and kind of normal or mainstream however you want to describe it yeah right you would not have gotten any traction or attention it was partly just the whole absurdity just kind of like the spectacular nature of it all that was part of the like we like to say on our podcast maga is the mess right like think about Trump rallies all the people like a carnival most circus like sometimes even revival like atmosphere right but it's that sense of chaos crazy people stuff's going to happen I don't know that's all in the mix and I feel like someone like Milo his particular brand the bombacity and the self deprecating nature of it to I think that's that's very like of the moment and it it's not exactly shocking in some ways when you think about how the right operates in the ways I was just describing I think people also sometimes forget that Trump won tolerated certain types of gay people like rather openly Peter teal to me someone I mentioned a few moments ago Peter teal I mean Milo spoke at like I mentioned the 2016 Republican national conventions gaze for Trump rally

31:45which existed back then you think there's a gaze for Trump rally in the upcoming 2028 RNC absolutely not I mean there was still a room for like earnest advocacy for gay people within the Republican party and many of us back then we're saying well that's going to go away though if you pursue this to its logical endpoint that's going to go away and what's interesting is that Milo says in many interviews at the time of the height of his fame that discrimination against gay people was a thing of the past like he would acknowledge that gay people were discriminated against and he said well that's over now I'm going to put in clips here and it's crazy because it's not but identity politics also comes from understanding people have been marginalized in the past and didn't need protection perhaps still do I think I'm the only as to whether or not they still do gaze I think we're doing fine gay people are doing fine Matt I have a question for you like I remember the twinks for Trump art exhibition gallery showing that you mentioned earlier but I feel like as a gay guy like I definitely knew about that my friends knew about it even if they would text me the Lincoln in kind of ironical or joking about it or even critical ways but I feel like there was a way in which as a PR campaign it succeeded in some way in breaking through or at least kind of success might not be the right word but as with all these it's my

33:11self defeating ultimately but in terms of just the attention right away what was your sense of that so yes because Milo spoke at the RNC in front of huge prints of these twinks for Trump naked boys wearing Trump at photos which is just so ridiculous to think about now my memory of the twinks for Trump thing was I had just moved to New York I was 18 years old I thought that moving to New York City from a suburb in New Jersey it was going to be this moment where I'm like I'm I go to love his love paradise and it's like all the gay people here are like cool and everyone's amazing and politically sound and everyone like hugs each other good night or something and and urban metropolis is that with it you know a big gay population there is that there is that but I remember one of the first things I heard about was this controversy where a bunch of like downtown gaze in the art scene had participated in this twinks for Trump photo shoot I think I thought then what I still think now which is just like what a bunch of losers seeking attention like what a bunch of fucking losers seeking attention you're not good artists the only currency that you have that you can work with is

34:25outrage and what a fleeting way to exist as exemplified by the man we're talking about today like I yeah I don't think it worked in producing any sort of meaningful republican gay cohort I just think it like like there's always this like downtown dirt bag culture in New York that I don't respect that does everything like I runically and it's like are we really Trump supporters are we just pretending to be Trump supporters and taking sexy photos who cares get a life make better art yeah the only other thing I want to add to this is I feel like in the certain sense Matt for just the reasons you describe but I feel like it kind of all held together to because Trump is kind of the first gay president yes dancing to YMCA like there really was a thing where like well Trump he's not gonna be that bad for gay people because he's from New York he loves Broadway show tunes he's not he's not like this visceral homo foe and do you remember the incredible moment where the gaze for Trump like the homemade gaze for Trump when one of the daughters spoke yeah to fit oh my god Tiffany Trump wasted off her ass gave like the keynote speech

35:30so let me just say how excited I am to be here in this room with probably so many of my friends I that I see a few of you already in here it's such an honor I love you it's truly it's such an honor to be able to be here and speak truthfully honestly and from my heart I know what my father believes in prior to politics he supported gays lesbians the lgbq I I a plus community okay and people you unfortunately you see social media you see these fabricated lies it it saddens me I have friends of mine you reach out and they say how they make up stories how would you support your father we know you we know your best friends are yet we know your best friends are this this this I say it's because my father has always supported all of you

36:30he's not doing it he's never got it for politics and he's not doing it for politics and unfortunately I think there's a lot of people out there and other politicians who do okay when my father decided to run as for the Republican nomination I can say I was you know I was a little bit worried just based on previous you know the past the past Republican establishment and how you know their views maybe were towards this community towards gays lesbians but guess what my dad cannot be bought off he's not going to let anyone change his views and he's done that great I can all see that my mom's here in the audience okay she flew down I being some of her best friends when she was on Broadway like unfortunately one of her best friends passed away from AIDS and he said my mom had so many friends in New York who were gay actors who all died of AIDS yes it was like

37:35and she came on to like upbeat pop music and then she was like all my mom's friends died of AIDS and everyone was like yeah because I do have a gaysons of humor there's something like darkly funny about that like that that that particular like statement in that context but it's darker in a in a worse way to do like it's it's kind of like speaks to that like no matter how far you go with these people there's they'll always remind you of the dark dark kind of underbelly I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to the sponsor of today's episode factor I present as cool calm and collected on this show and I think that that's a pretty good representation of how I am in real life to however I also get overwhelmed sometimes by the seemingly never ending list of obligations that we all have friend obligations family obligations work obligations health obligations and one of the places where I would like to have as few obligations as possible is in the kitchen I want food easy and I want food that tastes good and that's interesting and that is where factor comes in factor is a meal delivery service with chef made gourmet meals that are already too heat and eat in just two minutes

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41:33from my lows perch at bright bar news he became one of the primary aggressors of gamer gate a massive online harassment event that allowed my low to ride the wave of the culture war all the way into the heart of the United States cat could you explain what gamer gate was and the precedent that it created for online harassment campaigns TLDR on gamer gate so gamer gate established the modern playbook for smear campaigns and harassment and the phrase gamer gate is everything has come due to scribe so much of our culture in particularly like the 2020s but where it started was it started with this harassment campaign against women in the video games industry women game developers women who made YouTube videos about pop culture what this came from was it was a backlash against feminism and there were these like lies and there were these smear campaigns built around the idea that female game

42:38developers could sleep with men who covered video games as journalists to gain favorable coverage that's where the phrase like it's about ethics in gaming journalism comes from but of course this wasn't true like of course this was completely rooted in nothing like the woman who was targeted at the beginning and the man who she was accused of being in this relationship with for clicks like there wasn't even any real coverage that was happening like they just they just invented it there's a lot it goes into a lot more detail that we don't really have time for today what is important about gamer gate is that I think it combined a lot of the key elements of like these types of campaigns which is like disinformation online coordination which at that time was like bright bar and specific online forums an onslaught that these days is conducted through like algorithm driven social media feeds which were new and emerging at that time it's like if you post enough about something it'll start being put onto every single person's feeds and it creates this like cascading

43:42network effect so that's a big part of what gamer gate was and Milo and bright bar were really bolstering and allowing this campaign to get as big as it did by covering it for bright bar and I mean I feel like gamer gate set the playbook for like online harassment to drive people out of public life particularly like minoritized people through doxing yes through death threats through all of that stuff and the gamer gate playbook has really been almost industrialized by things like canary mission which targets anyone who is pro-Palestinian and public by libs of tiktok who targets anyone who's LGBT and public in the same places children what's interesting is one year prior to gamer gate Milo mocked gamers as quote unemployed saddles living in their parents basements but of course that did not matter if joining their cause positioned him as having the upper hand against online feminists and social justice warriors and women in general then that's what he was going to do from the

44:45guardian quote gamer gates activists and opponents both agreed that without Milo's advocacy the movement would have fizzled out I want to tell you guys Milo's core political tenants as I see them this is this is how I summarize them one Trump is daddy two feminism is cancer even saying those three words it brings me it's like a shot of 2016 right into my system feminism is cancer his big thing is like that he would literally say on speaking tours was like would you rather have a child with cancer or a child who's a feminist it's classic three feminists and people of color and liberals are societies real oppressors and political correctness is the sword they wield to crush free speech for Islam is bad because it's caused oppression for women and gay people but Christianity is good despite having done the exact same thing and also women and gay people are bad anyway but it's not racism I

45:50promise five Muslims are an inherent threat to western society thus their immigration into the US must be stopped okay these tenants exactly as you have written them are what Elon Musk fed into the Twitter algorithm to create X as it exists today like to your earlier point Matt about how like this is just what the whole right is now like this is if you could distill Elon Musk the world's richest man who controls so many of our communications platforms like this is this is him now this is what Elon is now I want to make one more point that follows from gamer gate specifically and Matt it goes to a number of the you know distilled my low beliefs you mentioned which is I kind of think the sequence of the misogyny and anti feminism at the heart of gamer gate what years would you say the height of gamer gate would have been 2014 2015 okay and do you remember trump one way he broke

46:54through the very first Republican debate remember his attack on making Kelly she she gets out and she starts to ask me all sorts of ridiculous questions and you know you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes blood coming out of her way or ever making those comments going after Rosie O'Donnell you've called women you don't like fat pigs dogs slabs and disgusting animals your Twitter account only Rosie O'Donnell very dated reference although she's back on TV everything old is new again apparently but like the misogyny at the heart of the trump campaign I think in some ways the gamer gate the misogyny and anti feminism at the heart of that was a way of like priming the pump for someone like trump who very first debate before we knew his opponent even would be Hillary right was talking about the mod debate moderators menstrual cycles right and making fun of Rosie O'Donnell and it turns

47:55out this is the man who wins the nomination and then defeats the first women candidate for you know of a major party like I don't I think though that kind of trajectory and linkage is not accidental trump was riding a wave that was maybe not started by Milo but that Milo was instrumental in kind of turning up that's exactly right and that's why you saw so much of the same gamer gate architecture around depb heard in 2022 which then paved the pathway for trump to come back into power riding the wave of denying you know abuse allegations and and using cultural d'arvo on this massive scale following the success of gamer gate and not only bullying a number of women into years long solitude but also turning Milo Ganapala's into a folk hero of the online right Milo thought why stop there and so with his celebrity on the rise in 2016 when a ghost busters remake was released featuring an all female cast which included Leslie Jones online alt-right wingers levied

49:00a misogynistic and racist harassment campaign against the film and its cast specifically targeting Leslie Jones for being a black woman Milo led his hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter to dog pile on her and posted a barrage of tweets himself calling her quote barely litter it a black caricature and a black dude this led to Leslie Jones leaving Twitter which of course the goals of campaigns like this which by the way are the real cancel culture might I add Milo's own account was then suspended by Twitter for violating rules around harassment back when Twitter still had those hello well well throughout 2016 and 2017 Milo spouted his beliefs in the most incendiary possible way at anyone who would give him a microphone and accused anyone who did not give him a microphone of being insufficiently devoted to the cause of free speech if you don't let me speak on your

50:03campus and give me money you are against free speech so ridiculous i think it's relevant to discuss here something that i feel very passionately about which is that Milo's fame was not inevitable but in my opinion manufactured by a media apparatus that simultaneously treated him like a mean gay joke and like a serious person who represented free speech itself similar to other previously obscure figures like Barry Weiss or Dasha Necrosova in the later 2010s working on a bonus episode about Dasha right now subscribe to the patreon if you want a mainstream media outlets profiled Milo endlessly thereby conveying to the rest of us that this is someone worth taking seriously and one of the reasons why mainstream media outlets were so obsessed with Milo and comparable figures is because he was there waluigi but he was the he was the anti-huffing the post therefore you can

51:08create this ecosystem where it's like they're playing off of each other it's like oh Milo says all the naughty bad things that were not allowed to so we're going to profile him and give him more ammo to use because there's this like mutual effect to that that's why like the media ecosystem my Milo became such a darling because it was like at the end of the day all of it was run off of this same desire to get clicks and to get attention online and because he was so good at that and specifically in a genre that mainstream media was very responsive to which was politics that in my opinion is is one of the reasons why Milo became this like little media darling for that period I also think as someone who has a whole podcast thinking about right-wing politics intellectuals and so on I've noticed that for sheer like content creation purposes more mainstream outlets have to find some right-wing figure to profile inevitably in a way that

52:08it might not be overtly sympathetic but it's it always ends up being kind of a win for them at some level because we all know the right wing like it's kind of priced in some of the nastiness so what they're gaining is wider exposure their ideas are being you know for every person like us who reads a profile of Milo in year whatever in his horrified there's people who say oh wait I never heard of this guy this is kind of interesting yeah and it's it's kind of a tricky problem because it feels wrong somehow to ignore people like Milo because they are spreading vicious hateful things their politics are not just but if you cover them too much it's kind of a win for them because it's it's it's you know kind of in kind contribution to their PR campaign I just think if you are going to cover these figures as I do as both of you do on our respective very established media properties but like if you're going to cover these figures you have a responsibility to do it honestly to weigh the harm that they're causing to not treat it like a joke or I think perhaps even worse

53:15something like serious and fashionable and that brings me to one particular profile of Milo Yannopolis he was put on the cover of Out Magazine in 2016 Out Magazine is I probably the biggest LGBT like media property and it wasn't like how horrible is this person it was like this is a relevant gay guy so we're going to do a fashion photo shoot with him and I want to look at some of those photos the article the accompanying article was titled send in the clown internet super villain Milo doesn't care that you hate him it's so annoying it's super villain itself is a bullshit term yes or descriptor like that makes it seem a little cool or at least like something you don't have to take that seriously yeah right yes yeah super villain could you just describe the the photos that we're looking at and if you're watching the video version I'll throw it on the screen

54:16I mean I literally gasped when I saw these pictures because I was just like you have got to be fucking kidding me they are like glamour shots like they have put him in these elaborate costumes in the first one he's just as a clown and he has like the classic like clown makeup with like the blue diamond face paint on his eyes like little red hat and like retro clown suit on but even in this photo it's like they're shooting it like he's a movie the heartthrob they're shooting it like he's like a sexy like clown I hadn't I hadn't even didn't see or didn't remember that photo shoot and Matt when he sent him around beforehand like I was like what the hell is this even like it's it's bizarre in a way that I words are failing me like it's just very strange the clown but it does have the effect whatever else you think about these bizarre photos the clown get up is a way to say yeah this isn't that serious it's so annoying to me and also for patreon cat and I did

55:21an episode about Barry Weiss and it was like New York magazine or like one of these like very fashionable trendy publications did a similar piece and a similar photo shoot of Barry Weiss where I'm like this photo shoot and all of the people you paid to create it and the makeup artist and the set designers and everything costs thousands of dollars they look on top of the world like someone you would want to be and interestingly attached to this article about myler unopolis out magazine put it a disclaimer that was like just because we're covering someone does not mean we endorse everything that they've ever said and I'm like well based on how you've presented the material it sure looks like it the fact that they had to say that someone felt compelled to insert that is kind of like the tell right that's their conscience or something peeking through I have included a passage from the article I want someone to read it enter myler unopolis a 32 year old shamelessly gay british Catholic of Jewish descent who now lives in Los Angeles he stands over six feet tall

56:25and has a lanky soft build when he's not dressed in tailored English suits he's usually sporting tank tops flowy textiles straight leg jeans and a thousand dollar Nike basketball shoes quote I wear these because the guys I want to fuck know what they are but can't afford them dark sunglasses his signature strings of Bahamian pearls around his wrist and a pair of gold crucifixes about his he has poor eyesight and is constantly reaching for his glasses when he speaks he lowers his chin and leans and intently fixing a gaze with dark eyes that are at once dough like and cutting shut up they're all like he's at the airport someone screams at him but he doesn't care and flicks through Instagram on his phone I'm just like shut up these people aren't that cool or interesting but you're telling us that they are oh he reaches for his glasses yeah he reaches

57:26just like me I remember in the berry wife's profile they were like she couldn't believe that she had accidentally gotten pen on her shirt oh my god she told me I have pen on my shirt who cares that's incredible it gives the game a way that they like him it really is revealing that they think he's cool and sophisticated and interesting and intriguing and it's like they don't care they like who like I the whoever wrote this piece I find it very difficult to believe would actually care about Leslie Jones getting harassed off of the internet as a result of this man which by the way this was published two months after the Leslie Jones harassment campaign where Milo called her a man like this was two months after that wow that's incredible how much of this I do not intended derails with this but Americans falling for anyone with a semi-charming British accent it remains undefeated it seems like well actually that's a good segue into the next one I have to talk about

58:31because because in his earliest days despite all of the abhorrent shit he was saying he was charming and he could charm the pants off of a live studio audience and he did that very thing when he was invited to speak of course on Bill Mars show a few months after this out magazine profile Bill Mar was one of many people who gave him a sort of primetime interview I think that that interview is instructive for a few reasons and I want to play a coupled brief clips the first clip is just an excuse for me to lay into Bill Mar I'm for it you look like Bruno you know I told her to doll down contouring she didn't listen you make up lady was just crazy all right about here go people started to tell me have you are you gonna get this guy Milo you know on your show and I started to look into you know what you're saying and look I think you're colossally wrong on a number of

59:32things that's okay but if exactly if I if I band every now to the show who I thought was colossally wrong I would be talking to myself Bill Mar is like I need to talk to people who I disagree with otherwise I wouldn't have a show Bill Mar when's last time you talk to a leftist Bill Mar when's last time you talk to about talk to a Palestinian about Israel Palestine it's so fucking again this is nothing to do with my Leonardo bliss it's just so fucking bullshit because Bill Mar loves to create an aesthetic of like I'll talk to anyone but I'm like no you won't you will only talk to people at least as right wing or more to the right than you are because that's who you're most comfortable talking to and he does this thing with the the specific Milo you know a police interview where he sort of creates the aesthetic that like they have nothing in common and they are so different but not five minutes into the interview they're bonding over how much they hate Muslim people no I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll but if it's if somebody gets hurt and because of

1:00:37truth needs to be said like yes religion I've always attacked religion yes well we're your sound on Islam unlike most of the people in your side yes right very good that's true Milo is like grinning from ear to ear during this televised interview because this gives him everything he needs Matt you I think made this point earlier where it was like if you are giving these people a platform then they can sway non-believers even if the people who are watching think they disagree with them from the outset he's doing his whole charming funny stick in the beginning and then he's like it's okay if you disagree with me it's okay if you disagree with me he's manipulating the audience and Bill Maher is giving him a massive platform to do it and by the end of this appearance many people watching are gonna be like you know I may not agree with Milo Uniappla's on everything but what a what a charming little man like what a what an interesting guy maybe I actually do agree with him on some stuff and maybe the media's wrong for saying all these things about him yeah Matt I like

1:01:42to say I really love your Bill Maher hate you know there was I thought he hated I know I know there was a an old writer for the nation magazine who every summer when he did you get a new intern you know he would ask them like young man young woman is your hate pure and that your hate for Bill Maher is pure I'm glad you played that clip because Milo is very charming in that clip that this is part of the why he's such a dangerous bag it he lives up to the name he lives up to the name and I want to play another one for you so let's start with the contradictions about you which is pretty crazy because you're you're gay and you're uh spoiler alert oh come on you can do better than that what tips you are I've been reading about you I mean your mother's Jewish you have a black Muslim boyfriend no but I have no you did still black no Muslim not Muslim but he was Muslim

1:02:47there was somebody once okay but you the spoken out talk about it you're spoken out against all these your people like you say you don't hire gay people oh no you can't trust them to shop to work on time too much drugs too much sex they never shop to work always making excuses no no no I mean not as bad as women but no I don't hire you but you know that's not I mean oh there we go but you know that's just hitting you're easy you're very easy very easily triggered it's pathetic I mean it's the same thing it's like he's funny and then he'll like push it a little too far and then he'll be like oh but I'm just joking you guys are so triggered he's not joking it's not funny his actions and rhetoric that he spread we can now see with the benefit of 10 years in the future how many horrific consequences they had for actual people's lives but this studio audience is just like eating it up I know that was that was I got just as mad at them it's like look at listen to those piggies eating up the slop uh terrible again this just circles back to how much I hate Bill Mar

1:03:52yeah most things do in fact but as it should my low is having fun right he knows what he's doing he's very good at it like I said he's charming this audience which if he just came out and said you can't hire women or gay people because they'll never show up for work of do the job that's horrifying but my low presentation is very convincing so he knows what he's there to do and so does Bill and Mar and it's good TV and this video got seven million views on YouTube and this is how people worm their way into the culture and you know Bill and Milo despite Bill going great lengths to define their aesthetic differences do have a shared goal which is getting attention and this is this is also after Leslie Jones incident like man shout out to Leslie Jones and just all of the people who were overlooked during the rise to this man's fame as just people like who are worthy of being sacrificed at the altar of like but he's so cute and funny yep viewed as completely disposable and then people like Bill Mar get to act like they're

1:04:56so different from Milo you know bliss like get to play this whole thing is like I really disagree with you and we're on opposite sides of the issue what what what sides of the issue do you not agree on yeah what is he saying that you disagree with cat that's such a that's such a great point it is like it ends up being this weird way in which Bill Mar like having Milo on is proof of his principles in virtue yes or something actually like in his telling like that actually is what that proves it's not that your platform in this odious bigot it's that no see I Bill Mar I talk to people I disagree with in this age of you know polarization look at us having conversations across the divide fuck off sorry so much fucking bullshit no no get into it get into it this is where we yell yeah it all comes back to the imaginary victimhood versus real victimhood that we talked about at the beginning so as Milo's star continues to rise he he does sort of become a maga darling

1:05:56Milo was good at generating press about himself and his movement speaking at campuses across the country and working to legitimize the alt-right within what was becoming mainstream mega culture one such speaking event at Berkeley college in in California famously drew 1500 protesters and became violent with many people getting beat up and injured but this was good for Milo because his fashioning himself into a warrior for free speech absolutism earned him credibility within members of trump 1.0 and a speaking opportunity at CPAC 2017 this was you know of course during the era when republicans claimed to be the party of free speech in opposition to the cancel culture obsessed liberals nowadays those rules have decidedly been reversed his invitation to CPAC was supremely controversial from the outset regardless traditional republicans like Ted Cruz tried to

1:07:00issue Milo from the movement finding him cruel and obscene but the movement was decidedly gravitating towards the brashness and outward racism of figures like trump and Milo so they failed to stop him i want to give a content warning now because we are about to talk in some detail about child sexual abuse in 2017 Milo and opolis was preparing to speak at CPAC when video surfaced of youtube interviews from the year prior where Milo had argued that some 13 year old boys could consent to sex with adult men because some of them are quote emotionally mature enough to consent to sex with adults the law is probably about right that's probably roughly the right age i think it's probably about okay but there are certainly people who are capable of of giving consent to a younger age i certainly consider myself to be one of them people are people who are sexually active younger

1:08:03this is sort of this is why one of the reasons i hate the left you know i'm not this sort of stupid you know one-size-fits-all policing of culture this sort of this arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent which totally destroys you know the you know understanding that many of us have the complexities and softleties and complicated nature of many relationships you know people are messy and complex and actually in in in a homosexual particularly some of those relationships between younger boys and older men some of those relationships are some of the most station in me it sounds like it sounds like i'm a pre-smaller station to me and you know what i'm grateful for father Michael i wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him oh my god this was a bridge too far Simon and Schuster cancelled plans to publish his autobiography called dangerous which he'd previously received a $250,000 advance for he resigned from bright part under pressure and CPAC cancelled his speech in the wake of all of this yet another 2015 interview clip

1:09:09emerged where Milo told Gavin McIns the co-founder of alternative media outlet vice who himself turned out to be a neo nazi the 20 tons are crazy that child sexual abuse is quote really not that big a deal you can't let it ruin your life but as far as i can tell it did ruin his life i want to play you guys the apology the rare the exceedingly rare apology that Milo made in the wake of these clips resurfacing and here's what he said between the ages of 13 and 16 two men touched me in ways they should not have one of those men was a priest my relationship with my abusers is complicated by the fact that at the time i didn't perceive what was happening as abusive but i can look back now and see that it was i still don't view myself as a victim but clearly i am one my experiences as a victim led me to believe that i could say almost anything on this subject no matter how outrageous but i understand that my usual blend of sassy gay british sarcasm provocation and gallows humor might

1:10:12have come across as flippancy a lack of care for other victims or even worse it seems to have been the case in reports advocacy i'm horrified by that impression i would like to restate my disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors i regret the things that i said i don't think i've been a sorry about anything my whole life and this isn't how i wanted my parents to find out about this either but let's be clear about what's happening here this is a cynical media which hunt from people who do not care about children they care about destroying me in my career by extension my allies they know that although i made some outrageous statements i've never actually done anything wrong they held this story back they held the footage back footage has been out there in the wild for over a year because they don't care about victims they don't care about children they only care about bringing me down additionally my lo told the new yorker quote i don't believe sex with a 13 year old is okay when i mentioned in number 13 i was talking about myself i was talking about the age that i lost my virginity i think anyone who is tuned into politics or was like watching the

1:11:20news a lot at this time remembers that my lo defended pedophilia and that was the story i did not know until i went back and looked at all of this for this episode that he later explained it this way and i think it colors in so much of what we know about his life my first thought when i hear him talk about this and sort of his rationale behind it is that it's not super uncommon and in fact over the past couple of years in my reporting something that i've gotten really interested in is this phenomenon where people who are victims of abuse whether it's childhood sexual abuse like the type that my lo is describing here or whether it's you know into a partner violence domestic abuse i've noticed that a lot of times people will come out of these situations and they will develop really really victim blaming attitudes in response to being victims and i was like where does

1:12:22that come from because i see it all the time and the refrain usually is not as horrific as my lo is commentary on children it's usually something like oh well i'm a victim of abuse and i don't believe her or him or them because i don't think what they went through is that bad or that's not how i would have acted or yada yada yada and i actually spoke to a sociologist about this last year who told me that one of the reasons she thinks this is is because when you're a victim of something very rarely do you get anything even resembling justice like that rarely ever happens we've been a very backwards world when it comes to abuse typically abusers don't really face any consequences and sometimes they even assume benefits as a result of them abusing others and so as a victim and i think particularly as a child victim how do you internalize that and how do you grow from that and what does that do to your mindset i think a lot of times in order to cope

1:13:28people do flip it and say like well i'm not a victim and actually what happened to me wasn't even bad and that's exactly the way that my lo was describing these incidences it's just that that doesn't justify or make it okay for you to spread that type of victim blaming language further but i think that that internal sort of psychology around this is really really really common and the sociologist i spoke to found in her research that it happens more often than not so that was kind of my first impulse here i also suspect that at the time he was making like this press conference there's no way that he would have actually been able to like heal and reprocess all of this stuff from the time that the podcaster resurfaced and he got fired and the time that he was making those statements like it's not that he was being coerced into saying like actually i am a victim and actually like what i said was wrong but i doubt that he actually believed it what i think helps provide color as to what will happen next in this timeline the last thing i'll say is when he mentions that people

1:14:32bringing this up don't actually care about children and it's all a very cynical like media ploy there is some truth to that i literally wrote down in my outline that is true that is true there's definitely some truth to that like some of the people who were outraged about this online and i remember this happening and to your point Matt i don't really remember like all of this but i remember him making these comments a lot of people were justifiably outraged about it but you think about him getting pushed out of bright bar Steve vannins operation and just recently it was revealed that steve vannin had a very close relationship with jeffery epstein throughout all of this where and he was working behind the scenes to help try to like allow epstein to have a comeback into polite society so it's like yeah what what Milo said in that podcast the language he used and the framing he used was notable it was something that you don't hear every day but the attitude he's a spousing is not that abnormal and it is deeply interwoven into the conservative movement and beyond

1:15:32yeah and held deeply by many of the people who sought to push him out and so much of this was about aggrieved conservative media figures who thought that Milo's brand of conservatism was going to make them irrelevant cat could you say what when someone like Milo says i am not a victim what does that do for them or what is that compensating for yeah obviously you know i can't speak for him directly or for every person but the sociologist all excited the person who's researched into this i find really helpful it's a book called on the wrong side um and the sociologist in question is Nicole Baderra and she did these interviews with people going through the title nine process where she would interview them before they started the process like after they had just been assaulted or abused and then they would go through the whole title nine process every single one of them unanimously in the entire school system that she studied over the course of a year every single one of them was filled by the system which is striking on its own and then she would interview them

1:16:33again at the end of it and a lot of them what happened to their thought process was they they kind of determined that they weren't victims because the alternative to saying like like if you say like i am a victim and i was filled by the system that is really haunting and difficult to carry with you and victims who internalize that they are in fact victims which is true often suffer more consequences than victims who slip it around because the the people who went through this system and were failed and who knew that and continued to believe that a lot of times they would drop out of school they would struggle to complete their degrees and they would just struggle to be able to move on because they knew they had been failed but victims who decided that actually it was their fault and actually they weren't victims at all and the school was correct to fail them in this way those are the people who would be able to stay in school and like complete their degrees so it's almost like a survival mechanism yeah i was going to say that that's exactly where i was

1:17:34going to go it's like there is something almost empowering about saying i'm not a victim and moving forward but the problem then is you the actual stuff is not dealt with and that's not being critical it's hard it's obviously just beyond difficult to handle those things but it does mean like someone like Milo as he was going through his life it was all kinds of undoubt with traumas and difficulties that we can sympathize with but also kind of sane i'm not a victim it means it's kind of like the you're you're moving forward but without healing at all and that's yes it's probably going to lead into what Matt you might want to say next or where this tale is going to some degree i mean i i want to provide compassion with the caveat that a lot of people do experience things similar to what he experienced and don't end up doing this but at the same time like the compassionate part of me is like well maybe if he wasn't abused by a priest when he was 13 maybe he wouldn't have

1:18:37flunked out of school twice you know and maybe he would have gotten a normal job instead of filtering into this like shock jock conservative media persona thing and if that had all happened maybe he would have had space to deal with this in a healthy way that could actually allow him to heal but he didn't have any of those things and perhaps because he was already down this right wing media persona career path and this is all he could do and perhaps also as a genuine coping mechanism that felt good to him at the time in 2018 the following year when Milo is decidedly out of work he self-publishes another book called diabolical how Pope Francis has betrayed clerical abuse victims like me wherein he attempts to assert the discredited link between homosexuality and pedophilia Milo blames systemic child abuse in the Catholic Church not on closed rank power structures or

1:19:41a culture of Christian sexual shame but on a pope he views as overly friendly to gay people and progressive bishops he refers to as the lavender mafia which is another good name this comes up again in 2024 when he still seems to just be really upset about the things that he said and I think specifically what they did to his career he tweeted at 13 I was raped by a priest his name was father Michael he died years ago I said some stupid shit trying to make sense of it which was used against me in 2017 the idea that this translates to Milo as a petto is so warped and dark that anyone who says it is dead to me forever well I mean to me when Milo said that these people in the media don't actually care about abuse victims what is he doing there so I can honestly say when I was an editor at catholic magazine and the summer of 2018 is when the sex abuse crisis really re-emerged in the news because Cardinal McCarrick right who was a very

1:20:45fey who was the archbishop and Cardinal of Washington DC very major figure in the American church his decades long abuse especially of like young seminarians or like priests in training came to light and Francis happened to be Pope who did not make Cardinal McCarrick a bishop or an archbishop or a Cardinal right he was Cardinal McCarrick was retired basically by the time Pope Francis this time period we're talking about but I can honestly say no experience of mind in media has made me more depressed despairing just just almost victimized stomach than using priests abusing children to try to do a coup against Pope Francis because you didn't like the direction Pope Francis was leading the church like that to me is just unfathomably evil to try to take out a pope who he has flaws and when it comes to handling of sexual abuse by catholic priests I you know I've written about that I've written editorials about that I'm not letting Pope Francis off the hook but he was not the

1:21:48heart of this problem nothing that happened to Milo had anything to do with Pope Francis Pope Francis was a normal straight guy which is why he didn't give a shit about when he said who might a judge he was almost like a straight guy saying I don't get the big deal because he's not neurologic about it right that's why Pope Francis was there would be somewhat normal toward gay people compared to many other popes because he I think he just it didn't you know it didn't trigger any kind of his own neuroses or repression like it might have with Pope Benedict XVI and his red proto loafers and such right so that's one thing I just want to say that the very thing Milo was criticizing that statement you know he was doing he was using the you know survivors of abuse to try to take out a pope who his ideological allies hated no one more than Steve Bannon like Steve Bannon hated Pope Francis with a passion he viewed him as like like the er globalist enemy of whatever he was trying to achieve politically and so I find I just

1:22:48want to say that like I have no tolerance when it comes to sexual abuse in the Catholic church but I find leveraging the suffering of victims and survivors that way really disgusting and of course Matt as you pointed out the link between pedophilia and homosexuality is discredited the link between gay priests and abuse is not real none of these things are real that he's claiming there are problems in the Catholic church including with gay priests and the kind of culture and secrecy around that but that is not that's like a an institutional structural problem not a gay problem and so I just want to say someone who thought about and read about these things far too much please do not take anything Milo says seriously if I can convey one point on the Catholic question he's ever almost every single point it's just the opposite of the truth in fact and I do think like the Milo Catholic mediator kind of this phase of his career which seems very connected to Catholic matters I remember I mean again going back to the 2016 era when I started as an editor

1:23:51to Catholic magazine I became aware of this gentleman named Michael Voris who I always thought he very gay and it turns out like as his story came along he was like formerly lived the gay lifestyle or the homosexual lifestyle but then stopped and he ran a media operation called church militant which the SPL Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a ultra orthodox Catholic propaganda ministry that pushes an anti LGBT agenda on the episode entitled the Pope and the homomorphia the two meaning this guy Michael Voris and myelianopolis discussed the book you mentioned that diabolical and it's just one of those moments where like as a gay Catholic I've made a promise to myself to be honest when like I've told cardinals important ones that I'm gay like at a cocktail hour like I take every opportunity I have every priest I meet every kind of Catholic you know pre-late people in the hierarchy I try never to hide it and so I found it especially appalling that these two gay men

1:24:55right we're sitting there talking about how they're not really gay or they've stopped being gay and how you gays are the problem with the Catholic church it was just like a distinctly Catholic form of absurdity actually like probably you're only really going to get that these days with any regularity in religious contexts where the guys who are white knuckling it saying I'm not gay I prayed away the gay whatever it might be right they're continuing to build the cage that they're trapped in you know and it's just it's both kind of comical and absurd but also deeply sad because they're lying about themselves and they're lying about the church and when you're building your life on lies it crashes out in the way it has with Milo among others speaking of the 2017 pedophilia scandal was the effective end of Milo's short lived relationship with the mainstream right since then he's bounced around looking for work working underneath figures including Kanye West

1:25:58who he served as chief of staff for in Kanye's short lived 2024 political career and for Marjorie Taylor green unpaid intern correct was Milo unpaid under marjorie I read that in preparation he was in like 2022 he was an unpaid intern for some amount of time with Marjorie Taylor being wow what I do know is that he lived in her house crazy oh man room and board was included in this is a great premise for a sitcom yes a Milo like character in a marjorie Taylor green like character you know the twos company I'm a fascist woman and here's my gay live-in intern it's awesome yeah Milo claims that he helped orchestrate the infamous Mara Lago dinner between Trump Nick Fuentes and Kanye West to get back at Trump or putting him in political exile knowing correctly that the dinner would be a PR fiasco for MAGA Milo has also traversed the podcast circuit to

1:27:00advertise his conversion out of homosexuality and it's up to you to decide whether that is in attempt at sustaining relevance in pivoting the brand or a product of genuine religious psychosis I want to talk about his sexuality in 2017 when things were still going well for Milo and his career he married his husband a black gay man and there isn't much known about his husband and Milo posted photos from their wedding where his husband is turned around in every photo wow which is which is bizarre and also speaks to Milo's just ongoing objectification of black gay men even on his own wedding day but I also understand that this guy probably wanted anonymity because I would if I was married in my right I mean it's like I understand why we're doing what we're doing here yeah yeah but despite his marriage and his flaming homosexuality in general Milo insisted throughout this

1:28:06entire thing that homosexuality is a sin and criticized the Catholic Church's loosening attitude towards it saying quote I wouldn't dream of demanding that the church throw away her hard truths just to lie to me in hopes I'll feel better about myself and if it's no longer a sin then your whole stick is kind of blown up isn't it Milo I feel like this is sort of like a progression that you see happen in conservatism where it's like not by any means all conservatives are stemming from the root of like unresolved abuse or trauma in their lives hashtag not all conservatives but some certainly are that is why I believe that Trump as the abusive father figure for all of America has taken on such an important like cultural symbolism in the new right like we're all treating Trump as our abusive father what I feel like is kind of happening with Milo is like he really internalized

1:29:06this idea that he wasn't a victim then he was forced to confront the fact that he was a victim and take that on as an identity that he didn't actually believe or was like processing and now we have this phase where it's like it's so much easier to blame the pope and gay people punching down or up like in a weird way like tokenizing in one direction and like punching down in the other direction and it's like that's so much easier than actually having to process and understand like rape and abuse culture which is all around us and deeply depressing and for Milo likely the the root of a lot of unresolved issues internally so it's like now we've entered the ex gay phase because we're just he's constantly moving from one form of disassociation around that childhood trauma to the next yeah and that is exactly why I said it's like is this religious psychosis and dealing with trauma is this just where you are in your career which you would also have to throw away if you

1:30:10admitted that why what happened to you happened to you was not because of gay people it was not because of a you know relatively liberal pope it was because of all of these institutional structures of power that we are constantly criticizing on the left yep in 2019 Milo was a still openly gay but also the grand marshal for a street pride parade in Austin throw back to that era of the culture were remember when they were like trying to make street pride a thing yes in 2021 Milo declared himself ex gay he said that he was opening a conversion therapy clinic in Florida not sure if he ever got around to that he said that his husband which he still had had been quote demoted to housemate oh they are currently an active divorce I cannot imagine why ex gay is back I mean we've talked about this before Matt like we talked about this on the channel like ex gay is back with a

1:31:14fervor and a passion and it is quite frightening the number of people even just I think I think a like a reality TV star just this week came out as ex gay or like he came out he said he was announcing being gay and now he's a girlfriend it's just like it's it's happening all the time it's making a comeback but then also like talking about you know people who supposedly believe in free speech it's like they're making like a free speech free association argument why perversely like you should be able to send like I don't understand how it's free speech to make sure you're like 14 year old son can be stuck in you know therapy with some lunatic who tries to get him to pray away the gay but it is like again like hypocritical free speech arguments among other things are in this too but they're actually winning like court battles now as Trump reshapes the judiciary like certain states yeah like practices that had been banned or outlawed right or severely curtailed in terms of reparative therapy are are back and it's it's really it's very quite frankly it's very depressing to me as a gay man especially for the poor guys you know

1:32:15who's not job parents are gonna make them make them suffer through that yeah my first my first boyfriend when I was in high school his parents but of the conversion therapy mine too do you guys remember that bill mar interview I showed you and how my love was despite all of the insane things he was saying like charming playing to an audience coherent aware of all of his camera angles well in December 2025 eight months ago Milo went on Tucker Carlson's show to discuss his turn away from homosexuality and I'm gonna add another content warning here for some graphic descriptions of modes of conversion therapy let's watch a clip I just woke up one day and I was like and I was married to a dude to my shame and I who's now like the x-wife from hell my god um you know just look if there's no other reason to like not be gay just imagine like how bad a black homosexual x-wife is oh like I'm not I'm not even gonna go there you don't even want to know

1:33:19it's like oh sorry it was two sports cars a year wasn't enough okay all right okay all right um don't even but um when I woke up one day and I I woke up one day and I looked over I was like oh no I don't want to do this anymore like hell is real I don't want to go there and it just hit me like all after it was growing you know why I was just like no no I really don't want to go there and I know yeah um what am I doing and the way that I started to address this I kind of stumbled upon a crude version of what the enlightened like they don't call it conversion therapy and what they call it reintegrative therapy um because it's reintegrating those shots and those and those broken and those broken bits of like memory that lead to the wrong output we're talking about detail if you want to but I I stumbled upon kind of like a crude version of that so when I was trying to stop myself from doing this stuff I was using like hot oil on my thighs I was like doing things you know like like

1:34:20like that hurt and I was trying to rewire my brain because I read a lot of you know it's like college anthropology books as I play that's I thought I don't know I thought sex urge is such a basic and powerful urge it's gotta be hard I just thought I knew what I was doing so I was like every time I get aroused I'm gonna go and do something that hurts Matt how many views does that have? 250,000 it's pretty bad it's pretty bad and there are thousands of comments on it being like he's clearly like struggling may god grant him the power to get through what he's going through etc etc. Matt is that struggling what you kind of are referring to when you pointed out how kind of articulate and where the camera angles and kind of on point he was in the prior interview are you are you kind of like juxtaposing even his manner like there is a decomposition even if you hadn't seen the bill mark clip from earlier you just watch that clip he's not a well person just like an and I don't mean that in a mean way I just mean he's he doesn't talk the same

1:35:21way his thoughts are more broken he's clearly been going through some stuff in a way that is like that that Milo is not nearly as compelling as the the clips we saw earlier and I say that again just just because I think that was one of the things you're driving at absolutely and it really struck me because I you know before planning this episode like I haven't watched a Milo Unopolis interview probably since 2017 when he sounded a lot like how he sounded in that Bill Mar interview and when I was watching this Tucker one from more recently it struck me like you know I can't say definitively if someone's on drugs or I don't want to armchair diagnose anyone with anything but clearly a great deal has happened and this person is broken I mean the sort of irreverent cruel one-liner humor that many people once found charmingly offensive in the 2010s now just feels sad I mean even when he is clearly trying to make a joke about having a black gay ex-wife

1:36:24Tucker is like not laughing he's like I don't even want to go there do you know what you have to say for Tucker Carlson to say I don't want to go there yeah literally yeah I mean seeing this and knowing that a quarter of a million people watched it and that many of them are agreeing with this direction that he has taken is just a really disturbing reminder of one of the reasons why the ex-game movement takes on a lot of steam right and out back in the 90s which I think was the original like peak yeah like and certainly a pre-internet was the original peak of the ex-game then it was like books and speaking tours and like mega churches and like a religious movement but now it's an algorithm driven movement that is held aloft by like podcasters with massive platforms like Tucker Carlson it can reach so many more people and as depressing as this is to us it's sending a terrible message to like closeted or gay people who are watching this who are in

1:37:27this audience who are like you know seeing it as something that's being presented as like admirable and part of a struggle that is necessary yeah and I actually want to amend that number because I was referring to Tucker had just posted that clip the full episode that he did with Milo titled why are you gay Milo Yanopolis explains has 1.3 million views yeah that's really bad and I mean like I get this stuff on my wheels my Instagram wheels I get like ex gay and ex trans stuff and I'm like why is this even being targeted to me like I'm not ex gay I'm more gay than ever yeah and I I want to add to it's interesting how much his story of like waking up one morning right and almost an instant having a specifically religious insight right not wanting to go to hell that is so he may talk with the British accent but that's so American right being oh yeah in a moment you can change your life around on your deathbed right you can ask Jesus into your heart right it's and

1:38:29especially if you ever want to get get away with something in our culture you say I was wrong but I found Jesus I'm forgiven and I'm moving forward it's the Russell brand move right the rest of brand move like and it's if you as Chris is the late Christopher Hitchens 15 years ago in December will be when he died but he after Jerry Falwell died he had the great line he said if you can just get yourself called Reverend in this country you can say stuff that no one else could get away with and I thought of that line when Milo basically you know it's the ex gay and the religious conversions they're kind of like two sides of the same coin or often they go together right or whatever your sin might be but it's I found Jesus I'm a new man so quit complaining about me and let me continue to sell you now religious artifacts or whatever that Russell brand you know the Russell brand Bible or his necklaces with independence just all kinds of you know it's the beef tallow yeah yeah yeah at all all fits it's also like with him being like I don't want to go to hell

1:39:31hell is real I'm like baby you're in hell right now you're in the realest hell you're ever going to experience right this second yeah it's very Dante right the people and how who don't realize they could leave yep exactly well one thing about leopards they stay hungry throughout all of this Milo's support for banning immigration has never ever ever ever ever wavered this has been one of the tenets of his politics from the very beginning and you know I should say not banning immigration in general but banning immigration of brown people that's what it's always been in I believe 2017 he gave one of his many campus speeches at a boulder Colorado where he held up a sign that said dear Trump please deport fat people but then more recently in 2025 he tweeted California needs ice checkpoints at supermarket entrances gas stations strip malls intersections

1:40:36and government buildings with on the spot deportation for anyone who can't prove they are in the US legally and then in September of 2025 total legal immunity for ice agents when they're on duty Milo Yannapolis an immigrant was arrested by ice on august 27th 2026 at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport where he was arriving ahead of a scheduled Kanye West concert because I believe he is still working for Kanye West I mean you do what you gotta do never before heard sentence the department of Homeland Security announced his arrest over Twitter and shared his mug shot where he doesn't look like the Milo you remembered unrecognizable now almost immediately fellow right wing provocateur islamaphob pro-Israel sykafant and friend of the president Laura Lumer claimed responsibility writing on twitter breaking illegal alien Milo Yannapolis

1:41:40has been detained by ice I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the US illegally where he incited violence against president trump and worked for marjorie trader green recently kandas oens invited this illegal alien into her home when Milo called for me to be assassinated I reported him to ice and the FBI I told you all that Milo was an illegal alien he was detained in Louisiana by at ice guv Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the muslims he has recently chosen to embrace today is a great day for america now it's worth noting that Milo and Laura Lumer used to be great friends but in recent years that relationship has soured both politically as I said Milo became an ally to marjorie Taylor green and the burgeoning anti-magga america first right which is critical of israel israel is something that Laura Lumer

1:42:42has hit herself to but they also seem to have had a personal rift Milo claimed on a podcast that Laura Lumer wasn't really Jewish that she was just claiming to be he claimed that Laura told her friends that she had performed a sex act on the president and he claimed that Laura had been 5150 which is involuntary psychiatric hold when she was younger by her father which is the real reason she can't own a gun why any of this is anyone's business god only knows and so it's just like these are all pitiful spiteful shameful people with entirely too much power I mean I just people were like you know this is the one time I can support ice I guess and it's just like Laura Lumer has the power to get him deported because she's personally had it with him that's crazy yes can I read from my great friend john gans who did his great sub stack unpopular front great great name but he summarized it this way that which I think is really important to underscore

1:43:46here's where the rise smile of shade and Freud must give way to the furrowed brow on its social media sites ice publicize its deportation with a mug shot of my low think about it the security state is being used to settle factional disputes in the ruling party and apparently at the behest of a person who makes the screeching gobbles seem like a paragon of steadiness manifestly insane and idiotic people are running our government they're using its tools to punish and humiliate their enemies what country are we living in I could not have put that better myself I think that's the key point the ruling party is using the security states to settle its factual disputes which is what arresting and deporting my low what it's kind of substantial meaning is and I would just add he's still getting special treatment why why was he not in some Honduran jail why was he sent back to the country he's actually from right which is not something most people ice is arresting something we can say they're doing oh no oh no oh no oh we lost Matt

1:44:51he'll be back I hope his laptop is okay I'm gonna text him I'm gonna say okay oh oh there he is my laptop fell off of the pasta box and closed a fuck me like I anyway upon returning to the UK Milo gave peers Morgan a TV interview where he said quote I wouldn't wish this on anyone I didn't really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality as an America that the one manner in which they arrest you they put your manacles your hands your feet chain it together I mean like everybody is arrested is like an MS-13 gang member and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television you know I was put from from you know detention facility to correction facility you know every three hours they were they were sort of trying to keep ahead of my lawyer so I couldn't you know so whatever but but no one would tell me anything

1:45:53it was it I mean I know it's designed to be like that but it's it was sure it was humiliating and it was disorientating the rest of it it was physically degrading it was it was frightening it was frightening I don't think I've ever been frightened like that before just how emotional have you been through this period I've never been like this before I I tripped and kind of tumbled downstairs a not or two ago and you know I'm a clumsy person so that it's not the rarest thing in the world but it set something off from from when I'd been kind of you know shoved down a couple of steps and I was weeping like an old woman for an hour and I was like oh I really have to go to get this out of my system I think maybe in the past I've been a little bit a little bit blasé when people talked about their trauma a little bit kind of cavalier when people talked about you know stuff kind of lingering with them but I get it now and I wouldn't wish it on anyone I mean what is there to say yeah what is there even to say you spent 15 years

1:46:59making as much money as you could by specifically wishing this on everyone you thought was beneath you you you did wish this on on people and like I don't think that Milo Yanopolis should have been deported because of a personal tiff with a colleague who has entirely too much power but the situation you have here is one where like the machine that you very happily helped construct has said its sights on you yeah I mean how many times can we say the leopard ate my face it I think for me part of this is going back to the question of like at the very beginning of this episode it was like why are conservatives like so comfortable with this guy who was so flamboyantly gay even though they don't like that and I think part of the allure is the idea that you can be conservative and you can benefit from these power structures even if you can't like that is why you have people from minority groups who are targeted by this ideology throwing their full support

1:48:05profiting from it and pushing it further than it's ever gone before out of the hopes that they too can be a part of the ruling authoritarian class and crush everyone beneath their boot and that they won't be crushed like they want that domination and I think that appeals to people on like a very intrinsic level where it's like oh well if this flamboyant gay guy can be a part of the right wing ruling class then maybe I can be too but the end of this story is that you can't you can't be a flamboyant gay man who is so messy you can't even renounce that and be a part of the winners table there is no winners table like that's what people in the Trump administration tend to find out at the end of it is there like oh it's not real this like fantasy that I that I've built by like wanting to crush all of my enemies maybe it's real for like Trump himself but it's never it was never going to be like what Milo pretended it was and even the consequences that he's living with now

1:49:08to your point Matthew are still nothing compared to the hell and the torture that he has put thousands of other people through have either of you heard this great definition of conservatism by Frank Wilhoid's law let me read it to you conservatism consists of exactly one proposition to wit there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside out groups whom the law binds but does not protect but as as Milo's finding out you know unless the law does protect everyone no one is bound right unless it's unless it's universal both in terms of the binding and the protecting it will eventually turn on you that screw will turn that worm will turn right this is the universal politics we started the conversation talking about right someone like Milo really thought there are some people whom the law should basically fuck over bind right control dominate and those who should be free permitted to do the dominating right and and you know punishing

1:50:10basically and he just found out and if you start once you start making exceptions you will eventually be that exception yourself it's like Lincoln's line his letter to Joshua's speed right you start out by saying all men are created created equal except black people then it's all people are created equal except Catholics and Jews and it's all you know you just once you go down that slope it just you keep sliding they don't stop because I said oh Milo's one of the good ones so we're gonna give him him a pass no the machine he built chewed him up to as I mentioned I read so many of those like glossy profiles they they made of him in 2016 2017 and in one of them from Bloomberg they talked about how much money he was making and how he would drop twelve thousand dollars in a single day on bespoke suits and my other Ianopolis is now allegedly more than two million dollars in debt he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid legal fees he owes even more than that

1:51:13to investors at his various media properties that didn't work out and he is in further debt to Cartier the luxury jewelry company wow it's bad for her I don't know I just kind of think you know there's there's the macro political picture which you too so eloquently described and then there's sort of the micro picture of what was Milo Ianopolis past tense like what was Milo Ianopolis to me I don't see him as someone who ever really planned this out in a long game sort of way I suppose if he had he would just be doing something entirely different but like even someone like Candace Owens who I find to be like very strategic very savvy always getting ahead of the next thing whereas like Milo strikes me as someone who from the beginning was just always trying to string along one controversy to the next to sort of juice

1:52:16out one or two more years of relevance and eventually it just gave out under the weight of its own ridiculousness and sort of political stupidity it was not sustainable no no no I don't think he ever really had like a grand plan for where it was all gonna go and I don't know if Candace Owens has a grand plan I'm almost too scared to ask but Milo this story is like depressing on an individual level at a systemic level it's just really dystopian also depressing yeah I yeah I think like in the next day or two I'm just gonna send you like a wellness check DM to say after after imbuying all this glossy photo essays and profiles of Milo are you holding up or is your brain just totally you know are you in a dark place yourself now from convening this convening this conversation I think I might lean into like the these like loose fishnet tops and I'm I don't

1:53:19know I might throw a couple crucifixes in there why not cat and Matt thank you so much for going down this road with me what a journey we've been on there's that saying of like Milo Yannopolis was a Harvard study and it has concluded thank you for participating I do feel like I do feel like Milo Yannopolis has has decidedly ended whatever that was feels over and with it in era of US politics by gone and so I like to cover these things almost like historically because I don't know I think there's lessons to learn from it if you're a gay guy don't do this that is a really good takeaway honestly and Matt I just want to say how honored I was by the invitation because I have enormous respect for you over your recognition of the humanity of Palestinians and the atrocities in Gaza and I know you've taken some black for it and so I was very

1:54:23chuffed to be invited on this particular podcast so thank you oh that's kind of you and no as far as I'm aware everyone is only nice to me on the internet same same and I'd like to keep my very limited knowledge of what people say about me there but you both do excellent work where can people find more of it well I mentioned the podcast I go host know your enemy you can listen to that wherever you listen to podcasts and if you really were stirred by this my contributions this conversation you can subscribe on our patreon patreon.com slash know your enemy and I'm on Twitter at Matthew Sittman and that's probably the best ways to follow what I'm doing I recently started my own YouTube channel you can find it at cattenbard it is going well I am very grateful to all who have listened and subscribed you can also read my newsletter spitfirenews.com and you can find me on

1:55:24Instagram blue sky and a few other places at cattenbard. Thank you so much for listening to this episode it's a long one I don't even know why I say that anymore they're all long ones I know I feel you man you either enjoy it or you don't listen to this podcast anymore I don't know what to say but I'm so appreciative you know I like I like dipping my toes into gay hell and uh this is gay hell I'm glad that you take take trips into it with me I so appreciate you I love you so much and until next time stay fruity