OPINION

THE left say a lot about Milo Yiannopoulos. They say he is ultraconservative even though he is outlandish, Gucci-clad and gay. They say he is racist even though he is married to a black man. And they say he is anti-Semitic even though he is half-Jewish.

But most of all they say that he shouldn’t be given a platform to spout his fascist hate-speech. And that is all well and good. The only real question is why they keep giving it to him.

Milo may well be a child of the alt-right, but the people who made him an international star are the alt-left. Probably never in human history has a political figure owed so much to his enemies.

And the truly staggering thing is that the left still hasn’t realised how much they are helping him. In fact even as he arrives in Australia, with his usual bluster and braggadocio, they are doing it still.

Whatever Milo’s political views, one transcends all others. He casts himself primarily as a defender of free speech, which he sees as being under threat from the juvenile left.

And so what does the left do in response to this? It tries to ban him from talking.

This has already happened at various universities in the US, where crazed protests and campus bans have made Milo a martyr. Only in student politics could mass cries of victimhood turn an oppressor into a victim.

Yet now in Australia, professional politicians who are old enough to know better are playing right into his hands once more.

Milo’s entire strategy, and indeed his entire appeal, is to act the role of an agent provocateur who has to constantly say outrageous things in order to preserve the right to say outrageous things. He has even publicly said as much, not least of all to me when we interviewed him on Studio 10.

And so not only is this obvious to anyone with half a political brain, he has actually openly stated it. He says outrageous things in order to outrage people so that they will seek to ban him from doing so, at which point he can then say: “See? They are trying to ban me from saying outrageous things! This is why I must say more outrageous things!”

And what do all our political geniuses on the left do? They seek to ban him from saying outrageous things.

The newly elected Labor Premier of WA Mark McGowan banned him from speaking at any government sites and now the Greens leader Richard Di Natale has requested that he be banned from speaking at Parliament House.

All you need to know about the wisdom of this move is that I — a hopeless news and political junkie — didn’t even know Milo was scheduled to speak at Parliament House until Richard Di Natale told me so. Now I’ll definitely be watching.

Frankly, it is a disappointing stunt from Di Natale, an otherwise intelligent, decent and reasonable man who just had the misfortune of landing in the wrong party. McGowan’s lapse we’ll just blame on inexperience.

Or perhaps it is the new so-called “virtue signalling” virus that has infected the left, a condition in which it is considered better to cause harm but look good while doing it than it is to achieve a good result but without the retweets.

Because it is obvious to a blind monkey that the only person who benefits from a ban on Milo Yiannopoulos is Milo Yiannopoulos himself. He loves being banned. His whole business model is based on it.

Indeed, the very move by the Greens to ban him from Parliament House came just after Milo himself was peddling the story that he had been banned from various TV shows, including Studio 10. This should have been a warning in 20-foot tall letters of fire that this was all part of his publicity strategy but incredibly the Greens didn’t pick it up. On the contrary, they actually cited his own claims of how much he had been banned as a reason for banning him further.

For the record, it wouldn’t have taken much research to figure out how credible the claim of a Studio 10 ban was: WE HAVE ALREADY HAD HIM ON THE SHOW! IT WAS ON LIVE NATIONAL TELEVISION!!!

Moreover, some in the left seem to have realised what is at play and yet still play into his hands. One prolific tweeter wrote an open letter to the Australian media saying that nobody cares about Milo Yiannopoulos, which got 4000 likes and retweets, and to which he then replied to himself with another tweet about Milo Yiannopoulos. By any measure this is an odd response to someone who nobody cares about.

Indeed, perhaps the most ironic thing about Milo Yiannopoulos is that most people had never heard of him at all until he was banned from Twitter. Now you punch in his name on Google and the first thing that comes up is an ad for tickets to his show. That’s a big win for the “Don’t be evil” cool guys of Silicon Valley right there.

And so if you want to help Milo Yiannopoulos continue his juggernaut to the heights of popularity keep talking about how you don’t want to talk about him, or better still call for him to be banned for saying all the things you say he said while you’re calling for him to be banned.

I mean once you ban something, it’s sure to stop it from becoming famous right? Just ask Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Henry Miller.

Honestly, how dumb have we become? If we keep going at this rate, the only person who’ll be out of a job is Milo’s publicist.