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Milo Yiannopoulos resigned Tuesday from Breitbart News, saying, This decision is mine alone. Juan Coles column was written before the resignation occurred.

The interview that emerged on the internet of practicing Catholic Milo Yiannopoulos expressing approval of some instances of priest pedophilia with boys has perhaps ended his career as the most flamboyant voice of the neo-KKK in suits. But those remarks are hardly the most objectionable things Yiannopoulos has said; at least he seems to have been talking in part about his own experience. What is really monstrous is the lies he told, and which he was encouraged by his boss Steve Bannon to tell, about Hillary Clinton being involved in a pedophilia ring. [Truthdig editors note: In an article Monday, The New York Times reported that Yiannopoulos denied that he had ever condoned child sexual abuse, noting that he was a victim himself. He blamed his British sarcasm and deceptive editing for leading to a misunderstanding. Also on Monday, the website Heavy posted a video and transcript of the controversial interview with Yiannopoulos.]

Steve Bannon, now sitting on our National Security Council (and perhaps in control of which of its recommendations goes to Trump), hired Yiannopoulos as an editor at his alt-NeoNazi rag, Breitbart, and helped unleash him on the United States. Bannons choice of proteges tells us everything we need to know about him and his agenda in the Trump White House. (Yiannopoulos himself has spoken about how Bannon hired and promoted him).

Newsweek reminds us that last fall,

Milo Yiannopoulos, who lost his Twitter access earlier this year after one too many online insults against women and minorities, was on the campus of Miami University in Ohio, scheduled to talk about PIZZAGATE: The deep Dish on Liberalism and Pedophilia.

Yiannopoulos pushed the fake news that Hillary Clinton, her campaign manager John Podesta, and others in her circle were involved in two scandals. One was spirit cooking or witchcraft. The other was involvement in a pedophilia ring run out of a Washington, DC, pizzeria (an establishment that has suffered reputational damage and actually was shot up by a Bannon-Trump acolyte). I dont understand why they never sued.

Yiannopoulos said he was not surprised at Secretary Clintons alleged involvement in spirit cooking because he had long been aware that witchcraft and Lesbianism go together.

Bannon cleverly used far rightwing narcissists like Yiannopoulos to spread around the most ridiculous and yet sinister charges against Secretary Clinton, which were apparently actually believed in the far right circles he cultivated.

So it is especially ironic that, having falsely charged the Democratic Establishment with pedophilia, that Yiannopoulos himself should have been revealed to be a proponent of it. Indeed, it is hard not to conclude that his charges against Clinton were form of projection, in which he transferred his real feelings incorrectly to her.

Given that Bannon hired and relentlessly promoted Yiannopoulos to spread hate speech and dark conspiracy theories, and given that his protege has been revealed to be so deeply flawed, is it really appropriate (was it ever really appropriate) to have Bannon in the White House? What kind of judge of character can we depend on Bannon to be?

Shouldnt Bannon have to tell us if he ever discussed pedophilia with his close associate Yiannopoulos?

Bannon should resign. Or he should be fired.

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Should Bannon Resign? He and Yiannopoulos Falsely Linked Hillary Clinton to Pedophilia. - Truthdig

This story about Hillary Clinton divorcing husband Bill Clinton returned via Internet posts in February 2017 after originally appearing in November 2016.

An old claim that says former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton filed paperwork to divorce her husband, former President Bill Clinton, recently resurfaced. But it is fake.

"Hilary (sic) Clinton filed for divorce In New York courts!" read a headline on a Feb. 8, 2017, post on USANewsToday.org. Facebook flagged the post as part of its initiative to eliminate fake news from its news feeds.

The story cited ChristianTimesNewspaper.com as reporting Clinton filed a divorce petition in the Supreme Court of the State of New York for Westchester County.

We know the story isnt real, because this exact same hoax has circulated online before.

The ChristianTimesNewspaper.com, which was a website that trafficked in fake news, tried to sell people the exact same story on Nov. 10, 2016, after Clinton lost the election to President Donald Trump. The website, which now appears to be offline, did not carry a disclaimer identifying its news as fabricated. It did say it "does not take responsibility for any of our readers' actions that may result from reading our stories."

Some minor details of the ChristianTimesNewspaper.com story have been changed, but USANewsToday.org and several other fake news websites, as well reproduced essentially the same story in February. USANewsToday.org is a clickbait site registered to an address in Macedonia, where fake news is a lucrative cottage industry.

This mirrors a minor trend weve seen with fake news, in which a fabricated story that originally was posted weeks or months ago is suddenly resurrected and regains popularity.

While the original version of this story came after Clintons presidential campaign loss, we can only make an educated guess as to the reason why this claim made a comeback. Valentines Day, maybe?

The statement is no more accurate now than when it was first posted months ago. We rate it Pants On Fire!

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Internet resurrects false claim that Bill and Hillary Clinton are divorcing - PolitiFact (blog)

If the FBI concludes that Americans within Trumps orbit colluded with Russian intelligence officials to disrupt the U.S. election, the evidence and prosecutions should speak for themselves. But no matter what conclusions the FBI ultimately comes to, its director, James Comey, owes the country a public accounting of what his agents foundeven if nobody ends up being indicted.

Comeys own intrusions into the election look worse and worse with each passing day of the Trump administration. At every turn, we are reminded that Comey did horrible damage to Clintons campaign, notwithstanding his unique visibility into the Trump-Russia nexus.

Comey announced in July that hed recommended no charges be filed against Hillary Clinton, despite what he called her extremely careless handling of classified information through the use of a private email server. But eleven days before the election, he told several congressmen in a letter that there might be new evidence in the email investigationor there might be nothing. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote to Comey shortly afterward, decrying the clear double-standard Comey appeared to exhibit. As soon as you came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton, Reid wrote, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative light possible.

What Comey did was unforgivable, and likely history-changing. The most generous interpretation of it is that he inappropriately prioritized the FBIs reputation and his own over his obligation not to discuss investigations. In so doing, he ended up offering a play-by-play of the Clinton-email investigation, in a way that had a clear partisan effect. Making the public statement about closing the investigation last summer put him on the hook to testify before Congress; testifying before Congress arguably compelled him to keep Congress apprised of unexpected changes in the status of the investigation, which in turn compelled him to exculpate Clinton a second time, days before the election.

Comey made a huge and unnecessary mess.

But if we are being intellectually honest ourselves, we have to hold him to the precedents he set for himself, not to ones that would make things seem more fair. Comey should have kept quiet throughout the campaign, but by his own lightsaccording to his testimony before Congress last July, and contemporaneous reportinghe broke silence for three reasons that made the Clinton inquiry so unusual:

1. Because Clinton skeptics believed Attorney General Loretta Lynchas the head of the department investigating Clintons emailshad compromised her independence when she met privately and unexpectedly with Bill Clinton on her plane in Arizona.

2. Because the public interest in transparency was extraordinaryClinton was a presidential candidate, after all.

3. Because the investigation had essentially run its course, and could thus be aired without undermining its integrity. We sometimes think differently about closed investigations, he told Senator Angus King last month, after King implied Comey applied a double standard to Clinton and Trumpan acknowledgment, perhaps, that he wont be able to sit on Trump-related inquiries forever.

The Russian hacking and conspiracy investigations already meet the first two of these standards, but wont meet the third until they come to a close.

The new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, one of Trumps main campaign surrogates, is far more compromised than Loretta Lynch ever was. Sessionswho once called on Lynch to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clintonis, in an act of astounding hypocrisy, refusing to recuse himself from the Trump/Russia investigation.

Likewise, the publics interest in knowing the FBIs findings in this case exceeds its interest in knowing the findings of the email investigation: Clinton was a candidate for the presidency, but Trump is now the president.

Comeys actions last summer and fall raised the question of whether he had committed an honest-but-profound error of judgment or an intentional act of grotesque partisanship. What, if anything, he ultimately tells us about Trumps ties to Russian election saboteurs will provide us an answer.

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James Comey Had Better Treat Donald Trump Just Like He Treated Hillary Clinton - New Republic

New York Times

Hillary Clinton's in the House New York Times In the weeks since losing the election, Hillary Clinton has gone to four Broadway shows often enough that industry wags joke about making her a Tony voter. And she's even been spotted at theater district haunts last week, just before seeing a ... Hillary Receives Standing Ovation At Broadway Show (Video)Opposing Views all 2 news articles »

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Hillary Clinton's in the House - New York Times

A Hillary volunteer reflects on Presidents Day.

karakotsya / Shutterstock, Inc.

A dog started barking inside when I knocked on the door, the desultory, half-assed bark of an animal who doesnt really feel alarmed. Somebodys probably home, I thought. But after half a minute or so, I wasnt sure. I started to peel off one of the door-hangers I was carrying, and then, sure enough, I heard a fumbling at the latch.

The door opened a couple of feet to reveal a pretty, freckled, sleepy-looking woman in her 20s, dressed in a long T-shirt, with curly blond hair and a stud in her nose. I had clearly just woken her up. The apartment behind her was in darkness; the dark-colored, medium-size dog crowded behind her legs, curious.

Hello, I said. Are you I read the name from my list.

Yeah, she said.

Great, well, Im Mark, and Im volunteering for the Arizona Democratic Party, and were here in the neighborhood today talking to registered Democrats, reminding you to vote early. Youre a registered Democrat, right?

Yeah.

Have you received your ballot?

Yeah.

Great, and have you voted yet?

Not yet, hon. Im not sure if Im going to vote. I dont really believe in the process.

Her voice was quiet and flat. She didnt even seem particularly annoyed at the interruption of her afternoon, just massively, affectlessly uninterested.

Well, wed sure like to encourage you to vote early, and to vote for Hillary Clinton and the other Democratic candidates. I handed her the door-hanger.

Okay, hon. Thanks for coming by.

Her door closed, and I descended the stairway from her apartment, back into the heat of a late October Sunday in Phoenix. I jotted down the disappointing results of my visit on my sheet, then looked around at the baffling, unhelpful signs on the surrounding buildings, trying to figure out the most efficient route to the next apartment.

When I said, Were here in the neighborhood today, I had been using the editorial we. At least in this enormous, labyrinthine complex of shabby apartments, it was just me. I had been there for most of an hour, and the sleepy young woman with the nose stud was only the second person I had found at home. The first, a middle-aged lady, had claimed she was not the person I asked for. I didnt doubt her. The sprawling complex was divided into two sets of apartments with the same set of number-and-letter sequences. I was never sure, as I knocked, if I was at the right 128-A or 202-C, and the geographical division of the two sections had no logic that I could grasp. I was sweaty sweatier than usual, that is my legs ached, and I was tired of carrying around this stack of door hangers.

This was the penultimate weekend before Election Day. For months, I had carried a seriously bad feeling that Donald Trump could be elected president. I had written a longish essay, directed less at Trump enthusiasts than at those who were reluctant, at one level or another, to vote for Hillary Clinton, and I had donated a (very) few bucks to Clintons campaign.

But none of this felt like enough.

My career as a political activist has been neither extensive nor triumphant. I have a dim memory of spending some time in the Washington, D.C. campaign offices of Michael Dukakis in 1988. I think I distributed buttons or something.

In 2006, I did some speechwriting for a Democratic Congressional candidate in Riverside County, California. This was the midterm election of George W. Bushs second term, the year that the Democrats recaptured both houses of Congress. But my guy was decisively defeated by Republican incumbent Mary Bono.

Then in 2010, when my former New Times colleague John Dougherty ran a quixotic campaign here in Arizona for John McCains Senate seat, I e-mailed him (at the request of his campaign manager) with some pointers on public speaking. He graciously acknowledged these; whether he tried to put them into practice I dont know. In any case, he finished third in the Democratic primary.

Youd think I might have taken the hint, and helped by not trying to help. But no, I decided to get off my ass and away from my keyboard and take part in the famous Democratic ground game, the one Mitt Romney had disdained to play in 2012, and that Donald Trumps campaign was likewise ignoring.

Through one of the innumerable wheedling mass e-mails I received every day, Id arranged to go canvassing, trying to persuade Democrats in my part of town to fill out the early ballot theyd received. I went to the local contact persons home, and shed given me a map, a sheet with a script from which I was encouraged to depart if I wanted to add in personal anecdotes about why I supported the Democrats several sheets of names and addresses of registered Democrats, and a sheaf of flyers to hang on the knob when nobody answered the Halloween-decorated doors.

This had proven the most common result, so far. I had spent the previous afternoon, Saturday, wandering around this place as well. Hardly anyone seemed to be at home, and of those who were, several claimed, like the lady, not to be the person I was looking for. Maybe a half-dozen people had confessed to being, or being related too, the person listed on my sheet.

Over both days, a couple of these folks told me, without much passion, that they would be voting for Hillary Clinton. An elderly African-American man told me that he already had, and shook my hand hard, thanking me for my efforts so vehemently that it made me feel sheepish. A younger African-American man, according to his T-shirt a military veteran, had expressed concern at my flushed, unhealthy appearance and insisted I drink a bottle of water from his fridge.

Despite these kindnesses, the experience was the most disheartening, futile-feeling attempt at civic participation in which I had ever engaged (not, I admit, that this is saying much). I saw singles and young couples of all races skinny, tatted-up, perplexed-looking young men and overweight, addled young women corralling small children. There were also plenty of sallow, haggard, nicotine-stained seniors, looking like theyd washed up in this vast dreary compound after financially disappointing careers.

No one was angry or unfriendly. A number of people even thanked me, in an obligatory sort of way. And a preteen girl out in front of her apartment took a break from pestering her older brother to tell me a pretty good joke as I passed: Why cant you hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? (Sorry, but youll have to keep reading if you want the answer.)

But no one seemed very concerned about the presidential race, one way or the other. Though the complex wasnt a slum, the people I saw there, both those that came to the door and their passing neighbors, nonetheless looked to me like the sort of folks that would be very directly and adversely affected by a Democratic loss, even in a normal election year.

Yet to the very real possibility that Donald Trump could be elected president, most showed only a polite, distracted disinterest. At least two other young women told me, with no hostility, that there was no difference between the candidates. No one seemed to disagree with the idea that Trump was a terrible choice for president, but no one seemed to think it had any great bearing on their lives. I might have been talking to them about an election happening in Sri Lanka, or perhaps, about a fictional election happening on a TV show.

At one point I wandered between two buildings at the far south end of the complex, looked across the alley they faced, and saw the back of my own house. I hadnt realized the apartments extended that far. I had often wondered about the people whose arguments and laughter trickled over the wall while I sat in my backyard.

Now, Id met them. But I didnt understand them.

Late in the following week, the guy from the Arizona Democratic Party called me. Would I be willing to go out again? I said I would.

This time the contact lady gave me a map of a neighborhood of single-family homes. My neighborhood, as it turned out. It was the weekend before the election, so it was too late to vote early; now, my job was to get people to say they would show up at the polls Tuesday and vote the old-fashioned way.

I parked on a street a few blocks from my house, within walking distance of two registered Dems, according to my sheet. Amazingly, the first guy was at home, shirtless, puttering around his garage. He accepted the little flyer with the address of the polling place a nearby elementary school with thanks but no other comment.

Across the street and a few houses down, I approached the address of my second target on that block. There was a New England Patriots bumper sticker on the minivan in the driveway. A good Massachusetts liberal, I stereotypically decided. The screen door was closed, but the inner door was open. I rang the doorbell.

Instantly a pack of tiny dogs, four at least, charged at the screen and began rioting. More slowly, a stout Anglo woman of about my age shambled in from the back yard, where she seemed to be grilling, and approached the door.

Hi, Im sorry to disturb you, I said over the canine din. Im volunteering with the Arizona Democratic Party. I read her name from the sheet.

Thats me.

And youre registered to vote, right?

No, she said. Im a felon. We both are. So we cant vote.

Then she added, Thank God.

Again, no difference between the candidates, I thought as I headed back down her driveway. Not having to choose between them was an occasion for thankfulness, even thankfulness for being a felon.

This proved not to be a typical encounter, however. The second weekends task was a little less depressing. The folks in the single-family houses were, to begin with, more frequently at home, or at any rate more willing to answer the door. They also seemed more engaged, warmer, more aware of the stakes in the matter.

But just around the corner from my house, I walked up a driveway where a couple of souped-up, expensive-looking cars were parked, and a small group of young Latino-looking guys were discussing them in Spanish in the open garage. The first name of the person listed on my sheet for this address was Jesus, and the last name sounded Asian.

Yeah, thats me, said a slight guy of around 25 who looked, indeed, like he might be of both Asian and Latino descent.

Great, hi, Im volunteering with the Arizona Democratic Party. Youre a registered voter, right?

Yeah.

Have you voted yet?

No.

Will we have your support next Tuesday?

Nah, I dont think so. I dont see any difference between the candidates.

OK, here was my big moment to campaign, to persuade, to state my position.

What I was thinking was: Really, Jesus? No shit? You dont see the slightest difference between the candidates? No difference at all? What I said was something like:

Well, I cant agree. I realize that Hillary Clinton isnt a perfect candidate, but I think shes vastly preferable to Trump.

Yeah, said one of the other guys, with a chuckle. Jesus just shrugged. I handed him a flyer, asked him to reconsider, and headed for my truck.

The experience left me without the slightest sense that I gained Hillary Clinton so much as one vote beyond my own. About the best I can hope for is that I didnt actually lose her any votes, didnt turn anybody who was planning to vote for her off so badly that they changed their mind. Im not even sure of that.

As I write these words, Donald Trump has been president of the United States for less than a month. Im trying to think of what lessons, if any, I might draw from my couple of weekends as Clinton volunteer.

Well, first of all, let me say that activists who do this sort of tiring, unrewarding, dispiriting work who devote weeks and months and for that matter years to doing it, and not, like me, just a few hours, mostly to stave off guilt are heroic, as far as Im concerned.

Having said that, Im wondering if maybe the ground game isnt what it used to be. In an astoundingly short time, social-media outlets have radically changed the way millions and millions of people in our society (including me) interact with each other. It appears that the old retail-politics model of looking the voters in the eye, shaking their hands, and asking them for their vote has become, in the space of just a few years, unnecessary, even quaint. In a few more years, it may seem as obsolete as the whistle-stop speech. And it appears that Trump and his campaign instinctively understood this to a degree that the Clinton campaign didnt.

Finally, the biggest impression I got was: the progressive cause isnt getting through to young people, or at least not to working-class young people. The ones I talked to were registered Democrats, but many of them seemed to see their party as a big, monolithic, impersonal social force with roughly the same level of concern for them (none at all, in their mind) as the opposing party.

If Im right that this is their impression and I grant that its risky to speculate based on the tiny sample size of folks I met then I sure hope that its unfair. Maybe their youth, and the fact that they came of age over eight years without a Republican White House, leads them to see the likes of reproductive rights, marriage equality, or even access to health care, if they think about them at all, as givens. If so, then they, and all of us, may be about to learn that these are, rather, hard-won social victories that can quickly be taken away without a party even a compromised, corrupt, minimally progressive party to defend them.

Anyway, this is my best shot at a few tentative conclusions, for whatever they may be worth.

Oh, yeah, thats right, I owe you a punchline: Why cant you hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom?

Because the P is silent.

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Confessions of a Hillary Clinton Canvasser - Phoenix New Times