UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
It seems that former Breitbart editor and alt-right propagandist Milo Yiannopoulos loves to be hated. He has penned incendiary anti-feminist articles opining that women experiencing online harassment should simply stop using the internet, that birth control makes women “unattractive and crazy,” and that women are underrepresented in tech because they “suck at interviews.” He was kicked off of Twitter—no mean feat on the abuse-plagued platform—for coordinating a harassment campaign against actress Leslie Jones. On a college speaking tour, he has singled out a transgender student in the audience for harassment. Elsewhere, he has made remarks many have construed as anti-Semitic or racist.
To his fans, he’s a hero of free speech. (It is certainly true that in the United States, one is and should be free to say despicable things without fear of government reprisal.) To his detractors, he never should have been given the broad platforms for the nasty things he has said. And yet, as his notoriety grew, his star rose. Audiences that find “P.C. culture” to be a graver threat to society than racism, misogyny, or transphobia loved him, and other audiences became aware of him whether they wanted to be or not.
He’s made a career on seeing how far over the line he can go. Yesterday, it appears he may have found out.
After a video surfaced in which Yiannopoulos, in his own words, advocated for the idea of sex between “13 year olds” and “older men,” flippantly describing his own experience as gaining beneficial sexual experience when he was molested by a priest as a teenager, the consequences are coming down. In the last 48 hours, Milo lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster, had his speech at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) cancelled, and resigned from his technology editor role at the alt-right website Breitbart, losing perhaps his greatest platform.
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