Has Milo Yiannopouloss Berkeley Troll Circus Become a Fyre Festival for the Right?

[RhodeIslandOne]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/milo-yiannopouloss-berkeley-fyre-festival-for-the-right

The right-wing provocateur promised the “Woodstock” of the far right. But as “Free Speech Week” looms in Berkeley, California, many in his world are wondering whether it will be more like the next Fyre Festival.

When Milo Yiannopoulos last visited U.C. Berkeley, in February, he was met with a spectacular protest straight out of a conservative fever dream. The students of the university, famous for its left-wing activists, set up blockades in front of the hall where the controversial far-right figure was supposed to speak. Black-masked antifa protesters, including many non-Berkeley students from Oakland, swept through the plaza with rocks and Molotov cocktails, and left a trail of destruction in their wake: smashed windows, toppled police towers, and injured students. While in the end Yiannopoulos wasn’t permitted to speak, the event was nevertheless deemed a decisive media victory. Milo had provoked, and Berkeley had responded, as if precisely following a script. The university was shown to be a definitively illiberal institution. Even Donald Trump got in on the leftist bashing, tweeting a subtle threat: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” In the strange calculus of the current free speech war, Yiannopoulos had won by not being allowed to open his mouth.

But Yiannopoulos was hardly able to capitalize on this form of media-trolling glory. The following months, after all, were rather tumultuous. He was forced to resign from Breitbart after it was revealed that he uttered comments that seemed to condone pedophilia. In the wake of the scandal, Simon & Schuster dropped his book deal. (He would later self-publish his work, Dangerous.) He launched a multimedia venue called Milo Inc., with a purported investment of at least $10 million, and promised stunts that failed to meet the notoriety he promised.