Well: It's finally happened. Milo Yiannopoulos, the infamous alt-right poster boy and harassment-campaign leader, has finally reached the end of his good luck. Once on the verge of stardom, Milo now finds himself unemployed and disgraced. It's hard not to feel a little gleeful. Still, when one considers how very close Milo came to being a mainstream media figure, it's terrifying. And to understand how he got so disastrously close to being mainstreamed, we need to understand which parts of the mainstream sympathized with him—and the comedy world does not have clean hands.

Just this weekend, it seemed, Yiannopoulos was riding high: A six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster, an invitation to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and his most high-profile TV appearance to date, on Bill Maher's Real Time, where he was met with surprising amounts of sympathy. At one point, Yiannopoulos insisted that transgender women had a "psychiatric disorder."

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Then, conservative bloggers at The Reagan Battalion tweeted a video of the self-styled defender of women and girls also defending the right of adults to rape 13-year-old boys. In the last three days, Yiannopoulos has lost his invitation to speak at CPAC. He has lost his book deal (after what Simon & Schuster assures us is "careful consideration"). In the most shocking twist, fellow employees at Breitbart — the far-right, Steve-Bannon-run trash-hole where Yiannopoulos was originally spawned, and the one job you'd think he couldn't lose—reportedly lobbied for his termination. They got it; Yiannopoulos officially "stepped down" from his position at Breitbart on Tuesday.

The contents of the leaked video are legitimately disturbing. Yiannopoulos, despite his current claims that he is "horrified by pedophilia," is specific about the age of the children in question: "We're talking about 13 [and] 25, 13 [and] 28. These things do happen, and completely consensually… the boy is the predator in that situation." Yiannopoulos then complains that too many people "get hung up on this child-abuse stuff." When pressed, Yiannopoulos flips the whole thing into a joke: "I'm grateful for Father Michael! I wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him!"

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🚨 Breaking: We obtained the #CPAC2017 Milo Yiannopoulos introductory video.



This is a must watch!



Well done @mschlapp. pic.twitter.com/2nA0H9woUX — Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) February 19, 2017

So, the outrage is completely reasonable. Or it would be, if Milo Yiannopoulos had not been shaming rape victims and attacking "the idea of consent" for years. In 2015, he was ejected from a protest for holding up a sign that read "Harry Potter and Rape Culture: Both Myths." He has routinely argued that "feminists" make up rape statistics; in one 2016 Breitbart column, he argued that "college-age women [are] effectively being taught that regret equals rape." In a July 2016 conversation with comedian Joe Rogan, host of the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, he went even farther, arguing that "this sexual harassment craze right now, it's really just a way for women to tell you they've been hit on."

Then, of course, there's yet another Rogan bit that Yiannopoulos' recent critics might be interested in. It's the first YouTube result for "Milo Yiannopoulos pedophilia"; it's from Yiannopoulos' first appearance on Rogan's show, in September of 2015, and begins with the line "if it weren't for Father Michael, I would've given far less good head."

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The "leaked" video of Yiannopoulos didn't constitute some kind of accidental disclosure. He didn't just blurt out his true feelings, and (despite his claims to the contrary in one of his many apologetic Facebook posts on the matter) those words did not just "tumble out of [his] mouth" during some late-night "spit-balling" session. The mere fact that he was able to repeat his lines nearly verbatim shows how hard he worked on them. It was a bit; he was workshopping it, honing his material.

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Milo, whatever else he may be, views himself as an entertainer—specifically, a comedian. Even in that Facebook "apology," Yiannopoulos touts his "blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor," in language that could come from some hack stand-up's PR team. This is important, not just to understanding Yiannopoulos himself, but to figuring out how to stop the next Yiannopoulos from happening. Yiannopoulos-style ranting about "SJWs"—or, social justice warriors, meaning, most often, feminist women who take rape too seriously—has been the norm in the comedy world for many years now. Yiannopoulos didn't get invites from mainstream comedians despite his views on rape or women, but because of them.

Milo Yiannopoulos, after speaking a press conference, February 21, 2017 Getty Images

People who remember Joe Rogan as a Fear Factor host or a lovable schmoe on NewsRadio would be alarmed to find that his current "comedy" podcast (which is depressingly successful; Rogan claims to get 30 million downloads per month, and the podcast currently stands at #9 on industry tracker PodTrac's charts, just below NPR mainstays like Fresh Air and Planet Money) is basically a wailing wall for middle-aged white men who believe they've been victimized by feminism; in his segments with other guests, Rogan complains about everything from "false rape allegations" ("we're supposed to assume that women never lie about rape, and it's not true, we know it's not true, but we're not allowed to bring it up") to the very concept of anti-rape activism ("to make it your primary concern, to make it this thing that you focus and concentrate on… it's like a rape fetish"). In this context, Yiannopoulos isn't some scary neo-Nazi outlier; he's one more white guy who thinks he's funny and believes feminists lie about being assaulted. When Yiannopoulos claims that women who report sexual assault are bragging, Rogan doesn't recoil, he concurs happily: "It's a way [for women] to get money." Milo's views aren't coming out of left field; they mirror Rogan's own.

Maher and Rogan aren't outliers, bad men who made the mistake of inviting a worse man onto their platforms. Making light of women in general, and rape in particular, is baked into certain segments of the culture of stand-up—and comedians defend it, sometimes violently. After comedian Daniel Tosh infamously suggested that a woman who objected to his rape jokes should be "raped by like, five guys right now," dozens of male comedians rallied around him, calling the victim everything from "a self-aggrandizing, idiotic blogger" (Patton Oswalt) to "a rude brat" (Jim Norton). Dane Cook advised her that "it's best for everyone if you just kill yourself;" Doug Stanhope tweeted a simple "#FuckThatPig." When feminist author Lindy West debated rape jokes with Norton on TV, she was inundated with threats. (Sample: "Holes like this make me want to commit rape out of anger, I don't even find her attractive, at all, she's a fat idiot, I just want to rape her with a traffic cone.")

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Nor is the alt-right unaware of the fact that "mainstream" comedy carries a surprising amount of sympathy for their causes; members of Reddit's infamous Red Pill forum pass around Bill Maher's anti-feminist bits, hailing them as "gems of wisdom." Bill Burr, a comedian famous, in part, for complaining about domestic violence activists—there's "no reason to hit a woman"; "really? I could give you like seventeen [reasons] right off the top of my head"—is a regular guest on relatively liberal outlets like Conan O'Brien. He also has a devoted following on far-right sites like NewsHeist, which re-packages his bits for conservative Internet outlets under titles like "Bill Burr Intelligently Shuts Down Anti-Trump Feminist" and "Bill Burr: I'm Sick of Michelle Obama."

The standard claim, here, is that comedians don't actually support such violence; that they do and say these things in the name of "free speech," and their own freedom as comics to press social limits and flout taboos. But that's exactly what Yiannopoulos always claimed to be doing, too; it led to trans women being harassed out of schools, female bloggers and comedians getting months worth of death threats, and one Milo fan just plain shooting a protester in the stomach. When Patton Oswalt, a staunch progressive, blows off feminist criticism by saying that "rape is absolutely wrong; speech is absolutely free," it would probably horrify him to realize he's laying groundwork for someone like Milo—yet when Milo shows up and claims (as he did on Real Time) that "all I care about is free speech and free expression; I want people to be able to be, do, and say anything," he's drawing from a recognizable line of argument.

In a culture where the ability to say whatever you want, and hurt whomever you please, is valued over and above anything else, canny manipulators like Milo will always persist. Milo's pedophilia comments and "jokes" are no more shocking than any other "joke" he's made about rape culture—unless you subscribe to the idea that rapes can be quantified, or that teenage boys are inherently less worthy of being victimized than teenage or twenty-something girls, which you shouldn't. Yet his "jokes" about those female victims had been so widely normalized by mainstream "comedy" that many people didn't realize they were hearing pro-rape arguments until it was too late. That is what's truly shocking.

Sady Doyle Sady Doyle is the author of 'Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ...

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