Milo Yiannopoulos is one of those people I generally prefer to ignore. Unfortunately, recent events have made this all but impossible for me and anyone else who still manages to stomach reading the news.
He’s been announced as the keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is ordinarily headlined by future presidential candidates and the Republican Party’s most influential officials and activists. He had a vomit-inducing interview with Bill Maher, another person I usually prefer to pretend doesn’t exist. One of his events in Washington state ended up with a man getting shot. The shooter subsequently turned himself in ... and was let go. Protests also led to an event of his getting canceled in Berkeley, California.
Unfortunately, it’s no longer wise to ignore him because the Republican Party has signaled he has a large place in its future and he frequently finds himself at the center of debates over the meaning of limits on “free speech” in an age of would-be fascists. So let’s start at the beginning: who is he and what has he done.
Yiannopoulos, generally referred to simply as “Milo,” is an editor at Breitbart News, the website most notable for giving us Steve Bannon and serving as a hotbed of fascism back in the days when those were somewhat hard to find. He’s openly gay, which is strange for a conservative provocateur. But he’s earned his fame on the right by being opposed to almost everyone else. He’s known as a terrible misogynist, led a harassment campaign against a black actress for the terrible crime of appearing in a movie, created a petition to remove trans people from the LGBT acronym and has recently attempted to publicly identify undocumented students on college campuses. He also holds the distinction of getting banned from Twitter, a bar so high that not even David Duke has reached it.
So why are mainstream Republican organizations accepting him? I genuinely don’t know. He does mesh well with Trump’s politics of replacing the party’s old veneer of ideology with blind, unadulterated hatred of The Other. Him being gay also might play a role, as the party has always had a prominent place for women or minorities with minimal policy experience and insane viewpoints, like Michelle Bachmann or Ben Carson. It lets them deny allegations of sexism or racism without, you know, taking steps to not be sexist or racist. This might be more common in the future, as at least a third of white gay men voted for Trump for similar reasons that most white women did — yes, conservatives dislike them, but not as much as they dislike black people.
And if any conservatives object to that statement, here’s a quick reminder that in electing Trump the party and ideology you identify with just went against every one of their supposed ideological points to spite people of color.
The other reason Milo is relevant is the debate over “free speech” he ignites and thrives on. How he usually works is he says, does or threatens to do something terrible. In the past, this has been leading harassment campaigns saturated with sexism and racism or outing transgender or undocumented students who attend a college he’s speaking at. This leads to people trying to stop him from harassing others by means like banning him from Twitter or protesting so much he can’t speak on a campus. Then he claims he’s being harassed and the “snowflakes” on the Left are out of control.
Here’s the thing though — his words aren’t “just words.” His initial actions are actively meant to harm. He wants to make social media such an unbearable strain on people’s mental health that they can no longer use it. Undocumented students he outed could have been forced out of the country. Allowing him to speak and giving him platforms just lets him harm people. We know that by now. We’ve seen it many times before. The “free speech” he wants is the right to hurt other people with no consequences. It’s important we keep that in mind and deny it to others like him who would see others harmed.