Milo Shunned - By His Own Side

After Twitter finally lost patience with whinging man-baby Milo Yiannopoulos and kicked him off the system for good, to the relief of many who wished the deed had been done rather earlier, one might have thought that his pals out there on the libertarian right would rally round and signal their support. After all, his cause was their cause, right? But the response from some of his former pals was not what might have been expected.

The real Milo Yiannopoulos

For starters, there was the reaction of the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, of whom Yiannopoulos had been such a pal for so long. But that was then and this is now: his chief Fawkes blog ally, Master Harry Cole, has moved on and is now the Sun’s alleged “Westminster Correspondent”. Staines and his current rabble are clearly less keen on Yiannopoulos, and it shows.

Or rather, it doesn’t show at all: the Fawkes blog has said next to nothing about Yiannopoulos’ Twitter banning today. It is as if he did not exist. But there is a good reason for this: the Fawkes crowd have clearly tired of all the attention-seeking, as a recent post from them confirmed. After Yiannopoulos and (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch had whined about alleged left-wing social media bias, Staines and his pals called them out, rather than sympathising. They should stop complaining and compete.

And then it got worse: Breitbart, for whom Yiannopoulos allegedly works (that’s as in “for some value of work”), may have recorded the Twitter banning on its main USA site, but the Breitbart London Twitter feed, reflecting the preferences of James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole and the deeply unpleasant Raheem “call me Ray” Kassam, has also said nothing about the person who might be expected to be their pal.

What about his pal Cole? Sadly, now that Master Cole has taken the Murdoch shilling and been assimilated into the Baby Shard bunker, he has no time for the likes of Yiannopoulos. Nor does another alleged libertarian, the loathsome Toby Young. But there is some good news for him: Ms Mensch was literally flying to his aid: “I hope to see my boy @nero today in Cleveland #FreeMilo got to go to airport later all” she Tweeted earlier.

That was a nice touch, although perhaps confusing to Yiannopoulos: after all, that was the same Ms Mensch who had not long ago referred to him as a “subhuman pig”. Even more confusing was her suggestion that calling someone else “subhuman” should be sufficient to have them banned from Twitter, an action that many observers now believe has great merit - the kind of observers who dislike her.

Milo Yiannopoulos must hope there is plenty of mileage left in his faux-shock persona and enough people in the USA to continue milking for attention, because back here in the UK, many of his former pals now have better things to do that take any notice of his antics. If it was all about Conservative commentators being silenced by the left, those who are now ignoring him would be up in arms. They’re not. Because it’s not about that.

It’s about a whining man-baby being denied the oxygen of publicity. End of story.