sWelcome to another Infowarzel. It's been a while! And I'll have a standard edition out this weekend with a bunch of observations/bits of reporting I've gathered over the last month. But I wanted to fire off an emergency edition based off a big, huge, massive story that published yesterday.
If you get this newsletter you have probably read my colleague Joe Bernstein's blockbuster piece on the Breitbart/Bannnon/Milo emails. If not, click away from this and spend 20 min or so with Joe's piece. It is arguably the most illuminating bit of journalism ever published on the apparatus that we've come to call the pro-Trump media. The piece is littered with scoops and people have lots of opinions, but I wanted to highlight one in particular that I think is troublesome.
Don't Make The Same Mistake Twice.
There's a tendency — for some — to react to the Breitbart/Bannon emails sort of dismissively. Bannon especially comes off in some of the emails like a teenager firing off pugnacious IMs in a multiplayer video game chatroom. The emails reveal in fuller detail the somewhat stunted language of "#war" that we hear people like Bannon espouse in public. There's so much chaos and infighting and bluster that it's easy (and oh so satisfying) to make fun of.
But this is the wrong way to read this piece. The excellent Quinta Jurecic alluded to the reasons why yesterday: 
It was easy for most people to dismiss Gamergate for a number of reasons (a deep history of not taking both the on-and-offline harassment of women seriously until its too late, the fact that it was, on the surface, about video games, the fact that the conversation was frequently relegated to the murkier areas of the internet). Mostly though, it was easy to dismiss those doing the harassing as a bunch of mouth-breathing virgins sitting in their parents' basements and acting out war games. There was an idea that this crowd isn't just small but that it has no power. That turned out to be very far from the truth.
There's a passage in Joe's piece that has been somewhat overlooked — but that I think is crucial to understanding the pro-Trump movement and its future. It's this bit about the people that email Milo:
What struck me about this passage is the how many different kinds of people were drawn to Milo. And how the thing they feel in common is a sense of being overlooked and disenfranchized. They feel — for whatever reason — that they can confide in Milo and rely on him to represent the feelings they have that they can't say in public. Setting aside one's personal feelings about these people, these emails represent something important. That Milo/Bannon/Breitbart have tapped into something big (that they then proceed to exploit in a myriad of disingenuous ways)."He heard from ancient veterans who “binge-watched” his speeches on YouTube; from “a 58 year old asian woman” concerned about her high school daughter’s progressive teachers; from boys asking how to win classroom arguments against feminists; from a former NASA employee who said he had been “laid off by my fat female boss” and was sad that the Jet Propulsion Lab had become “completely cucked”; from a man who had bought his 11-year-old son an AR-15 and named it “Milo”; from an Indiana lesbian who said she “despised liberals” and begged Yiannopoulos to “keep triggering the special snowflakes”; from a doctoral student in philosophy who said he had been threatened with dismissal from his program for sharing his low opinion of Islam; from a Charlotte police officer thanking Yiannopoulos for his “common sense Facebook posts” about the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott (“BLUE LIVES MATTER,” Yiannopoulos responded); from a New Jersey school teacher who feared his students would become “pawns for the left social justice campaign”; from a man who said he had returned from a deployment in “an Islamic country” to discover that his wife was transitioning and wanted a divorce (subject line “Regressivism stole my wife”); from a father terrified his daughter might attend Smith College; from fans who wanted to give him jokes to use about fat people, about gay people, about Muslims, about Hillary Clinton."
It reminds me of a point that Milo made this May in an interview he did with the TODAY show (and then leaked on YoutTube before it aired because he is just completely exhausting):
I've thought about this observation probably once or twice a week since I heard it. Such a big part of trying to report on the pro-Trump media and the Breitbart movement in general is trying to understand the scale of what you're reporting on. In some ways the size is unknowable. But the quote stuck with me as it hinted at something I've felt in my reporting: that there's a largely silent, generally quite young contingent that feels unheard and that political correctness and social justice have run amok.
The Milo emails offer the first bit of definitive proof of this. In my mind, it's the biggest bombshell in the story. And, for those looking to resist Trumpism, it seems like it should be a stark warning sign. It's no wonder that — as Milo was getting these emails, he was compelled to put out content like this:
I've talked to countless people who abhor the Breitbart/Milo/pro-Trump movement and there's always this sense that so much of Trumpism is a vestige of an older generation. That the next generation (generally thought to be more tolerant and progressive) will be the saving grace. But this doesn't really align with the reality of what we're seeing every day on the internet in places like 4chan, Gab, Twitter, and in Discord chats where armies of young kids are coming together to join the counterculture and participate in 'Great Meme Wars.' For example, I spent a month inside a pro-Trump meme chatroom and noticed that most of the people in it — plotting to bring down CNN with an information war —were still in high school:
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Again, it's easy to dismiss this — literal high schoolers! — and it's important to keep perspective when it comes to general bloviating on internet forums. But its worth taking a moment to step back and recalibrate — especially when dealing with Milo or Bannon and the Breitbart crew. And to think of what's going on across the internet as a legitimate counterculture (it's no surprise that my colleague Joe, who wrote the piece, noticed this before basically anyone else — as evidenced by this late 2015 piece).
What the Milo email piece does best — in my opinion — is show how Bannon/Breitbart/Milo's "killing machine" worked. Sure, there's plenty of important, embarrassing tidbits in there to make the players look awful...and it exposes that there's a lot of darker forces at play in this movement than Bannon/Milo/others let on. That's crucial.
But the piece is most powerful in my reading as a hint at the scale and intensity of the Trumpism movement. As Quinta Jurecic said: it's a reminder that many people (besides Joe and others who reported on this early) should have taken this movement seriously when it began to bubble up. And it's a reminder not to dismiss it and make the same mistake again.