BY HANK REICHMAN

My title may be — indeed, probably is, alas — overoptimistic, but the rapid-fire sequence of events surrounding putrid provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, including the revoking of his invitation to speak at CPAC, the loss of his lucrative book deal, and finally, today, his forced resignation from Breitbart News, the repulsive fake news site that produced not only Milo but the odious Steve Bannon, does tempt one to gloat.  However, as many have pointed out, the news that Milo had advocated pedophilia — not really a revelation; it’s been public for at least a year — demonstrates well not just the hypocrisy but the fundamental mean-spiritedness of Milo’s erstwhile defenders.

CPAC can’t stomach a speaker who advocated sex with underage boys, but they’re totally comfortable with a speaker — Donald Trump — who brazenly invaded the dressing rooms of underage girls competing in his hokey pageants and who boasted of his assaults on women’s genitals.  They were fine with Milo’s anti-Semitism, his crude racism, his misogynistic “gamergate” comments, his harassment of transgender students in his audiences, but this man-boy thing was apparently a bit too much.  And so, despite all the right-wing blather about how it’s somehow always an assault on the First Amendment to disinvite a speaker or revoke a book contract they, well, disinvited Milo and revoked his book contract.

Google “Milo hypocrisy” and you’ll find numerous take-downs of the Right’s hypocrisy with respect to this creep  Here’s part of one from a site called Flavorwire:

Let’s be clear: while some of the things Yiannopoulos has said and/or enabled have been thoroughly obnoxious, it’s doubtful that any of them would be examples of speech not covered by the First Amendment. But then, neither would his statements on pedophilia. Until now, Milo’s fan club have cited the First Amendment and painted him as a martyr for free speech every time he’s been slapped down, no matter how tokenistic and overdue those actions have been. Nothing, it appeared, would cross the line, perhaps because there wasn’t one.

Except, whoops, nope, it turns out there is a line! Over the weekend, we found out where that line is drawn: pedophilia! Racism? Totally fine. Sexism? All good. Transphobia? No problem. But endorsing grown men having sex with underage boys? Nope. That, apparently, is where conservatives (and book publishers of questionable morality) draw the line. Pedophilia is such a toxic subject that any hint of association with it is too much. . . .

. . . it’s instructive to look again at what Yiannopoulos’s supporters have been happy to tolerate. If their commitment to free speech is not, in fact, absolute, then they have made a choice as to what speech is acceptable and what is not. This means that a refusal to censure Milo over his enthusiastic racism, sexism, etc, reflects a thought that those statements are acceptable. This is a case in which a refusal to condemn is essentially an endorsement.

And there’s also Milo’s own hypocrisy.  He promotes himself as a bold and fearless avatar of unbridled free speech, no matter how offensive, but read the concluding paragraph of this essay, “The internet is turning us all into sociopaths,” that he published in 2012:

So perhaps what’s needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. But if the internet, ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others. Isn’t it time we did the same to trolls?

Still, the implications of Milo’s demise (even if it may be, as I fear, short-lived) are most significant for what it says about the politics of the campus, not the Internet.  As I wrote in a post shortly after rioters in Berkeley shut down Milo’s talk there three weeks ago, “What is most regrettable is that the College Republicans — and the clownish president who leads them — are now able to claim they are defenders of free speech rather than being compelled to defend what they are, enablers, if not advocates, of Yiannopoulos’s bigotry.  Anti-Milo demonstrators should let the moron speak and then hold his sponsors responsible for promoting their ideas.  Make them own the ideas, not the “right” to express them.”

A similar point has now been made retroactively in an excellent op-ed piece, “If college liberals are so naive, why did the campus right fall for Yiannopoulos?,” by Alyssa Rosenberg, published today on the website of the Washington Post.  She writes:

Yiannopoulos’s rise coincided with a new wave of protest on college campuses and was directly facilitated by conservative college students who booked him in an attempt to raise even more ire from their liberal peers. At the same time that conservatives were criticizing liberal college students as vulnerable snowflakes making unreasonable requests of their administrations, conservative college students and groups were enabling the rise of an intellectual fraud at the cost of their own funds and credibility.

Utopianism can be a form of naivete. Given the sheer variety of students who gather on most college campuses, it would take an impractical — if not Orwellian — effort for administrators and faculty to anticipate their students’ every need. And given the inevitable contradictions between those needs and desires, it would be impossible to accommodate every single one of them. Hoping for a world free of economic precariousness, myriad forms of discrimination and the unkindnesses of youth may be impractical, given present political conditions and university politics. The solutions that the left and liberal college students propose may even be downright undesirable. But as forms of callowness go, wanting to improve the world is hardly the worst.

Contrast the wide-eyed earnestness of progressive college students, for which they’ve earned so much criticism, with the gullibility of their conservative peers . . . .

. . . conservative college students were willing to keep booking Yiannopoulos, since demonstrating “that we are not these special snowflakes who need safe spaces,” as the organizer of one such event at Yale put it, apparently counts as high principle. . . .

. . . If the entire case for your importance is that you make a certain class of people angry, then you have to keep making those people angry, upping the rhetorical ante all the way, to preserve the sense that you are “dangerous” and thus capable of moving books and movie tickets. Conservative college students proved more than willing to provide Yiannopoulos with the forums to do that, in some cases paying for extra security at the events in question. . . .

So the next time conservatives feel tempted to decry the callowness of campus liberals, they might take a pause to consider why so many college conservatives allowed themselves to be taken in by a dubious huckster with little to offer the long-term development of right-leaning ideas and institutions on college campuses.

Unless, of course, the sick sludge that Milo peddles is in fact all that’s left of the Right’s ideas, either on campus or in the halls of Congress and the White House.  Time will tell.