Everyone knows who Milo Yiannopoulos is—sort of. He’s that brazen, outlandish, outspoken gay conservative who attacks women and trans individuals. He goes to college campuses and unleashes hate and bile.
He’s a troll, a showman, an internet provocateur. He has a following, yes, but they’re alt-right white guys: racist and sexist, raunchy and ignorant. He let slip in one interview about his comfort with pedophilia, which got him ousted from all respectable outlets, and some disrespectable outlets, too, such as Breitbart and Infowars.
None of that changes the set judgment of Yiannopoulos as a disgrace, however. The charges leveled against him accomplished their goal. They progressively removed him from the public square. It wasn’t enough to prove that Yiannopoulos was wrong. He had to be silenced and “disappeared.”
Which gets us to the real reason for the takedown. Liberals and leftists generally, and feminists and social-justice warriors, in particular, didn’t want to see or hear him anymore because Yiannopoulos was so good at what he did. Audiences on campus loved his speeches; conservatives, libertarians, and fraternity boys all laughed and caroused while Yiannopoulos launched one sally after another. He turned appearances into ludicrous performance pieces, such as the time he was carted into a hall at University of California-Santa Barbara on a throne, an entrance that was captioned on video as “All Hail Queen Milo.”
In sum, Yiannopoulos recast the left’s moral terms—racism, oppression, sexism, and transphobia—as tactical terms. Those accusations, so often tossed at conservatives, are a threatening verbal bullet. Most conservatives flinch when they hear them. Yiannopoulos’s irreverence, coupled with his rhetorical explanation of how those terms work, lowered their caliber.
That’s why he had to go. The left and liberals have relied on guilt as a political weapon for a long time. It has served them well. To be disarmed of it, to find that one’s lexicon of -isms and -phobias no longer work in debate or in politics, is to lose a treasured ally. It tells leftists, “You’re not as superior and good as you think you are.”
In other words, Yiannopoulos threatened their self-esteem. They got it back by shutting him down.
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