The “Free Speech Week” Milo Yiannopoulos planned in cooperation with students at Berkeley fizzled into nothing, hampered by a toxic cocktail of red tape and poor planning. Yiannopoulos, shrewd and shameless promoter of his own brand, was clearly counting on his star power to carry at least a little weight, though it seems his meteoric rise to notoriety ended some time ago.
But there’s a serious lesson to be learned in his ascension to whatever level of fame he’s managed to earn. Eli Lake of Bloomberg set out to explain “Why Conservatives on Campus Love Milo Yiannopoulos,” in an article published Wednesday that sought input from students at Berkeley.
Here’s one key passage:
Rowlands, Whitty and Worden like Yiannopoulos because he defies the double standard that protects the left and threatens the right. He welcomes the opprobrium of those who would quiet him. When asked by one reporter whether he had exposed students who were illegal immigrants, he quipped, “I haven’t, but that’s a good idea.” In this sense, Yiannopoulos is a lot like the candidate he cheered in 2016, Donald Trump. Both double down in the face of flabbergast.
Lake is right to compare Yiannopoulos to Trump in this context. On Monday, I wrote about how Trump’s instinct to double down when politically correct pundits react to statements like the one he made regarding NFL protesters by calling him racist is actually more important than the initial statement itself.
“Political observers underestimate how desperate people have become for someone, anyone, to fight this,” I wrote. “Enter Trump, whose complete disregard for the pressures of political correctness resonate powerfully with many conservatives, but also with nonpartisans who in many cases care a lot less about policy than about having a champion for cultural common sense.”
I think this pattern also explains Yiannopoulos’ popularity with conservative college students.
Under pressure from the powerful police of political correctness at their universities, most conservative students either don’t express their beliefs or do so with a tone that borders on apologetic. On the occasion they do not express themselves that way, and openly question transgenderism or feminism or any sacred progressive social cause, they face shockingly unacceptable consequences. In fact, that happens even when they do couch their ideas.
When students who believe in fundamental racial and sexual equality are repeatedly told in no uncertain tones they are bigots and racists and sexists, and then censored for advancing their arguments, that enormous buildup of frustration drives them to desperate measures.
Rather than clinics in conservatism, Yiannopoulos’ events function as primal, hour-long screams from maligned students who are at a complete loss for how to make their peers listen. He indulges the part of them that wants to abandon substantive argument and just explode at their detractors.
There are, of course, other reasons conservative students gravitate towards Yiannopoulos, including the opportunity to juxtapose his sense of humor with the humorlessness of their progressive peers. As campus leftists increasingly argue they are physically endangered by speech that questions, for instance, transgenderism, his lectures are also an exhibition in the safety of free speech.
Desperation drives people down strange paths. In the face of increasing attacks on their character, conservative students on college campuses often feel they are out of options. Given this context, it’s important to understand Yiannopoulos’ celebrity is a function of that desperation.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
