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Trump Supporter Milo Yiannopoulos, Of Gamergate Fame, Sparks Student Backlash At American University

Lane Balassie (right) addresses fellow protesters outside the Mary Graydon Center. CREDIT: BRYAN PARK, THEĀ EAGLE
Lane Balassie (right) addresses fellow protesters outside the Mary Graydon Center. CREDIT: BRYAN PARK, THEĀ EAGLE

Around 150 students gathered last Thursday on the steps of the Mary Graydon Center at American University to protest Breitbart tech journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, condemning the controversial speaker as well as using the opportunity to spark dialogue about marginalized workers and students.

Yiannopoulos rose to prominence in 2014 as an “alt-right” celebrity who championed the cause of “GamerGate,” a phenomenon seen by many as a sexist campaign by a small subset of conservative gamers to harass women who participate in video game culture. Despite this criticism, Yiannopoulos encouraged GamerGate activists to, among other things, lash out against what he called “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers…terrorising the entire community.” He also may have outed a trans woman to the world during this time, and has since continued to pander to the alternative right fervor which spawned GamerGate, most recently by expressing adoration of GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.

Yiannopoulos was invited to American University by Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), the school’s Libertarian student group. YAL says it hoped Yiannopoulos’ speech would provoke a conversation about free speech, though the group’s secretary Gabriel Benitez admitted in an article published before the event that he was concerned the talk might reassert popular conceptions of “libertarians as racists, sexists and misogynists.”

For the roughly 150 American University students who gathered outside the speaking hall, however, free speech meant rallying for a “Say No To Milo” protest. While Breitbart’s coverage of the demonstration mentioned only “SJWs” (social justice warriors) “screaming at event goers,” the protest itself was primarily a speak-out wherein AU students addressed the crowd about institutional challenges they faced at the university. Despite Yiannopoulos’ tendency to portray opponents as hysteric and disinterested in rational discourse, neither he nor reaction to his rhetoric took center stage at the protest.

In fact, though the protest certainly intended to show opposition to the event, speakers emphasized the need to look beyond Yiannopoulos.

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“It’s really really easy to point to Milo as a target and be like, yeah, this man’s fucked up,” stated trans advocate Jes Grobman, who attended the rally. “But it’s harder to acknowledge…smaller microaggressions and the systemic oppression.”

In a speech at the protest, organizer Noah Leibowitz mentioned racism faced by students and workers on campus as well as the University’s “second Title IX complaint in two years.” Addressing the fears of trans students on campus only days after the death of transgender person Keyonna Blakeney in nearby Rockville, Maryland, Leibowitz stated, “I’m not calling for AU to be a perfect little utopia. I’m calling for AU to be a place where I don’t need to fear for my safety every time I put on a skirt.”

Protesters noted that Yiannopoulos’ talk was part of his “dangerous faggot” speaking tour. Yiannopoulos uses the “dangerous faggot” moniker in reference to his homosexuality, but has incensed the LGBT community by regarding “transgenderism” as a psychiatric disorder.

The dangerous faggot tour also provoked major controversy at Rutgers University on February 9, where students smeared fake blood on themselves during Yiannopoulos’ speech. But his visit to American University was the largest on-campus backlash Yiannopoulos has received during his speaking tour thus far: in the days leading up to the talk, tensions rose on campus after students put up posters for the event with the slogan ‘feminism is a cancer’ and promising to ‘trigger’ students (a reference to the concept of PTSD triggers.)

At the start of the sold-out YAL event (with a significant number of non-AU students in attendance) Yiannopoulos pledged, to laughter and applause, that he would donate twenty dollars to the Donald Trump campaign for each interruption of his talk. Yiannopoulos was, in fact, interrupted by several individuals, though the organized protest occurred outside before the start of the event.

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Unsurprisingly, hearing a protester’s reasoning suggests that the man who calls Donald Trump ‘Daddy’ is not the adult in the room. In an interview after the protest, Leibowitz explained the decision to deemphasize Yiannopoulos in the demonstration, arguing that Yiannopoulos’ own ideas are stuck within the individualistic confines of the culture war.

“He is popular because of capitalizing on reactions that focus only on identity politics of the individual,” she said. “He doesn’t have anything to say about systemic oppression…it’s all about what the individual says. He came to AU to talk about free speech on campus. That’s not a debate, that’s a pointless argument that makes him money.”

Leibowitz noted that she has seen death threats and negative commentary on her appearance online since spearheading the protest, but said she had “no reason to feel distraught” over language alone. “I feel unsafe not because of words” Leibowitz went on to explain “but because a trans woman was just murdered in DC.”

Leibowitz emphasized her interest in starting an activist group on campus to build on the concerns raised during the speak-out, at one point saying “I don’t care about his speech as much as I care about those issues.”