Milo Yiannopoulos: the troll who aims to trigger. He laments comediennes who have “contracted feminism.” He jokes about being sexually molested when he was a minor. He’s a gay man who regrets that gay men no longer marry women and make babies. Don’t get him started on Muslims.
For two generations, the right’s intellectuals have bridled at being painted with the same “-isms” and phobias that breach the margins of respectable discourse. Yiannopoulos welcomes the labels. So why would conservatives treat him as a martyr for their cause? He’s everything they’ve tried to avoid being.
A rising generation of millennials on the right see things differently. They love Milo. (And yes, they all call him “Milo.”) They subscribe to his Facebook feed and invite him to speak at their campuses. Ashton Whitty, a junior at UC-Berkeley, told me: “I want to stand and fight with Milo.” Her conservative publication, the Patriot, invited him to speak at what was dubbed Free Speech Week.
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