I have been vaguely aware of Milo Yiannopoulos for a while. He is a gay Brit who works for Breitbart News. Lately he has been embroiled in controversy on Twitter and on college campuses, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to know what the fuss was about.
Now Milo has come to town. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports on his appearance earlier today: “Protesters gear up for conservative pundit Yiannopoulos at University of Minnesota.”
Stephanie Taylor admits that she’d never even heard of the guy a week ago. But on Wednesday night, she led a boisterous protest at the University of Minnesota against a conservative pundit named Milo Yiannopoulos for spreading what she called “hate speech.”
We have pretty much gotten to the point where “hate speech” is when you disagree with a liberal.
Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute
It was the second campus protest in a week for Yiannopoulos, who was shouted down Feb. 9 at Rutgers University in New Jersey by activists smeared in fake blood.
Anti-Vietnam war protesters made liberal use of fake blood. Not quite sure what it signifies here.
So why is Yiannopoulos so controversial?
Among his favorite themes: what he calls the myth of a “rape culture” on college campuses….
Of course it is a myth. Just ask Rolling Stone. Does anyone actually believe the ridiculous “one in five” claim?
…or the frequently cited statistic that women are paid less than men for the same work. “Absurd,” he says, saying the claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.
He’s right, that claim (or “statistic”) is absurd. Men and women are paid, on the average, different amounts for different jobs, not the same job. Wage discrimination is illegal.
Far from being “hate speech,” neither of the cited propositions is even controversial among those with minimal knowledge of the facts. But at American universities, hysteria is the order of the day:
Critics have blasted him as “an anti-feminist troll” and “crank of the far right.”
In the world of higher education, pointing out facts that are inconvenient for left-wing narratives makes you a “crank of the far right.” Yiannopoulos appeared along with Christina Hoff Sommers, presumably also a crank of the far right.
His appearance at the U, titled “CALM DOWN! Restoring Common Sense to Feminism,” was briefly interrupted by five protesters shouting and sounding noisemakers. They were quickly escorted out by campus police.
The protest was organized by the U chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). His message “is pretty overtly sexist,” said Taylor, 28, a 2012 graduate of the U’s Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies program.
Of course she is!
Outside the packed auditorium, activists held protest signs saying “End rape culture” and “Rape culture is not a myth.”
Taylor insisted that the protest was not meant to shut down free speech. But “we think it’s important to have a clear message … that hate speech isn’t tolerated on this campus.”
Today, anyway, non-leftist speech was tolerated, Ms. Taylor notwithstanding. But that won’t be the case for long if the liberals get their way.
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