Remember how Milo Yiannopoulos’ career seemingly exploded into flames in the span of a week? It felt like a long time ago, but the last straw — his resignation from Breitbart as their senior editor — was only 10 days ago. Bananas, right?
Well, the story gets even better when you find out how this call came about. Turns out there’s a 16-year-old Canadian high school student who was the brains behind the extremely efficient operation. Vox caught up with this girl, whom they refer to as Julia, to learn why and how she did it. The teen describes herself as “very socially liberal” yet more conservative on economic and foreign policy issues. So why did she target Milo? Well, this is what she told Vox:
“I see Milo as this embodiment of the awfulness you see over the past few years with the general tilt of millennial conservatism. It’s diverged from this traditional conservatism so much. You’ve seen it essentially become full of awfulness and all about attacking the left and not about actual principles. It has nothing to do with conservative ideology so much as it has with opposing the leftists, SJWs, and so on and so forth.”
Julia closely follows American politics, so when news of Milo’s keynote speech at CPAC broke she was disgusted — and sprung into action. She vaguely remembered the now-infamous statements from Yiannopoulos defending sexual relationships between young teens and older men, so she dug and eventually found it. How she decided to spread the word is a pivotal part of his downfall:
She didn’t think she’d have much luck spreading the news herself with her small Twitter following, so she contacted a conservative outlet to get the story out. She figured a liberal outlet would have less credibility among CPAC followers.
She landed on the previously not-very-well-known conservative blog Reagan Battalion, which, after a bit of back and forth, tweeted out the video — leading not just to CPAC canceling Yiannopoulos’s speech, but to Simon & Schuster pulling his already controversial book deal and his resignation from Breitbart.
“I thought it would only get, like, 200 retweets,” Julia said. “I had no idea that it would blow up to the extent that it did.”
It ended up at thousands of retweets.
Brilliant. The entire piece by Vox is worth a read. It’s really eye-opening to see this girl nail what is so wrong with today’s Republicans — they no longer have their own values. What we see now is reactionary conservatism. Instead of having specific values and goals, the GOP is now reduced to being the “anti-liberal” party. As Vox’s German Lopez notes in the piece:
It’s not necessarily that they support any specific conservative policies or political ideals; they by and large just oppose social liberalism — multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, equality for people of all races, religions, and genders, and so on.
And that, ladies and gentleman, is how we got to the current political sh*tshow we have on our hands today.
Big props to Julia for her brilliant work! We need more leaders like her to prevent the Trumps and Milos of the future.