Milo Yiannopoulos is really getting desperate. He’s looking for an audience, any audience, that will pay attention to him, and he has battened on a peculiar one: right wing furries. What I’ve known of the furry community is that they’re extraordinarily tolerant — these are people who belong to a ridiculed minority, and their reaction has been openness and acceptance. Apparently, there is an even tiny minority of alt-right people within this small minority of fans of furry culture, and Milo wants to make himself king of this tiny sliver.
He announced that he would be attending a furry con.
Yiannopoulos posted an email screenshot to one of the few platforms he has left—his Telegram messaging channel—on Saturday and claimed he registered for Midwest FurFest, a convention “to celebrate the furry fandom” hosted in the suburbs on Chicago this December. “Furries,” as they’re often called, are groups of people who have interest in animal personas with human characteristics; people who participate in the subculture often present themselves as non-human characters via art and costumes.
Yiannopoulos also claimed on Telegram that he had submitted a form to suggest he host a panel called “The Politics of Fur.” He asked his followers who plan to attend Midwest FurFest to message him to arrange “dinner, drinks, photos or anything else.”
I suppose it’s possible that he’s long yearned to be a snow leopard, but more likely he just wants to take advantage of a few people — that’s always been his modus operandi as a professional scammer. Unfortunately for him, conference organizers saw right through him and rejected his application. I don’t think there are many niches left where everyone doesn’t know exactly what kind of hateful slimeball he is.
He has now announced that he is going anyway, despite not being registered. I don’t know what he’s planning to do…get drunk in the bar and dance around in the lobby, mocking the attendees? That is his art, after all. I don’t think it will win him a beachhead in the furry community.
He does have an impressive ego. It must make it hard to cope with his irrelevance.
Yeah, the alt-right and the fash (but I repeat myself) try to recruit among furries because sexually and socially insecure men who feel like outsiders are their usual marks, and you naturally get a lot of those in a niche online fetish community.
They haven’t been terribly successful so far. Even the small “Nazi furry” sub-sect seems to be mostly normal people with an unfortunately specific uniform fetish and just a couple of actual Nazis trying to recruit.
“dinner, drinks, photos or anything else.” — I really didn’t want to think about what an “or anything else” public invitation means at a furrycon.
What are the “two ecosystems” within furrydom that need to divorce or hop into Milo’s blender?
Right-wing furries? I don’t get it. How does a fandom centered around something that is antithetical to core conservative and libertarian values attract a subset of right-wing people?
I mean, I guess I understand only liking something at a superficial level – like Star Trek fans who got ticked off that it showed an interracial kiss (the original series) or a same-sex kiss (Deep Space 9) – but the moment you engage with the larger fandom, does it not become immediately apparent that maybe you missed something along the way? Of course, I think I may be begging the question about whether or not right-wingers are capable of that kind of reflective self-awareness.
Perhaps the Log Cabin Republicans could offer some insight here?
“people who participate in the subculture often present themselves as non-human characters”
We have to grant M. Yiannopoulos that : he is pretty good at it.
The mildly deranged penguin — who’s a natural feathie (tuxedo subgroup) — points out slime can be very difficult to remove from fur (or feathers), so it’s no surprise furries and feathies find fake “friends” and frustrated führers frothing foaming fools. And slime-on-cheese is rather disgusting as well…
@kome, 4: Well…while the common perception of the furry fandom as only a sex thing is inaccurate, it definitely is also a sex thing. So if you’re a reactionary who’s unwilling to repress that aspect of their sexuality, but also unwilling to learn or change, it makes sense that you’d want to carve out a niche.
After his role in the “New Paws” hoax, he expects to be welcomed among furries?! That’s like Dylan Roof trying to join an NAACP rally!
Reads to me like “you buy me dinner and drinks and then I let you take a photo with me.”
Milo, please, don’t do it! You stoop too low to conquer naught. Disappear into the void. Get a job. Enjoy your life as a non-entity with the rest of us. We’ll all be happier.
kome @4:
To be honest, the fandom really is just the expression of the people in it, and some of those people have decided that the only “free expression” they’re OK with is their right-wing standard in which Holocaust jokes are OK but referring to Trump as “Mango Mussolini” is treason. The fandom as a whole has been dealing with right-wing factions for decades, to be honest. We had the Burned Furs in the 90s, the outgrowth of the Nazifur subset being turned from power/uniform/atrocity RP into, well, actual Nazis, Religious Right people trying to convert the whole fandom into one big happy PG-rated fuzzy praise group…honestly, the list goes on. Even some big names in furry art – even the people running furry art repositories, past and present – have also been right-wing, sympathizers, willing enablers, or at the very least queerphobic. So little of this is new that most of us who have been around 20+ years don’t even bother bracing ourselves; we just sigh and say “here it all goes again”. When Milo first got attached to the furry fandom in 2016 via Dave Lillie of the webcomic “Dreamkeepers”*, some of the more jaded among us decided that we’d already spent more than enough time talking about his rhetoric and instead just rolled our eyes at his characterization of snow leopards as “hungry bottoms”, because that’s how unoriginal and cyclic this whole thing is (disclosure: I was not one of the people responding to him, but I did take quiet personal umbrage since my primary RP character is a snow leopard!).
* – I mention Dave Lillie and his comic by name here because part of the story in 2016 is that Lillie, who was at the time an avid GamerGater with Disqus posts under his webcomic’s name on Ralph Retort and other “anti-SJW” sites, chose to advertise his comic on Milo’s podcast. Lillie has since effectively claimed that he was just looking for a provocative voice with a large audience to advertise to, but his journal posts on art sites made it clear that he agreed with Milo’s politics at the time. Lillie has since pivoted to trying to paint himself as an “anti-extremist” voice in the fandom, but his actual position is civility politics mixed with the barest lip service given to the physical danger of the “alt-fur” movement (they’re linked to a chemical attack on MFF, the same con Milo is “not-attending”, as well as attack threats and harassment of con attendees and staff as well as venue staff) and then turning around and giving the same list of “extremist violence” that the alt-right uses to paint the left/antifa as domestic terror threats.
I’d say a better way to put it is unfortunately for him, the conference organizers were notified of the sorry state of affairs by a load of anxious and pissed-off furries, many of whom are lgbtq and did not want an alt-right (nazi) transphobe known for doxxing people and getting his fans to attack them.
Milo also pulled a whole “I’m coming any way, watch out!” bit of nonsense. After which it was explained he’ll be marched out in handcuffs if he attempts to attend.
Deplatforming and grassroots pressure works, people.
=8)-DX
I’m not sure there’s a lot more context I can provide about this, but I can offer a few notes about the curious phenomenon of right wing furries.
Last year there were a lot of badge ribbons at MFF that said “Nazi furs f*ck off!”. The censoring was there, I think they were trying to avoid the trap of having the ribbon violate the all ages appropriate rule for attire in public spaces. I saw them everywhere, it was heartening to see actually. But at the same time, ya’know, it was sobering to think that people felt that they were necessary. It was like a moment of realization that the age of Trump had come to MFF.
And just to complete the picture some of our volunteer security staff showed their true colors and started harassing people for wearing them. They claimed that the badges were a “threat”, but that excuse was pretty transparent and eventually an official announcement was made that the badges were not a violation of code of conduct and were allowed.
If I can get one, I’m wearing one of those this year.
Oh, and HawkAtreides: Thanks for the background, I’m not as familiar with all this stuff, sometimes I prefer the bliss of ignorance I guess. I’m a snow leopard myself so I took personal offense at his claiming the species too. I was there for the chlorine attack, but I hadn’t heard anything about anyone in specific being linked to it. The last I heard it sounded like the cops had completely bungled the entire investigation, not even testing some of the chemical samples they took.
Nomad:
Yeah, from what I heard the investigation didn’t bear any fruit itself, but given that one particular alt-fur was convicted of stink-bombing his bank it’s not hard to guess that even if he wasn’t the perpetrator it was likely one of his alt/Raider ilk. I do find it hilarious that Milo thought he’d be able to “not-attend” MFF and play the child’s “I’m not touching you” game, given the arrest of someone doing just that only two years prior. Only slightly more ridiculous when one realizes that the person most suspected of carrying out or assisting the 2014 chemical attack was the same person arrested for trespassing and assault in 2017.
Sounds like Milo wants the Furries to look up to him as “Hair Furrer”!!
I’ll get my coat…….
I assure you the vast majority of the community is having none of his shit. Although I can certainly get behind the idea of getting the tiny contingent of far-right furries to permanently feck off into their own considerably smaller community.
This is a followup that no one else might see, but it’s worth mentioning.
Now the Proud Boys have announced that they’re going to show up in revenge for “their favorite fag” being denied entrance. I’m not making this up, and they really called Milo that. They called furries “communists” and…
This is going to get ugly. Milo and a handful of fanboys is one thing. But a mob of Proud Boys primed for violence is another thing entirely.