Milo Yiannopoulos speaks, and Australia's respectable racists howl their approval
Midway through his performance in Adelaide last Friday night, the British alt light provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos smirked as he displayed on the big screen an unflattering photo of the feminist writer Clementine Ford, snapped when she was a teenager.
The word “UNFUCKABLE” was superimposed over the top.
You’d think Yiannopoulos, of all people, would avoid making public assessments of sexual desirability, what with being caught on camera enthusing about intercourse between older men and younger boys, and then scoffing at the Left’s attitudes to this “child abuse stuff”.
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Indeed, one shudders at the images Yiannopoulos might have labelled “FUCKABLE”, given his well-publicised opinions on the “arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent” (he later claimed to have been taken out of context).
On Monday night, at the first of his two Melbourne gigs, he rejigged the gag, using an image of a slightly older Ford. But the joke remained the same. Ford was unattractive. Ford was a pig. She was, he said, a “fat cunt” – and the crowd whooped its appreciation.
Earlier in the evening, as the audience lined up outside the Melbourne Pavilion in Kensington, many attendees had seemed genuinely puzzled by the chants from the anti-racist protesters floating across over a row of riot police.
Yiannopoulos may not be a fascist. But his act weaponises identity by tapping into deeply held conservative grievances
“They’re calling him a white supremacist,” said an older woman, waiting with her daughter, “but he’s married to a gay guy.”
“He’s Jewish, too, I heard,” the man behind her said. “I mean, how can he be a fascist if he’s Jewish?”
It was a remarkable demonstration of how the right’s opposition to identity politics rests on the very ideas being disavowed, with Yiannopoulos’s personal background somehow providing a pre-emptive alibi for anything he might do or say.
In the media there had been chatter that the Troll Academy Australian tour was tanking. The attendance on Monday showed otherwise. The Melbourne Pavilion holds 600 people and Yiannopoulos packed it to capacity, despite announcing the location only a few hours before speaking – and then held a second show the same evening.
Many of those listening to him were seemingly unremarkable, suburban folks.
Yes, there were bikers and men wearing Make America Great Again caps and one youth with his face painted like Pepe the frog. But obvious members of the alt right were outnumbered by those conspicuous only by their ordinariness, including a surprisingly high proportion of women. There were even a few family groups – mum, dad and the kids, out for the evening together.