Analysis: Milo Yiannopoulos wins by capturing spotlight
September 25, 2017 by admin
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Milo Yiannopoulos showed up to Sproul Plaza to speak despite his “Free Speech Week” being canceled. He stayed for just minutes. The cost for security is north of $800,000.
Media: KTVU
Milo Yiannopoulos billed his return to UC Berkeley on Sunday as a test of the willingness by the left-leaning “craziest campus in America” to let him deliver his right-wing views there, months after rioters shut down his first speech.
UC Berkeley let him have his say. But out in Sproul Plaza without a microphone, Yiannopoulos said little that anyone could hear, and nothing of substance.
So what was his highly promoted visit all about?
If Yiannopoulos’ idea was to bring attention to himself, he achieved his goal, said David Meyer, a professor of sociology and political science at UC Irvine who studies protest movements.
“He did well,” Meyer said, referring to the hundreds who showed up at UC Berkeley to support him, protest, or just peer curiously at the spectacle. “If someone in Berkeley who would have otherwise been gardening or studying, or gone out grocery shopping, had their afternoon taken up by Milo’s whims, then Milo is winning.”
Yiannopoulos used his time in the public eye to pray, shoot selfies, sing the national anthem and sign autographs.
He originally advertised the event as Free Speech Week, from Sunday through Wednesday. It was to offer more than a dozen right-wing speakers. The line-up was to include standard-bearers of the right, including Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former White House adviser; author Ann Coulter, another right-wing provocateur; and David Horowitz, founder of a think tank devoted in part to anti-Muslim activities.
But the small conservative student group that had invited them withdrew the invitation just one day before the extravaganza was to begin, as speaker after speaker dropped out or revealed that they had never even intended to come. The students also said they feared for their safety and had received messages threatening to attack them if the event went on.
Yiannopoulos said he was coming anyway.
The former news editor from the opinion site Breitbart News was a far-right rock star on Feb. 1, when he showed up at UC Berkeley to deliver an anti-immigration speech. Student Republican clubs across the country had invited him to their campuses for a post-Trump-victory speaking tour. Yiannopoulos framed the appearances as a backlash against what he called coddled, politically correct leftists who dominated American universities. On campuses, he insulted women and black people, and targeted one transgender student by name in Milwaukee.
But soon after rioters prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking at UC Berkeley in February, the right wing also kicked him out of their realm when video clips surfaced in which he appeared to defend pedophilia. Yiannopoulos lost a book deal, his job at Breitbart, and an invitation to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Now, Meyer said, “He’s not selling anything but himself.”
If Yiannopoulos is intent on resurrecting his image and leading a new social movement — the rise of the political right on college campuses — what happened Sunday suggests “the support for his cause is just not there,” said Michael Heaney, a University of Michigan professor who studies the sociology of protest movements.
“Most of what you see in social movements is people trying to get attention and failing,” Heaney said. “What makes people like Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King so extraordinary is that they were able to mobilize people.
“Most people try and fail,” he said. “Milo Yiannopoulos is par for the course. He’s an activist who has failed to galvanize people for his cause and that makes him typical.”
He said Yiannopoulos has more in common with Abbie Hoffman, founder of the short-lived, 1960s-era street-theater group called the Yippies, than with King, Chavez, Parks — or Mario Savio, whose name today is a symbol of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
The Sproul Hall steps where Yiannopoulos stood Sunday are named for Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s who spoke eloquently from those steps against a ban on students’ political activities imposed by the UC regents.
On Sunday, Yiannopoulos lamented, “I didn’t get to say much.”
Protesters clashed on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza ahead of Milo Yiannopoulos’s appearance Sunday, Sep. 24, 2017. Yiannopoulos left after about 15 minutes on campus.
Media: Guy Wathen, Chris Preovolos, Kimberly Veklerov
During his brief appearance, about 150 people surrounded him in Sproul Plaza, and hundreds more never made it through the single metal detector set up at Shattuck and Telegraph avenues. For about 30 minutes, a Chronicle reporter watched police halt the line leading to a holding area where people were screened before walking through the metal detector. Only after Yiannopoulos concluded his 15-minute visit did police briefly allow the line to move again.
UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo Bennett said police never halted the line but only slowed it down.
Among those unable to get into the plaza were members of the Berkeley Patriot, the conservative students who invited Yiannopoulos in the first place.
Their withdrawn invitation cost Yiannopoulos the student sponsorship needed for him to be allowed to use sound amplification for his speech. He blamed the university for the loss of the sound system, and for the security that kept so many people out of Sproul.
“It was chaos, because that’s how it was designed to be by UC Berkeley and the police,” Yiannopoulos told The Chronicle. “I was denied any kind of amplified sound, so no one could hear anything I was saying.
“There were protesters screaming into my face,” he said. “It was absolutely impossible to proceed, and the entire audience was being held outside. Then I was told antifa was showing up and I was being evacuated. It was impossible to deliver the speeches we had planned.”
And yet, “UC Berkeley did permit him to speak,” Heaney said. “The fact that he did basically force Berkeley to allow him to speak, that is a positive development I would say.”
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Germany’s jubilant far-right has Merkel in its sights
September 25, 2017 by admin
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BERLIN (Reuters) – Swept into parliament by those Germans angered at the arrival of more than a million refugees and migrants, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) had a stark message for Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday.
“We will hound her. We’ll get our country and our people back,” Alexander Gauland, 76, one of the party’s two leading candidates, told supporters to wild applause at a post-election celebration in a Berlin nightclub.
The first far-right party to enter Germany’s parliament in more than half a century, the AfD – which has been likened by Germany’s own foreign minister to the Nazis – won around 13 percent of Sunday’s vote, according to early projections.
That puts it on course to be the third biggest party in the new parliament after Merkel’s conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats, both of whom saw their share of the vote fall amid the AfD surge.
Its campaign provoked controversy with posters featuring a pregnant women under the slogan: “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves” and women in traditional Bavarian dress holding wine glasses with the words: “Burqa? I‘m more into Burgundy”.
The party did particularly well in the former communist east Germany, where it won 22.9 percent of the vote – up 17 points from the last election in 2013, according to projections. In the west it won 11.3 percent, up 6.8 points from back then.
Although all established parties refuse to work with the AfD, its forecast 87 parliamentary seats mean it will now have a voice in the lower house of Europe’s richest country and become eligible for government funding tied to the size of its vote.
It rejects any comparison to the Nazis, instead insisting it raises valid concerns about immigration and what it calls the “Islamisation” of the West which are not being addressed by Europe’s mainstream politicians.
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s other leading candidate, promised supporters the AfD would do “constructive work” in opposition.
“The first thing we’ll do is keep our first promise to launch a committee to investigate Angela Merkel,” said the 38-year-old former investment banker, who argues Merkel’s 2015 decision to allow one million migrants into Germany was illegal.
Georg Pazderski, a member of the AfD’s executive board, told Reuters before Sunday’s election his party would use parliament speeches to draw attention to the cost of immigration and the shortcomings both of the single currency euro zone – which the AfD wants Germany to leave – and of the European Union.
He said he expected other parties to shun the AfD for a year or two but ultimately to work with it. He pointed to the regional assembly in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt where the AfD and Merkel’s Christian Democrats together voted to set up a committee to investigate left-wing extremism.
A recent study by the Ruhr University Bochum found that of the 235 candidates running for the AfD, 98 belonged to the wing that supports party official Bjoern Hoecke, who has courted controversy by denying that Adolf Hitler was “absolutely evil”.
It found 40 candidates were part of the party’s more moderate wing around co-leader Frauke Petry. She herself was once considered radical for overseeing the AfD’s transformation from a party set up by academics in 2013 to protest euro zone bailouts into a staunchly anti-immigrant party.
The other 97 candidates have been so inconspicuous up until now that their political orientation was not known, it said.
The AfD’s candidates include a judge who called Germany’s remembrance of the Nazi murder of six million Jews a “cult of guilt”, a 77-year-old who once called the Holocaust “an effective tool for criminalizing Germans” and a lawyer who said police should be allowed to shoot at illegal migrants.
Reporting By Michelle Martin; editing by Mark John