This is a story about how trolls took the wheel of the clown car of modern politics. It’s a story about the insider traders of the attention economy. It’s a story about fear and loathing and Donald Trump and you and me. It’s not a story about Milo Yiannopoulos, the professional alt-right provocateur who was last week banned from Twitter for directing racist abuse towards the actor Leslie Jones.

But it does start with Milo. So I should probably explain how we know each other and how, on a hot, weird night in Cleveland, Ohio, I came to be riding in the backseat of his swank black trollmobile to the gayest neo-fascist rally at the Republican national convention.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a charming devil and one of the worst people I know. I have seen the death of political discourse reflected in his designer sunglasses. It chills me. We met four years ago when he was just another floppy-haired rightwing pundit and we were guests on a panel show. Afterwards, we got hammered and ran around the BBC talking about boys.

Since that day, there is absolutely nothing I have been able to say to Milo to persuade him that we are not friends. The more famous he gets off the back of extravagantly abusing women and minorities, the more I tell him I hate him and everything he stands for, the more he laughs and asks when we’re drinking.

“Feminism is cancer” is one of Milo’s slogans, and yet it took him only seconds after learning we would both be at the RNC to offer me a lift to his “Wake Up!” rally. This time – God help me – I said yes.

So, here we are at the convention, where howling psychopath Donald Trump has just been confirmed as the presidential nominee. Milo is loving every second. He lost no time climbing on the back of the clown car of the demagogue who, with ghoulishly oedipal glee, he calls “Daddy”.

I wait for Milo outside the Ritz. After half an hour, I’m ushered into a large black Ford, where Team Milo is off to pick up their star.

Team Milo consists of his tour manager, Tim, one writer for the rightwing website Breitbart, one young man with a neat beard and a “Dangerous Faggot” T-shirt, and Milo’s personal trainer and driver.

Just as we set off, news breaks that Milo has been suspended from Twitter. A frenzy of jubilant activity: this is a huge win for Milo. He’ll be trending worldwide within the hour.

Milo Yiannopoulos speaking at the Gays for Trump party. Photograph: YouTube

The car pulls up outside a dinner being held by Fox News, and two giant security guards get in on either side of me. Then, at last, Milo arrives.

Milo is excited. This is his night. How does he feel about his suspension?

“It’s fantastic,” he says, “It’s the end of the platform. The timing is perfect.”

He was planning for this. “I thought I had another six months, but this was always going to happen.”

Milo shows no remorse for the avalanche of misconduct he helped direct towards Jones, who is just the latest victim of the recreational ritual abuse he likes to launch at women and minorities for the fame and fun of it. I have come to believe that Milo believes in almost nothing concrete – not even in free speech.

Milo puts on a bulletproof jacket. He does this “because it’s funny”, although he worries that it may be insufficiently flattering. “I’m going to send it to my guy at Louis Vuitton.” It’s all an act. A choreographed performance by a career sociopath. Milo Yiannopoulos is the ideological analogue of Kim Kardashian’s rear end. Trickster breaks the internet.

The larger of the two security guards takes the wheel. Milo strokes his arm and tells him it’s all right to go fast. There follows the single most terrifying car ride of my life. I make it to the venue intact apart from my faith in humanity.

“Get Laurie a cigarette, darling,” Milo says to his personal trainer. We smoke in the car park as his camera crew arrive. Then the crew livestreams the delighted Twitter martyr’s Reservoir Dogs strut through to the VIP room – a carpeted ballroom on the seventh floor of hell full of manic trolls and smug neo-fascists from every slimy corner of the internet. Over by the bar is Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right leader. I realise that I have stumbled into a den of goblins. It’s way too late to cast a protection spell.

Milo swoops away to hold court. I hear a throat clear right in front of me. It is Daryush Valizadeh, also known as Roosh V, self-styled leader in the “neo-masculinity” movement, author of a suspicious stack of sex travel guides and headline-hunting nano-celebrity in the world of ritualised internet misogyny. Roosh hates feminists for a living. He asks me what I’m doing here. I ask him the same question.

Roosh is tall and well-built and actually rather good-looking for, you know, a monster. I have the opportunity to observe this because he puts himself right up in my personal space, blocking my view of the room. He asks me if I believe that it’s right for gay men to be able to adopt children. I tell him that I do. He appears as flummoxed by this as I do by his presence at what is supposed to be a party to celebrate gay republicans. But he’s here for the same reason I am: Milo invited him.

Daryush Valizadeh ... extravagantly bearded sociopath. Photograph: YouTube

What surprises me about Roosh is that he seems to be a true believer. Unlike Milo, he appears to be – to some extent – convinced of the truth of what he’s saying. He is bitter and vindictive, convinced of his own victimhood. He tells me that the reason I have a column is that I’m a useful idiot and all my readers have low IQs. I ask him if he’s negging me.

I turn to leave, and Roosh suggests that we should start some sort of “fake fight” on the internet, because that’s “part of the game”. “I’m good,” I say, genuinely confused. There is no way I could have a fake fight with this man. We have real, profound differences. I think he’s a dangerous manchild with an army of credulous misogynists at his disposal. I cannot fight him insincerely, and I don’t want to fight him in good faith because he has already had too much of my attention. What – truly – does this extravagantly bearded sociopath think he’s playing at?

The most widely accepted definition of a troll is a provocateur – someone who says outrageous, extreme or abusive things to elicit a reaction. For them, the reaction itself is the win. The key distinction is between the attention-hustlers – the pure troll howlers who play this grotesque game for its own sake and their own – and the true believers. Roosh is a true believer, and that puts him at a disadvantage.

Roosh means what he’s saying, but he’s still aware that he’s playing a game – the same game almost everyone in this crucible of A-list internet conmen is playing. It’s the game of turning raw rage into political currency, the unscrupulous whorebaggery of the troll gone pro. These are people who cashed in their limited principles to cheat at poker. Like Trump, they channel their own narcissism to give voice to the wordless, formless rage of the people neoliberalism left behind. Welcome to the scream room. There’s a cheese plate.

I run into a British writer from the Spectator, who is as bewildered as I am by the way Americans take Milo and his ilk seriously, by their willingness to take pride in performative bigotry and call it strength. It works. It sells. It’s the unholy marriage of that soulless debate culture that works so well in Britain, transplanted to a nation with no social safety net and half a billion guns. It works, in part, because of the essentially cult-like nature of US culture and the structured ignorance that accompanies it. America is a nation eaten by its own myth. The entire idea of America is about believing impossible things. Nobody said those things had to be benign.

I stumble downstairs to hear the convention speeches. The hall is packed with nervous journalists and plastered with photos of naked young men in Trump caps. Pamela Geller, a minor rightwing pundit, is speaking her brains, telling the punters that Islam is the real threat to gay rights, and that Trump will save America by kicking out immigrants.

Then it’s Milo’s turn.

His speech is cabaret from start to finish. He sashays up to the podium and strips off his bulletproof vest, giddy with the attention, and announces that he has been banned from Twitter. The news draws cheers from the assembled Gamergate goons.

I’m not going to quote Milo’s speech here. You can find it online if you want to. It’s a very good speech, for a given value of “very good” that’s designed to leave decent people keening in a corner over the death of reason. He tells a racist joke. The crowd goes wild.

Milo peddles a pageant of insincerity that is immediately legible to fellow Brits. The crowd of excitable young and young-ish people gathered to hear him pontificate believe what he’s saying, even if he doesn’t. Which he doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter.

Donald Trump after his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t mean it. It doesn’t matter that he’s secretly quite a sweet, vulnerable person who is gracious to those he considers friends. It doesn’t matter that somewhere in the rhinestone-rimmed hamster wheel of his mind is a conscience. It doesn’t matter because the harm he does is real.

He is leading a yammering army of trolls to victory on terms they barely understand. This is how we got to a place where speakers at the RNC are actively calling for the slaughter and deportation of foreigners, declaring that Hillary Clinton is an agent of Satan, and hearing only cheers from the floor.

They ventriloquise the fear of millions into a scream of fire in the crowded theatre of modernity where all the doors are locked, and then they watch the stampede.

I’ve seen enough. This is an evil place, as airless and soulless as the inside of Pamela Geller’s head. We have to get out. In the humid dark of the plaza outside the event, a dozen young activists have got together an impromptu protest. Shellshocked members of the press stumble out into the street.

“It’s just – there’s so much hate,” says one as she breaks down in tears. “What is happening to this country?”

What’s happening to this country has happened before, in other nations, in other anxious, violent times when all the old certainties peeled away and maniacs took the wheel. It’s what happens when weaponised insincerity is applied to structured ignorance. Donald Trump is the Gordon Gekko of the attention economy, but even he is no longer in control. This culture war is being run in bad faith by bad actors who are running way off-script; it has barely begun, and there are going to be a lot of refugees.

Laurie Penny is a contributing editor at the New Statesman.

A longer version of this piece originally appeared on Medium.com.