When I was growing up in St. Louis, there was a local radio DJ everyone loved to get upset about. If you've listened to any morning zoo in any American city, you know the type: raspy voice, loud opinions, giggling sidekick. He bounced from station to station throughout my teenage years; every year or so his face would appear on the side of a bus to advertise a new job. Once there, he'd say something crude (or racist, or sexist, or all three), and by the time he came back from whatever Van Halen song he'd be playing, the protests would already be underway. His latest shocking thing would make the 10 o'clock news, would make my mother tsk and say "vulgar," would get the kids in my carpool whispering.

It was a pretty simple career strategy: Say something wild, anger women or Jews or people of color, part ways with radio station, wait a few months, get hired by new station trying to make a name for itself, repeat. It was, when you think about it, the safest possible strategy for a person who talks for a living.

What it wasn't, ever, was interesting. I saw through it at age thirteen, an age when you would have won my respect for making a calculator screen spell out "BOOBIES." That's why I'm not using this DJ's name here. It's not because I don't want to give him the attention. It's because I've forgotten it.

Simon & Schuster

For the last year and a half, we've been told again and again how relevant and destructive Milo Yiannopoulos (né Hanrahan) is. He's the pouty, pretty face of the alt-right! He's a fresh and nasty gay voice! He's trolled his way onto college campuses, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the middle reaches of Twitter's trending topics. He has tried to become a very new kind of celebrity by playing a very old game. And it's worked, kind of:

He got himself a book deal. Which, by the way, is worth examining. His deal with Simon & Schuster was announced last December, for a book that was to be published this March (since moved to June to accommodate an extra chapter about the recent protests at UC Berkeley). Three months is not enough time to bind a book, much less write one. It is the quickie book deal of the instant internet celebrity. Simon & Schuster made a bad move, but their timing tells us they knew what too many of us didn't: act fast, because this guy won't be around for long. (We can also take a look at that quarter-million dollar advance. Generally, a solid chunk of an advance—let's call it a third—is tied to a sales incentive: you don't get that extra chunk unless you sell x amount, but it's announced as part of your advance amount anyway. The other two-thirds is paid out in installments over the course of the writing of the book, and through the year after publication. So all this guy had to do was put in constant effort to be the most offensive person in the room, and for his trouble he was compensated like a suburban bank branch manager. Congratulations.)

He got himself some college speaking dates. They were poorly received, which was undoubtedly the point all along. But do you know who else gets regular college speaking dates? RJ Mitte from Breaking Bad. Tyler Oakley. Todrick Hall. People who actually put a bit of thought and innovation into their time at the podium. Where are the breathless essays about their influence? What does their success tell us about our national id?

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He got himself a keynote spot at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, alongside right-wing sensations like Dana Loesch, Robert Davi of The Goonies, and the sitting President of the United States of America. It was a controversial choice, given that many of CPAC's attendees are virulent homophobes, but it passed anyway; if there's anything homophobes like more than calling someone a faggot, it's finding a gay person who will do it for them.

So you can tell me he's achieved marginal success. You can tell me he's developed a shtick. You can tell me he's found an audience (and you can probably also tell me every member of that audience owns a Harambe T-shirt). What you cannot do is convince me he's interesting. Because nothing he's said— feminism is cancer, liberals are ugly, rape culture is a fantasy— is something I didn't hear between Billy Squier and Heart in the way-back of a station wagon in 1985.

Well, all that bold progress is gone now. Over the weekend, conservative media group The Reagan Battalion unearthed a video in which Milo appeared to condone pedophilia in an interview with…I guess GWAR?

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Here is a longer cut where Milo Yiannopoulos says that he "is advocating" for legal sex between 13 year olds! & older men. #CPAC2017 pic.twitter.com/1fiuv7TSKs — Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) February 19, 2017

Upsetting, yes, but you can see the effort. You can see him asking himself, "What would an interesting person say here?" You can see him pushing to be transcendent and paradigm-busting and ultimately saying pretty much what you expected him to.

So Simon & Schuster has dropped him, CPAC rescinded his keynote spot, and he's stepped down from his position at Breitbart. This afternoon, he assembled a quickie press conference at which he spoke in front of an electrical outlet, styled as Linda Dano doing George Will cosplay, and did the boilerplate apology for "imprecise language." He cited his own status as a victim of sexual abuse at the age of 16, explained how it negatively affected his life for years after, and then urged his followers to reject victim status. He mentioned having lost his virginity at 13 at least three times. He played with his hair, dissed Ross Mathews, and promised he'd be back with a vague new media venture. When the assembled reporters talked over each other in trying to get in a question, he let loose the only funny thing I've ever heard him say: "Could you be respectful of other people please?"

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He never did get around to saying anything we haven't heard before. Because he can't.

So we are, at least for the moment, finished with him. When and if he comes trolling back, remember this: Getting angry at Milo is like getting angry at the mannequin challenge. You can start a boycott, you can make a sign to hold at a protest, or you can wait 10 days. The brand is nothing but provocation, and provocation for its own sake is unsustainable.

Our attention is a finite resource, and we don't have to pay it out to everyone who shows up at our door looking for it.

Milo ended today's press conference by reasserting his value as a cultural figure and assuring us that "America will judge [him] accordingly." Exactly. We always do. He has spent the last year straining for the one-name cultural ubiquity of a Beyoncé or a Cher, and while I'm annoyed he hung around long enough for me to have to develop an opinion on him, I am comforted by the fact that in one year I won't remember even that single name.