Photo via Thomas Fedra/Flickr

This past Tuesday, self-proclaimed defender and tester of the First Amendment Milo Yiannopoulos resigned from his position of editor at Breitbart News after his book deal with Simon and Schuster was canceled in regard to his statements concerning pedophilia and the age of consent in the United States. Going by just his first name, Milo has become the poster child for outrage culture and the new wave of conservatism that has emerged from this past year’s contentious election as his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” challenged the status quo of many American colleges and universities.

By ridiculing fourth wave feminists, Islam, Black Lives Matter protestors, and “Safe Space Culture,” Milo has fueled the fire on many college campuses to a breaking point and has garnered a large online following on YouTube and Facebook. However, he was banned from Twitter for enticing racial hatred towards African American actress Leslie Jones, and more recently students at UC Berkeley violently opposed Yiannopoulos’ arrival on campus by rioting and pressuring the university to cancel his performance. Milo uses these instances of perceived censorship to further his point that First Amendment rights in the United States are not always ensured, and his role as a conservative provocateur has, like it or not, highlighted some of the many hypocrisies existing on both sides of the political aisle.

I first stumbled across Milo Yiannopoulos last spring in the dark depths of fringe YouTube videos. His contentious and unapologetic debating style, combined with a dark and witty humor drew me in, and although I disagree with his public combativeness and his brazenly racist, homophobic, Islamiphobic, and sexist material, I was still nonetheless entertained. As his popularity began to rise online, I began to see patterns in his style of provocation. Milo uses his shaky positionality as a gay conservative Catholic immigrant with Jewish ancestry to justify most of his socially questionable material. His intellectual prowess and his ability to shoot down most attacks with straw man arguments makes him a dangerous and frustrating opponent to debate, and his support from mostly white male conservatives gives him a hungry following on which to project his fringe right ideology. Milo has given the white man who feels delegitimized by left wing social justice a voice and has tapped into the economic and social frustration felt in a changing America.

Although I am not a fan of this British ideologue, I do recognize his potential to be a very powerful conservative figure. The circumstances surrounding his recent downfall have certainly discredited him to a certain extent, but if Brad Paisley is right in his song “Celebrity”, “the more they run [Milo’s] name down, the more [Milo’s] price goes up.” Milo Yiannopoulos is now a public figure with a loyal base of support. This recent defamation may have set him back a few paces, but more likely than not it will embolden him to pursue larger ventures and larger audiences. In his resignation from Breitbart, Milo restated his mission: “Don’t think for a moment that this will stop me being as offensive, provocative, and outrageously funny as I want on any subject I want. America has a colossal free speech problem. The land of the First Amendment has some of the most oppressive social restrictions on free expression anywhere in the western world. I’m proud to be a warrior for free speech and creative expression.”

I will continue to keep an eye on the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet” despite his audacious and offensive material. He, in my opinion, has the personality and capability to take conservatism in a wild direction, and it is best to keep a close and serious eye on demagogues before they morph into something far worse (ahem, Trump). On the other hand, it is also important to question why firebrands like Milo have gained so much traction over the past year. Perhaps it would behoove us at this liberal arts institution to think about what Milo is saying and why his vitriolic words strike a chord in our fellow Americans. Only then will we be able to engage and unify a divided population.