They were fine with his bigotry, his in-your-face, two-fingers-up transphobia, Islamophobia and misogyny. It took his defence of relationships between “older men” and “younger boys” for their queasiness to set in. The case of Milo Yiannopoulos is indeed a parable of our time. But who do I mean by “they”? In this case, both his associates and his enablers. His associates are the ascendant racist and neo-fascist movements of our time. He was a means to repackage their hatred for a certain demographic: as edgy, trendy, cool. Performative fascism, if you like. That’s why they call themselves the “alt-right”, after all: allowing them to cloak themselves not as a renaissance of fascist movements that have produced only human carnage in their previous incarnations, but as a sexy in-group and subculture that all the new cool kids are part of.

Milo Yiannopoulos book deal cancelled following outrage over child abuse comments Read more

You expect that from the associates – the racists and the fascists who have been defeated in the past but only at the cost of tens of millions of lives. But what of his enablers? While his associates deserve only crushing defeat, his enablers deserve only contempt. It doesn’t matter whether they agree with his bigotry, because they almost certainly do not. But they are fine with it – more than fine, in fact, because it is lucrative. The media outlets and, until its belated cancellation of Yiannopoulos’s lucrative book deal, the publisher Simon & Schuster, saw his hateful pronunciations as a commercial opportunity. There was money to be made. Never mind that they were providing him with a platform to menace and incite hatred against already besieged minorities. He was “controversial”, they would say with a glint in their eye. “Provocative”, even. And then the very media outlets that facilitated his rise would provide a platform for chin-strokers to sagely ask: “Why is this phenomenon on the rise and who is to blame?”

Yet now that there is video evidence that he is an apologist for relationships between older men and younger boys, some of his associates (but not all) and his enablers are electing to distance themselves. His past statements, on the other hand, were apparently entirely permissible. From public platforms he denounced trans people as “gay men dressing up for attention”, for being “mutilated trannies”, inciting his audience with statements such as: “Never feel bad for mocking a transgender person.” At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, he projected the photograph and name of a trans student for the purposes of ridicule. “Do you know what it’s like to be in a room full of people who are laughing at you as if you’re some sort of perverted freak?” the student would later ask. “Do you know what this kind of terror is? No, you don’t.” Yiannopoulos was inciting hatred against a group who, in large part because of the bigotry against them, suffer from extraordinarily high levels of mental distress, of suicide, and who are murdered for who they are.

Here is a man who encouraged hatred against Muslims as they suffer the sort of widespread and publicly acceptable bigotry Jews suffered in the last century. “Look what’s happening in Sweden,” he said. “Look what’s happening anywhere in Germany, anywhere there are large influxes of a Muslim population. Things don’t end well for women and gays.” Never mind that Sweden’s crime rate has been static for many years, or that Malmö – the cause celebre of the racist right – has a slightly lower crime rate than it did a decade ago. This is about inciting hatred and nothing else.

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Feminism is a “cancer”, he proclaims as he writes articles for Breitbart entitled “Does feminism make women ugly?” It was his online harassment of Leslie Jones, a black actor, that finally had him banned from Twitter. But you don’t need Twitter to be a troll. Yiannopoulos became ever more lucrative. When he was offered a slot on US talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, the US journalist Jeremy Scahill withdrew. “Milo Yiannopoulos is many bridges too far,” he wrote. “There is no value in ‘debating’ him. Appearing on Real Time will provide Yiannopoulos with a large, important platform to openly advocate his racist, anti-immigrant campaign. It will be exploited by Yiannopoulos in an attempt to legitimise his hateful agenda.” In doing so he showed integrity that the enablers of Yiannopoulos never had.

For years, feminists and trans commentators and activists and others targeted by his bile spoke out, but they weren’t listened to. But they were right. Both his associates and enablers have no excuses. They should be held responsible and accountable. Whether Yiannopoulos disappears or not – I suspect not – there will be others who make bigotry sexy in exchange for commercial success. But there is nothing sexy about racism and fascism. It is a menace to be defeated – and that means confronting not just its sympathisers, but its enablers too.