The pretty, monstrous face

It's really rather remarkable how insistent the media is in trying to anoint Milo the face, the spokesman, and the apostle of the Alt-Right.

Members of the alt-right, unlike their old, frustrated European counterparts, are less focused on policy than on performance. Their MO usually involves pissing people off with hypermasculine taunts. They call establishment and even Tea Party Republicans “cuckservatives”—because they are cuckolded by the Left. They do most of their acting out online, often by organizing on 4chan or Reddit and then trolling targets on Twitter. The alt-right is a new enough phenomenon that in August, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan—running against an alt-right candidate in a primary—mistakenly called it “alt-conservatism” on a radio show. “It’s a nasty, virulent strain of something,” he said. “I don’t even know what it is, other than that it isn’t us. It isn’t what we believe in.”

As Donald J. Trump has become the candidate of the alt-right, Breitbart News has become the movement’s voice. The two merged semiofficially in August, when Breitbart’s chief executive officer, Steve Bannon, quit his job to run Trump’s campaign. And Yiannopoulos, whose byline on the site is simply “Milo,” is Breitbart’s most radioactive star.

“Milo is the person who propelled the alt-right movement into the mainstream,” says Heidi Beirich, who directs the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and describes the term “alt-right” as “a conscious rebranding by white nationalists that doesn’t automatically repel the mainstream.” Beirich says she’s not even sure if Yiannopoulos believes in the alt-right’s tenets or just found a juvenile way to mix internet culture and extreme ideology to get attention.

Especially because he KEEPS TELLING THEM he is not.

Despite being the alt-right’s mouthpiece, Yiannopoulos won’t say for certain if he’s one of them.... He turns to Allum Bokhari, a 25-year-old half-Pakistani Oxford graduate, who used to work for a Liberal Democratic member of Parliament and now writes for Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, and asks, “Am I a member of the alt-right?”

“No,” says Bokhari, who wears a white dress shirt, gray blazer, and gray trousers to work at a desk next to a garment rack in Yiannopoulos’s living room. “Because they wouldn’t have you. You like Israel a lot more. Some on the alt-right would describe you as a degenerate.”

Of course, there is a reason they want to create a leader of the Alt-Right. As with #GamerGate, they need to identify a leader in order to destroy him. And it doesn't help their cause that so many well-known members of the Alt-Right refuse to talk to them. I get numerous requests from reporters and I ignore all of them. I am not the only one. Cernovich has a similar policy. So does Stefan.

I'm also a member of #GamerGate, after all. I know the media's routine and I won't play along with it. I can't speak for the Alt-White branch, I'm happy to leave that to TRS and Richard Spencer, among others, but as far as the Alt-West goes, there are no leaders, there will be no leaders, and neither me nor anyone else speaks officially for what is neither a group nor a movement, but a philosophical identity.

To ask "who is the leader of the Alt-West" is like asking "who is the leader of the left-handed people" or "who is the leader of those whose favorite color is blue"? There is no answer.

And as for the true face of the Alt-Right, we all know the correct answer is: "Pepe, and Kek is his Apotheosis."