Last night, Bill Maher interacted in a panel discussion with the hipster Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos. Similar to Richard Spencer, neo-Nazi and founder of of the white nationalist think tank the National Policy Institute, Yiannopoulos propagates his bigoted agenda by appealing to the mainstream. He attempts to normalize his bigoted takes and perpetuates an alt-lite facade, distancing his white nationalism from that of the Alt-Right movement. Yiannopoulos is openly gay and wields his sexuality as a guise to justify his anti-LGBT, anti-semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-women, anti-minority tirades.
He has recently embarked on a college tour across the United States and his actions have proved incendiary and detrimental to the safety of the university’s students. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Yiannopoulos projected an image of a transgender student on campus, singling her out for harassment. He took the same initiative at a variety of other schools, particularly pertaining to undocumented students. According to University of California Berkeley’s California Magazine, Yiannopoulos planned to publicly out undocumented Cal students by name, holding up their photos on stage. He has repeatedly called to “purge local illegals” at these events and has no remorse.
In his interview with Bill Maher, Yiannopoulos displayed his lack of awareness to the effects of his cruelty, claiming those worried about the violence his words would incite were “idiots.” Bill Maher deserves unrelenting criticism for supplying Yiannopoulos with the gargantuan platform he needs to perpetuate this deleterious agenda.
Yiannopoulos has been the most effective promoter of the Alt-Right over the last year and his hateful words have contributed to the cultivation of white nationalist terrorism within the United States. Websites like Breitbart News, a site Yiannopoulos is a senior editor for, are the primary causes of tragedies like the Pizzagate shooting and the Charleston church shooting. Both perpetrators of these attacks were avid consumers of Alt-Right media and the paranoia spread amidst these forums ultimately pushed them onto the path of their bloody crusades.
Maher has welcomed this fascist ideological current into public discourse and into the collective consciousness. He has given given them a boon and has assisted the Alt-Right in their crossover into the mainstream. Maher’s actions are only one of the many that will foster the rhetoric of the Alt-Right under the excuse of protecting free speech.
