The far right provocateur got what he wanted at his Melbourne show – publicity, violence and fawning attention from right-wing commentators. But his abusive style is of little use to parliamentary politicians

Midway through his performance in Adelaide last Friday night, the British alt light provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos smirked as he displayed on the big screen an unflattering photo of the feminist writer Clementine Ford, snapped when she was a teenager.

The word “UNFUCKABLE” was superimposed over the top.

You’d think Yiannopoulos, of all people, would avoid making public assessments of sexual desirability, what with being caught on camera enthusing about intercourse between older men and younger boys, and then scoffing at the Left’s attitudes to this “child abuse stuff”.

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Indeed, one shudders at the images Yiannopoulos might have labelled “FUCKABLE”, given his well-publicised opinions on the “arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent” (he later claimed to have been taken out of context).

On Monday night, at the first of his two Melbourne gigs, he rejigged the gag, using an image of a slightly older Ford. But the joke remained the same. Ford was unattractive. Ford was a pig. She was, he said, a “fat cunt” – and the crowd whooped its appreciation.

Earlier in the evening, as the audience lined up outside the Melbourne Pavilion in Kensington, many attendees had seemed genuinely puzzled by the chants from the anti-racist protesters floating across over a row of riot police.

Yiannopoulos may not be a fascist. But his act weaponises identity by tapping into deeply held conservative grievances

“They’re calling him a white supremacist,” said an older woman, waiting with her daughter, “but he’s married to a gay guy.”

“He’s Jewish, too, I heard,” the man behind her said. “I mean, how can he be a fascist if he’s Jewish?”

It was a remarkable demonstration of how the right’s opposition to identity politics rests on the very ideas being disavowed, with Yiannopoulos’s personal background somehow providing a pre-emptive alibi for anything he might do or say.

In the media there had been chatter that the Troll Academy Australian tour was tanking. The attendance on Monday showed otherwise. The Melbourne Pavilion holds 600 people and Yiannopoulos packed it to capacity, despite announcing the location only a few hours before speaking – and then held a second show the same evening.

Many of those listening to him were seemingly unremarkable, suburban folks.

Yes, there were bikers and men wearing Make America Great Again caps and one youth with his face painted like Pepe the frog. But obvious members of the alt right were outnumbered by those conspicuous only by their ordinariness, including a surprisingly high proportion of women. There were even a few family groups – mum, dad and the kids, out for the evening together.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Milo Yiannopoulos at a press conference in Sydney. Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

As the seats filled, people talked about Gamergate and the US conservative polemicist Ben Shapiro and the various clips they had seen of Milo mocking and belittling assorted enemies. Some had been drawn by curiosity, but many were already diehard fans.

In his book Dangerous, Yiannopoulos claims that the rightwing media depends too much on an audience over 60, an argument he repeated in a recent piece for the Australian. Pundits should, he says, be “sassy” – advice that sounded particularly incongruous presented next to the fulminations of the various portly gentlemen who dominate the Oz’s opinion section.

Clearly, Yiannopoulos’s “sass” – if that’s the word for it – attracts a different demographic than, say, the Coalition for Marriage, the Australian Conservatives or any of the other mainstream efforts to stir the so-called “conservative base”.

What, precisely, is his message?

Last Wednesday, he gave a bizarre interview to the Daily Mail in which he warned that Australians “ought to get used to his intentionally provocative dialogue” — and then declared that, um, he didn’t much like the Opera House.

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Conservatism might be the new punk rock, but this particular provocation sounded less Sid Vicious and more Kevin McCloud. What next – a diss about the Harbour Bridge? A smackdown of new Parliament House? A sick burn about the Shrine of Remembrance?

Well, no. That last would be off the agenda, since badmouthing the Anzacs might prove genuinely controversial among his base – and Yiannopoulos doesn’t do real controversy. On the contrary, his act consists of repeating back to white conservatives, in exaggerated form, what they already think.

On Monday night he called Muslims rapists and terrorists. He denounced the demographic shifts in Europe as an existential threat – London was “already gone”, he said. He mocked feminists and explained, to a chorus of approving laughter, that Aboriginal art was “crap” and “really shit”.

Did he believe any of it? Who knows?

The Daily Beast recently published an extract from James Ball’s book Post-Truth under the succinct title: “Milo Yiannopoulos Is the Walking Embodiment of Bulls**t”.

In it, we learn that Milo once thought that computer games “attract damaged people” and those who played them were “losers”. There were, he argued, “few things … more embarrassing than grown men getting over-excited about video games”.

Shortly thereafter he became a champion of Gamergate, an online mob of men overexcited about video games.

In late 2015, Milo launched a university lecture blitz that he daringly called the Dangerous Faggot tour. He retained the title for his manifesto – but then shed the second word, presumably recognising that, if the epithet caused a pleasant frisson on campus, it embarrassed conservative booksellers and their customers.

“Those are my principles,” Groucho Marx once said, “and if you don’t like them ... well I have others.”

As he lambasted Ford for her appearance in Melbourne, Yiannopoulos mispronounced “Clementine’. He went on to mock Waleed Aly – essentially for being Muslim – and managed to mangle his name, too.

Fairly obviously, he knew nothing much about either. He had chosen Ford and Aly as local colour for his prepared shtick, a routine that he could have done just about anywhere.

In Adelaide, Andrew Bolt had served as the hype man, a role played in Melbourne by Ross Cameron.

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A few days after the Adelaide event, Bolt wrote a column about his attitude to women, in which he congratulated himself for not being Don Burke.

“I’ve never told foul “jokes” to shock or belittle women,” he boasted. “Nor am I the kind who shuts up while other blokes give women – or anyone else – a hard time.’

Yes, Bolt wrote that in the wake of welcoming Yiannopoulous on stage to mock a teenager for being “unfuckable”.

Predictably, Cory Bernardi was also in Adelaide to see Yiannopoulos – according to Bolt, he received a “huge ovation” as he walked in.

Bernardi touts himself as a defender of “true conservative values”, yet there he was, at an event sponsored by the old-school pornographers of Penthouse, listening to a guy who once described underage sex as a “hugely positive experience”.

Why? Like Bolt, Bernardi recognises Yiannopoulos’s star power, and he hopes some of it might rub off.

But here’s the thing: it won’t.

Bernardi might, perhaps, have been reading Dangerous, free copies of which were handed out in Melbourne to just about anyone who attended.

The book is an attempt by Yiannopoulos to normalise his politics, explicitly disavowing those members of the alt right he calls “Holocaust-deniers, Richard Spencer fans and Daily Stormer readers.”

Yet shortly after Dangerous appeared, Buzzfeed circulated footage of Yiannopoulos singing America the Beautiful in a karaoke bar. Nearby, a group of Richard Spencer fans (including Spencer himself), were raising arms in Hitler salutes.

Yiannopoulos says his myopia rendered him oblivious to the Nazis’ antics metres away from his performance. Maybe so. But in what kind of gathering does the presence of sieg heiling fascists cause insufficient disturbance to interrupt a song?

Buzzfeed also challenged Milo’s purported hostility to the Nazi Daily Stormer by leaking his correspondence with, and about, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, the Daily Stormer system administrator, a man with a giant swastika tattooed on his chest.

“[Weev] is one of the funniest, smartest and most interesting people I know,” says Yiannopoulos in one email. “Very on brand for me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters outside Milo Yiannopoulos’s show at the Melbourne Pavilion. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Yiannopoulos may not be a fascist. But he knows that his act weaponises identity by tapping into deeply held conservative grievances. It provides a kind of vicarious catharsis through ostentatious transgression, something that Yiannopoulos can do (where, say, Bernardi cannot) precisely because he does not care about conventional politics.

To put it another way, the people energised by Yiannopoulos calling feminists cunts are not going to devote themselves to Bernardi’s Senate campaigns.

Most of them, in fact, will remain indifferent to a mainstream political process that doesn’t offer anything nearly as exciting as taboo slurs directed at Indigenous people.

A few, however, might make different and more sinister choices. After all, if you really believe immigration is destroying Western civilisation, it’s not such a leap to want to fight back.

On Monday, after most of the audience had gone inside, Neil Erikson, the fascist agitator notorious for his harassment of Sam Dastyari, arrived at the pavilion to accost the leftwing protesters gathered nearby. Erikson’s posse linked up with the other white nationalists drawn to the gig: grouplets including the True Blue Crew, the Soldiers of Odin and the United Patriots Front. They began brawling: with the Left, with the police and with the (mostly African) residents of the local housing commission flats.

Yiannopoulos was inside and probably didn’t even see the violence, inflicted primarily on the people of Kensington.

He’ll be gone tomorrow anyway, peddling his wares in a different city.