Hanover, N.H.
A few professors cancelled classes so that they could catch Bernie Sanders’s get-out-the-vote rally at Dartmouth College on Tuesday afternoon, exactly a week before the New Hampshire campus and the rest of the country will cast their votes. A few hours later, excited students confessed they’d skipped an evening session of their freshman writing seminar to stand in line for a different sort of rally—flamboyant Donald Trump booster and campus provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos had made Dartmouth a stop on his “Dangerous Faggot” college tour.
Brin, a freshman from Hawaii, told me as he slipped out of the Sanders rally mid-stump that he was planning to catch both events: “I’m a Bernie fan, and I came here to find out why I should become a Hillary fan. I’m also a Milo fan.” He fell hard for Sanders’s revolutionary rhetoric, but got to know Milo, as Yiannopoulos is known, through his YouTube videos. He confessed, “I didn’t know he did stuff with Donald Trump. I guess I would have found out tonight.”
Unlike Milo’s stops at DePaul, UCLA and Rutgers—or, more recently, an appearance at Yale that was quietly cancelled—the event at Dartmouth, “dangerous” as it was, went on unimpeded by protests. By Milo’s reckoning, he’s already outlasted the enemy, who “don’t have the energy for the protests anymore.” It might also help that some Dartmouth students are casual fans like Brin, who either don’t know or don’t mind that their man Milo celebrates and lends a public face to the so-called alt-right, a “vibrant new form of conservatism” as Milo told Dartmouth.
One young man wearing Nantucket reds and inspecting the soles of his driving moccasins for wear remarked that the alt-right simply “serves a purpose” on a politically correct campus. An internet safe space for white nationalists, conspiracy theorists and freakishly devoted Trumpkins, it’s a ragtag bunch united in their appetite for “devilish mischief” or a digital-age KKK, depending whom you ask.
Milo is their outrage-seeking, and quite openly gay, thought leader. And he’s come to Dartmouth to defend fraternity hazing as a virtuous male bonding measure—and to expound on the “crisis of masculinity” that’s born forth a bizarro-Babbitt father figure in Donald Trump, whom he calls “Daddy.”
“I invented this thing of calling Trump ‘Daddy.’ That was me, you know,” he boasted after his talk, and after a long receiving line for selfie-taking fans. “Where you and I probably differ is that I say it’s a good thing—because God save us from the eternal matriarchy!” he flailed theatrically. Milo continued: “I would love for there to be more masculine role models.” In reality, nothing suggests a global dearth of adequate male role models quite as well as close proximity to Milo.
He doesn’t contribute a meaningfully divergent perspective or bless campus with any original ideas—rather, “He is an idea,” said senior Sandor Farkas, editor in chief of the conservative Dartmouth Review. Farkas justified hosting the “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” having hoped that Milo’s performance would hold up a revealing funhouse mirror to the campus left: “He often attacks identity politics, but he is just all sorts of identity politics rolled up into one.”
Since 2015, Milo’s perch has been Breitbart News, serving as the right-wing site’s “tech editor” and helping to boost Breitbart‘s notoriety. Milo uses reactionary Trumpism to grow his cult following but says he imagines some spiritual kinship with the site’s late founder, Andrew Breitbart. “I watched some of his college talks and it looks a little eerie actually—I never watched this guy, but I would say that just like that,” he says.
An avowed social libertarian and a paleo-nationalist-populist otherwise, Milo considers himself the future of conservatism. In reference to rival Ben Shapiro, formerly of Breitbart, he said, “He’s the conservatism of the 2000s, and I’m the conservatism of the next three decades.” He’s also a Cambridge dropout, a practicing Catholic, and son of an authoritarian absentee Greek father and a Jewish mother, whom he described to me as a “sub-aristocratic housewife” and “not an intellectual.” And essential to his public persona anyway is a running parody of his own homosexuality.
As Milo sees it, he merely plays with these parts of his biography for the benefit of the performance. “If you allow your race, gender, sexuality or religious identity to start forming parts of your personality, it’s evidence of a deficiency, an intellectual deficiency,” he told me after the event.
Milo’s Clockwork Orange persona is not to be taken entirely seriously, he suggests. “I just don’t believe that people can’t tell the difference between me making a joke on stage and serious point,” he said. “I don’t think anyone’s that dumb.” Dumb enough, that is, to mistake “trolling” for bigotry. But if the target of his or the alt-right’s attention can’t take the trolling, at least they deserve it, he said. “They’ve been dishing it out to straight white men and all the rest of it for thirty years. And it’s about time they got a bit back.”
Zach, a Dartmouth freshman, doesn’t bother parsing Milo’s cultural critique from his farce—he just thinks Milo is funny, whatever he says. He used to say the same of Donald Trump, but “now it’s scary.”
“[Milo’s] not the candidate in charge of a major party,” Zach said. “Trump is though.”
For sophomore Peter, Milo represents something refreshing, “I like that he doesn’t care about what people think of him, because we live in a society now where every action we take is consistently judged over and over again with social media.”
Milo’s alt-right shouts down ideological opponents with newspeak slurs and neo-Nazi memes—and yet students find in him a hero for free speech. He also conspicuously avoids vigorous debate.
“The forums where he actually does debate are like this, where he has the mic,” said Terren, a senior. “I don’t know if there’s really a way to engage with him on his level.” But for Terren, it’s worth it just to study the crowd, “It’s completely male-dominated here. I would venture to say disproportionately white compared to the Dartmouth population.”
On campuses, that’s the audience Milo actively cultivates. “Frat culture is now used as a pejorative to demonize men and male pastimes,” Milo said in his speech. “Men are in crisis and are being treated incredibly badly by culture.” From there, he went into a paranoid crescendo: a bitter riff on the Ghostbusters remake with a female cast and the failed public feud his followers waged against one of the film’s stars, Leslie Jones. His racially charged attacks on Jones, who is black, got Milo permanently banned from Twitter. Still, “The left is going to lose,” he’s assured, because “it’s driven by a mean, nasty, misandrist anti-white crusade.”
By now even the event’s organizer, Sandor Frakas had begun to question Milo’s defense of masculinity. An ROTC cadet, Frakas pondered aloud the image of Milo at an early morning drill, a whiny distraction from the good old manly virtues he claims to defend.
But, when it comes to a dubious “masculinity in crisis” claim, schedulers may have inadvertently proven Milo’s point. His entire majority-male crowd chose him over game six of the World Series—even with pitcher Kyle Hendricks, a Dartmouth graduate, on the Cubs’ roster. On Tuesday night, while Trump’s lewd jester pranced around for these college boys, and a few girls, the rest of America learned in live time there’d be a game seven.
