If liberals and others think they just squelched right-wing attention-seeker Milo Yiannopoulos for good, they should think again.

Yes, the stunning three-day cyber-lynching that culminated in Tuesday’s news conference has cost him his speaking gig at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, his Simon & Schuster book deal, and his role at Breitbart, the silly far-right website that reads as if it were written in crayon.

But so what? Short-term pain will lead to long-term gain. Yiannopoulos is one of the least pleasant or sympathetic characters in political discourse. Still, as long as he plays his cards right, he will emerge as the winner from this. The losers will be his opponents.

Why?

First, he’s now more famous than ever. A week ago, even after the Berkeley riot against his speaking engagement, he was an obscure fringe figure. Now everyone knows his name. In the modern cyberworld, all that really matters is name recognition. Infamy is as valuable as fame. If Kim Kardashian can add to her brand value by flashing her butt on the internet, all old-fashioned standards are finito.

Second, he’ll get another book contract. Actually, he could just self-publish his manuscript through something like Amazon’s Createspace service. Marketing won’t be a problem — least of all now — and he’d pocket a much higher percentage of the cover price than he was going to get before. But even if he doesn’t go down that road, there are plenty of other book publishers who will snap him up.

Third, he’ll probably keep a lot of his original advance anyway. It’s been reported, but not confirmed, that Simon & Schuster had agreed to an advance of $250,000. The publishing firm hasn’t responded to queries. But it’s dollars to doughnuts it’s already paid Yiannopoulos some of the money. And if he sues, it may have a hard time withholding the rest. This looks like breach of contract. And an independent publishing expert tells me he doubts Yiannopoulos’ contract included the kind of “reputation clause” that might have protected the company. So he could end up with two advances, not one. LOL, as they say.

Fourth, he’ll sell many more copies of his book than before. Far-right nuts are a dedicated and passionate group of paranoiacs. They are convinced they are being oppressed by a shadowy and sinister conspiracy of “elites,” “liberals,” “globalists,” Jews and so on (the latest term is “the Deep State”). To these people, Yiannopoulos is now a cause célèbre: His lynching by the Illuminati makes him even more heroic.

Fifth, this “scandal” and this wave of outrage will die down. One of the features of mass hysteria in the age of the internet is that although it can erupt out of nowhere, it also fades pretty quickly too. People who can get enraged over a YouTube clip are also quick to forget. Next month they’ll be enraged about something else.

Sixth, this gives him an excuse to dump Breitbart. It’s one thing to be a far-right trash website and a purveyor of drivel. But now that Breitbart has supplied the president’s senior adviser, the joke has passed its tell-by date. Yiannopoulos is better off growing up a bit and becoming, say, the next Ann Coulter.

Seventh: Oh yes, and finally... in this case he’s actually in the right.

No, I’m not defending what he said. (Spare me the outrage, please.) But I certainly defend his right to say it.

Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns From Breitbart News

Those of us who were never sexually abused as children probably ought to think twice, or even thrice, before we lecture those who were. Yiannopoulos chooses to deal with the abuse he suffered through humor, flamboyance, and provocation. Does an abuse survivor not have that right? Seriously?

I took most of his remarks as tongue in cheek anyway.

While most of us support maintaining the sexual age of consent at 16 or 18, it’s also hard to say any discussion of the topic must be forbidden, when it was 14 in Canada until a decade ago and it is 14 in some European countries, including Germany, today. We had better stop all public performances too of Romeo & Juliet, whose heroine “hath not seen the change of fourteen years.”

Yiannopoulos’ biggest mistake in this entire affair was apologizing. It’s almost never a good idea: It demoralized your friends, and emboldens your enemies.

It is a paradox that Yiannopoulos, who was embraced by CPAC and Simon & Schuster despite all the genuinely awful things he’s said before, should have been rejected over this. But he will be back.