Milo Yiannopoulos and the end of the pro-Trump fameballs

That’s All, Folks: Milo Yiannopoulos’s “Free Speech Week” imploded over the weekend in Berkeley, cutting short what was supposed to be the British provocateur’s big comeback.

Stymied by the Berkeley administration and bumbling student hosts, abandoned or even publicly attacked by nearly all of the ideological allies who were supposed to speak with him, Yiannopoulos was stuck holding a sign for a few minutes with some of his catchphrases — “Feminism is cancer,” “Liberalism is a mental disorder,” etc.

And I was struck by something: it all looked irredeemably lame.

Yiannopoulos’s whole schtick has always been pretty cringeworthy — his signature move last year was bathing in pig’s blood while surrounded by pictures of twinks in MAGA hats and the scrawled names of murder victims, all to make a point about something. But for a while there, Yiannopoulos looked like the head of something that was ridiculous, dumb, but also undeniably successful.