THE MESS WE MADE:

Campus conservative groups face three undying challenges: They are always broke, their leaders are always about to graduate, and nobody on campus ever cares about what they have to say. Consequently, conservatives from Louisiana State University, Boulder, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, and dozens of other campuses turned to Yiannopoulos. He charges no speaking fees and, with minimal effort and planning from the students, guarantees them attention and controversy. He gives conservative student groups everything they could want.

But it comes at a cost: Every invitation extended to Yiannopoulos validates the idea that his alternately childish and hateful views are in some way "conservative."

Yiannopoulos was once a legitimate, if failed, British technology journalist. In fact, it was from his perch as a technology writer at Breitbart that he gained prominence for his early coverage of the "Gamergate" controversy, supporting the online harassment of feminist video-game programmers and tech bloggers. From there, he began to heap praise on Donald Trump, whom he calls "Daddy," and to become an aggressive online culture warrior.

He delights in offending or "triggering" leftists. He labels them "snowflakes," mocking their delicate sensibilities, while also calling them "fascists" for opposing free speech. In this, he can also delight the Right. Campus conservatives often defended him as "provocative" but ultimately useful for his defense of free speech. But that hides the truth.

In March 2016, Yiannopoulos co-authored "An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right" at Breitbart. In it, he denies that the alt-right is bigoted. Instead, he says, they just seek to "fluster their grandparents" with "outrageous caricatures," including anti-Semitic ones. Yiannopoulos takes great pains to differentiate the alt-right from skinheads. "The alternative right are a much smarter group of people," he writes, "which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They're dangerously bright."

He then explains just whom he finds so intelligent. "The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer," writes Yiannopoulos. This is the same Richard Spencer who promoted the rally in Charlottesville and marched next to neo-Nazis and Klansmen. In fact, Spencer's speech headlined the rally. (Tim Gionet, better known as "Baked Alaska," served as Yiannopoulos's tour manager in 2016, scheduling his appearances with campus Republican groups. He, too, showed up to speak in Charlottesville, holding up a torch, chanting that Jews "will not replace us," and claiming, "I'm proud to be white," alongside a flurry of Nazi salutes.)

"The alt-right's intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race," Yiannopoulos openly admitted in his article. But he went on to defend them on these exact terms. "The bulk of their demands, after all, are not so audacious: they want their own communities, populated by their own people, and governed by their own values," he writes. According to Yiannopoulos, "they want what every people fighting for self-determination in history have ever wanted."

This was an outright apologia for racist white separatism. And yet, time after time in 2016, campus Republicans held Yiannopoulos up to the world as their champion against the Left. Even as he made statements like "The Jews run everything" and "I don't generally employ gays, I don't trust them," he continued to be invited.

To defend himself from charges of anti-Semitism, Milo occasionally calls himself Jewish. Actually, he is a Roman Catholic, and has even posted photos of himself wearing the Iron Cross so beloved by Nazis everywhere. To counter charges of homophobia and racism, he told the New York Times that he has sex only with black men, in essence using identity politics to defend his own bigotry. Jamie Kirchick has astutely characterized him as a "caricature of what resentful, misanthropic, frat bros believe a gay man to be: morally depraved, sexually licentious, and utterly self-aggrandizing."

All of this is to say that even before videos surfaced revealing his endorsement of pedophilia, Yiannopoulos's derangement was obvious. 

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