Earlier today, a student newspaper called Nouse published an op-ed titled, “We Need To Talk About Milo.” It’s a long explanation of why I’m so popular, influential and successful.
I’m mortified by its appearance, obviously. That said, it’s worth reflecting on. So let’s go over the numbers, shall we?
I have 97,000 followers on Twitter, my primary distribution mechanism and the place I perform a lot of my journalism, when not here at Breitbart. And that’s not your average 97,000 either. Remember that I’ve put this all together in 18 months. Most journalists don’t get close to my influence in 18 years. People with more got it over a vastly longer timeline, so lots of their fans are dead and gone or don’t care any more.
Mine are current, still using the service, and they are telling their friends. Think of me as a journalistic Greek debt crisis, a snowball speeding up at the same time it grows larger, preparing to bring the world to its knees. That’s why I get an incredible 50 million tweet impressions in one month – more impressions than some big news sites.
Many of my feminist opponents record 50 million microaggressions a month, of course. But real impressions are the lifeblood of Twitter: they represent how many times people saw my tweets, like hits on a website. You won’t see social justice warriors discuss impressions because their tweets stay within their small circles, which constantly shrink as members are exiled to the normal world. I like to call it Social Injustice Twitter.
https://twitter.com/Nero/status/668660440881319936
https://twitter.com/Nero/status/667716430893342722
In the last 28 days, I received 135,000 @-replies on Twitter, and that’s just the people talking about me to my face. (Yes, I know the “M Y” subtweet trick. You bitches ain’t slick.) And remember, Twitter is just one of my many, many beachheads. I can inject myself into any number of different social media vectors.
I could go on, so I will, because this story is replicating itself across other social networks. Personal Facebook: full up with The Five Thousand, my most loyal fans. 10,000 more on my public Facebook page and a further 26,000 following my profile hoping for a spot in #The5000. Speaking of #The5000, I am a little worried that those waiting for a spot might try to engineer an early demise for you guys… so please check your brake lines and look both ways when crossing the street.
Thousands of installs of Milo Alert!, an app whose only function is to play the sound of my voice when a new article of mine arrives. (iOS out soon!) The users of this app aren’t willing to wait to see a tweet from me after I’ve published. My developer is working on a way to check for new updates every eleven picoseconds.
I also have 35,000 subscribers and 1.34 million channel views on YouTube and I don’t even take it all that seriously.
What you don’t see, of course, is all the people who for a variety of reasons can’t sign up to me publicly but guzzle my columns and TV appearances. My “on the DL” fans include world-famous rappers, comedians, novelists and movie stars. Your head would explode if you knew who you’re sharing a favourite journalist with.
That, together with the hate-readers, is why, although I have only 100,000 followers or so, my Twitter profile was viewed over three million times in the last month.
https://twitter.com/Nero/status/634202702688452608
I’m bragging, I know, which is not in my nature. My rise is also a consequence of the rise of cultural libertarianism. But although the polite thing to do would be to thank my lucky stars for the emergence of a new force that is hurling me into the spotlight, the truth is I created this movement as much as the movement has in turn helped me.
Observations of mine these days garner 90,000 shares. Not views, mind you, shares. That’s people who took my work and passed it onward. My competition, if I have any, is getting orders of magnitudes less attention than I am. I’m telling you this now not just to terrify you, though it should if you’re a progressive feminist, but to point out that the only way you’ll hear the story of what I’ve done here is if I tell it, because people read me. They don’t read you.
Interesting side note: the only people who read me as fervently as my hardcore fans are the people who want me dead or, at least, shipped off to a mental institution. I am the most hate-read journalist working today. So, when I tell the truth about you when no one else will, remember that the bad guys are watching, and seething with fury that someone let the cat out of the bag.
The author of the Nouse article today gets it.
Given his status as a caustic yet charismatic speaker who occupies an almost uncharted niche in the national debate, it’s no surprise Milo has fans. He’s followed by over 26,000 people on Facebook and 95,400 on Twitter, and his articles generate a phenomenal amount of buzz, both from his ardent supporters and from those who find him reprehensible. Like him or not, his political positions (combined with his flamboyant persona and expert cultivation and use of social media) make him a formidable online presence.
Whether his views are right, and heralding the start of a new dramatic social shift, or whether they are wrong, and out of step with reality, is irrelevant. What matters is his place in the national conversation.
“Like him or not, he gets around, with frequent TV and radio appearances, as well as the previously mentioned huge followings on social media. He often posts the Google insights related to his Twitter (@Nero) which show he has an enormous reach and audience. The things he says resonate with a lot of young people, and many of these young people would be otherwise completely disengaged and apathetic.
Milo is not a deranged lunatic shouting from a cardboard box-cum-pulpit on a street corner; he is a prominent figure in a legitimate and diverse new political grouping. In denying him a platform, even despite his ambivalent attitude towards misogyny and casual transphobia, we are shutting out someone who represents a side of the cultural debate that is often ignored outright. The fact that he has so many fanatical defenders at this University shows that he’s not an insular figure appealing to a tiny minority. For this reason alone he should be welcomed with open arms, and invited to speak on the issues in which he specialises.
My competition is wondering how I keep building my audience as theirs atrophies, how I keep eating their lunch on stories like Shaun King’s race and charity shenanigans, the U.N. Cyber Violence report, GamerGate and any of the other things I or my team are first at. Conservatives believe it’s because I can speak to people below thirty, and because I have a shockingly good handle on social marketing and information war strategy. Liberals blame it all on “hackers,” “misogynists,” “trolls,” and “harassers,” to whom they credit all my major wins.
But my secret isn’t really any of that. Sure, I work harder than everyone else, sleep less than everyone else (four hours, on average), I’m funnier, more charming, smarter, better looking and more modest than everyone else. But that’s not the whole story.
My technique isn’t some great contact book, or a crack team of cyber commandos, or some big secret social engineering secret. Nor is it even the fact that I’ve made myself social justice-proof by letting my flamboyant personality loose in public and never shutting up about black boyfriends. (They can’t get me on racism, homophobia or misogyny, so half the time they don’t even bother showing up to debate me.)
My secret is just this: I don’t exclude people. I’m everywhere, all the time, and I talk to everyone, especially the people polite society tells me not to, and my contact network and distributed social broadcast platform is of unprecedented size, with dozens of tentacles all over the web.
Yiannopoulos is successful in part because he has tapped into very real cultural anxieties. He likes to say that he is the voice for a voiceless majority. Over and over, in letters and phone calls, his fans espoused their gratitude to him. “For giving people like me who feel like they have been irreparably damaged and abandoned by the majority of society a voice,” said one. Or that he made them feel like “someone actually cared about them and understood their frustrations.”
As I get a handle on running each little fort in my online empire I build a new one, and find more displaced people to help. (I’m coming to Tumblr soon! Such plans I have for that.) I say “empire” like this is all about me, but what I’m doing, every day, is speaking for the voiceless majority against the powerful minority, which is what I always thought journalism was supposed to be about.
This is not what social justice warriors do. You guys hide, you exclude, you specialize, you basket all your eggs. You’ve turned your mastheads, comment sections, Twitter feed and safe spaces into aristocratic digital country clubs like something from the 1920s, ejecting each problematic group, religion, philosophy, subculture, and political bent one by one.
You say your audiences are shrinking but have you even read your own copy? How many of your stories tell some percentage of your readership to fuck off? It’s a lot, isn’t it.
Since “block bots,” whose widespread use on Twitter is largely thanks to me, started to spread, I’ve… gained 80,000 followers. The thing about block bots is, they’re like exclusive party invitations. If you accept them, you can’t go to anyone else’s do. So you’d better make damn sure your party is the very best in town, or the misfits and radicals who have all the sex, drugs and good music are going to head on up the road to crazy gay uncle Milo’s house.
My twitter has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2012
Progressives started excluding people for what I’m sure felt like good reasons. At the start, it was just the trolls. Just the fuckbois. Just the conservatives. Just the women who aren’t feminists. Just the gay men. I could go on but I think you’re starting to get it. Those little percentages eventually add up to a majority – what Ronald Reagan might refer to as a silent one. And it has all the best people in it.
Finders keepers, bitches! I have no problem wading into what you consider the muck and pulling out all the people you sent there by mistake. Cleaning them up, and thumping them down in my living room. Because I like these people. They are witty, fascinating people. They are in fact all the best humans. And I’m one of them. And because I don’t discriminate, unlike you, I am the only person on the planet who has roots in every major dissident subculture.
There are more famous people than me on the internet, and there are people with larger audiences, but only I have my finger in every active internet subculture out there, from men’s rights to gamers to every other reaction against the nannies and finger-waggers of the modern media and political elites. It’s a symbiotic relationship that works brilliantly.
I slum it with people you wouldn’t allow in your comment sections, let alone your homes. At a time other journalists are running scared from their own readers, I invite every shitlord on the planet to a party. You think you’re socially just; really you’re a snob and a bully.
My career is evidence not just that free speech is effective, but that free speech combined with a lack of snobbery and class war always wins in the end. There’s no defence against the truth – especially when it’s wrapped up in a joke and has great hair.
Progressivism and social justice threw everyone out one by one, until the number of people who weren’t permitted to talk was greater than the group allowed to. I’m a direct casualty of that exclusionary attitude: a gay, matrilinearly Jewish conservative Catholic who, according to your worldview, shouldn’t exist.
Is it any wonder I found common cause with the irreverent hordes of GamerGate? It’s the gamers, of course, I have to thank for giving me a leg-up a year ago. We might not look much alike, the average gamer and me. But, when you think about it, we’re natural ideological bedfellows – and we’ve both been cast out by the people who ought to have been our defenders. So we made our own family together, as dysfunctional as it can sometimes appear.
All I care about is intelligence, honesty and a healthy sense of mischief. It’s interesting, and it works. And here’s the thing, Salon et al: I help more people than you do, because I’ve assembled a crack team around me in which there’s someone who’s good at just about everything. There are nine of us now. There will be more soon.
My YouTube presence as a serious endeavour is in its infancy, yet it’s already a powerful outpost in the Imperium Miloanum. A #FreedomOfTweets stream I did a few days ago with Canadian politician Lauren Southern is well on its way to 100,000 views after three days, and I’ve only got 34,000 subscribers on that platform. Another single column of mine blew a hole through the funding target of a movie project and raised $200,000.
It’s not that I’m a particularly large presence on YouTube, because I’m not, compared to many established YouTubers. (Yet those subscribers have watched nearly 8 million minutes in the last 28 days.) The point is that I’ve got little forts of influence fucking everywhere and they can be activated at any time. I joined Instagram a few days ago, posted three photos. Now? Over 1,500 followers and growing. Bam, new fort.
And every single time I move into a new territory I immediately begin hearing the same grievances about you, the progressive media establishment. I find new groups you’ve thrown out as rubbish, and I welcome them into my camp. Every fort is growing, fuelled by the good, decent, smart, kind, fascinating people you decided to discard as “garbage.”
I turn your “trash” into “trashy” and throw the gaudy, garrulous masses of the internet into my columns and TV appearances every day of the week. And I stick up for dorks and nerds and fags and the different every time I step onto a new campus.
https://twitter.com/HiddenTara/status/668928890497310720
Of course, the Left’s response to the Milo phenomenon was first to ignore me, and then to attack me as some kind of bigot in an attempt to delegitimise and no-platform me, so no one ever got to hear what I have to say. The opposite has happened. They tried to strike me down, but I became more fabulous than they could ever imagine.
I’ve been profiled half a dozen times and there’s even a documentary about me, and I haven’t even got started yet. You should hear what I have planned for 2016. Liberals are starting to fear me the way conservatives feared The Daily Show in 2015, because I won’t just whip your ass with facts, I’ll make you look like the clown you are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Q-c29xFAY
You may be wondering at this point why I’m sharing my secret sauce with the world. It’s because, unlike my jealous, possessive and territorial opponents, I realise that there’s space for everyone. I’m not worried about competition because they don’t have any of the unique qualities that make Milo, Milo.
I’m not your typical journalist because although I’m talented and stunning I’m also really humble. I’m the Kanye West of new media. I won’t be to everyone’s taste. But is there another journalist working today who gets bombarded with home-made shrines and topless selfies from athletes and soldiers?
I’ll continue to lead the charge for free speech and freedom of thought and expression on the internet while the media gradually wakes up to the value and pleasure of being mischievous.
I will defend the internet’s right to comment on a woman’s weight or to post Hitler memes because words don’t hurt and I don’t care about the feelings of special snowflakes and it’s precisely the most offensive and obnoxious speech that needs to be protected with the most ferocity.
If you have ever felt bullied, or victimised, or harassed, or marginalised – not by bullshit imaginary concepts like the “patriarchy” but by people who want to stop you expressing yourself and who call you a loser, a manbaby, a shitlord, a privileged cishet white male – then Milo Yiannopoulos is for you.
I will be your Queen. I will stick up for you when no one else in the media will: when they lie about you, and slander you and call you names. I will tell your stories. And we will have so much more fun than the other guys.
Public figures rarely chart, less still analyse, their own rise to fame. They don’t want to jinx things, and frankly it’s tacky and gauche. But what’s happening with cultural libertarianism – and I’m proud to be leading the charge as the movement’s pre-eminent hell-raiser – is just too fabulous for me to deny myself the pleasure of writing about. It would be like not looking in the mirror during sex. Unthinkable.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter and Facebook, or write to him at milo@breitbart.com. Android users can download Milo Alert! to be notified about new articles when they are published.
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