Jamie Altman

Chapman University

Protests.

Human barricades.

Fake blood.

These are just a few of the tactics students have used to voice their opposition to British journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been visiting college campuses across the country this year as part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour.”

Yiannopoulos, the self-described "most fabulous supervillain on the Internet," is known for his staunch opposition to third-wave feminists, members of the Black Lives Matter movement and social justice activists, which hasn’t made him popular with some students he has encountered on tour.

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/745842234872987648



https://youtu.be/s86uGGkkycg

The list goes on.

When it comes to the angry masses he seems to attract, Yiannopoulos says all he can do is laugh.

“In many cases, the protesters say they don’t know who Milo is but they’re here to protest hate,” Yiannopoulos says. “There’s a mindless mob mentality. They’re hilariously stupid.”

Yiannopoulos isn’t fazed by the interruptions or objections. In fact, he says his tour thrives on them.

“It’s part of the fun,” he says. “People come to my talks to see the spectacle. They want to see the drama of it all.”

Yiannopoulos, the 32-year-old associate editor of conservative news website Breitbart, made a name for himself in the U.K. when he founded online tabloid magazine The Kernel in 2011. His rise to fame in America came in 2015 during “Gamergate,” a movement that called out sexism in video game culture. Yiannopoulos accused “feminist bullies” of “tearing the video game industry apart,” and by doing so, introduced America to his controversial ideas.

Since then, Yiannopoulos has garnered 319,000 Twitter followers – despite being suspended from Twitter this month after tweeting anti-Islam comments – and has taken college campuses by storm.



Related: Voices: Obama's welcome support for free speech on campus

His tour, which began in Europe in late 2015, has brought him to more than 20 universities. While not all visits were as dramatic as others, some involved debates about Yiannopoulos’s ideologies – at the University of Oregon, Yiannopoulos brought on stage an audience member who called him “dangerous” and “hateful.”

But the outspoken Trump supporter (he often refers to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee as “Daddy”) does not expect people to agree with his opinions, either.

“I don’t care if you come agreeing with me on any subject I talk about,” he says. “I want you to laugh and be entertained. Come away with the idea that more speech and not less is always a good thing. If you don’t like something people say, challenge them and have a good conversation about it.”

Among the many controversies surrounding Yiannopoulos is his birthday, which he dubbed “World Patriarchy Day” – a day in which men “should feel free to express (their) masculinity in the most odiously toxic manner imaginable.” His “privilege grant,” which launched last spring and exclusively funds the higher educations of white men, is another.

Yiannopoulos also criticizes modern-day feminism: He has entitled many of his college campus talks “Feminism is Cancer,” and, at Amber Rose’s 2015 SlutWalk, in which women marched against sexual violence and harassment, Yiannopoulos held up a sign that read, “’Rape Culture’ and Harry Potter. Both Fantasy.”

Some defend Yiannopoulos’s viewpoints. John Minster, a rising sophomore at DePaul University who interviewed Yiannopoulos on campus in May, believes that what some might call hate speech, is really just a clashing of opinions.

“We’re all going to have different definitions of what hate speech is,” says Minster, vice president of the College Republicans at DePaul. “Milo is going to these schools and being met with insane opposition and students who want to shut him down because what he says is terrifying or violent or they think his words can kill. When you look at what Milo is saying, I don’t think that’s hate speech. ‘Rape culture is a myth’ is not hate speech. It’s a different opinion.”

But Yiannopoulos says the protesters encourage him to be more outrageous (for example, he entered the UCSB event while being carried on a throne) and he plans to take things even further.

He plans to tour 40 more college campuses this coming fall semester, including October visits to Ohio State University, Yale University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This time around, the tour will likely have even more bells and whistles: stunts, entertainment, music and stand-up comedy, to name a few.

And he’ll be ready for the inevitable protests, too. In fact, he welcomes them, he told USA TODAY College.

“I want to shock and outrage even more people,” he says. “I’m fun and I like to have fun on the shows. The whole thing is entertaining, and there hasn’t been a lecture tour like this in America in a long time. The protesters should keep coming.”

Jamie Altman is a student at Chapman University and a USA TODAY College correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.