Earlier this month, as I was reporting a column about the unceremonious deportation to the U.K. of the immigrant-hating, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, the world got word that a true political giant, Gloria Steinem, had died.
Ten years ago, Yiannopoulos made a splash with his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” courting chaos and violence on college campuses as he attacked social justice movements, vilified transgender Americans and denounced feminism.
More recently, Yiannopoulos turned his attention to immigrants, demanding that the Trump administration deport millions and that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents be given total legal immunity. The ironies of his deportation were delicious.
But I spiked that column to honor Steinem, a relentless crusader for women’s rights.
Today, I think it’s worth revisiting Yiannopoulos, not because his deportation is any great loss for America — quite the opposite, in fact — but because he stands as an exemplar of the antipathy Steinem’s activism inspired in so many men. For those like Yiannopoulos, the idea that women should be on equal footing elicits a powerful, irrational hatred best encapsulated in the late Rush Limbaugh’s all-purpose slur, “feminazi.”
Much as we’d like to think we’ve moved on from that nonsense, it continues to animate so much of the culture in the age of President Trump: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s pointless war against women in combat. Alleged rapist and abuser Andrew Tate as a perverse role model for many young men. Vice President JD Vance blithely dismissing Democrats as “childless cat ladies” and suggesting that post-menopausal women exist to care for grandchildren.
Yiannopoulos, for his part, has spent much of his public career making life hell for women.
In 2014, he was ringleader of “Gamergate,” the severe online harassment campaign against women who pushed to make video games less sexist and more inclusive. He targeted a handful of high-profile women in the gaming space, leading to verbal abuse, doxxing, and rape and death threats.
In 2015, Yiannopoulos crashed a “SlutWalk” in Los Angeles, and tweeted a photo of himself holding the sign, “Rape culture and Harry Potter: Both Fantasy.”
In 2016, he was banned from Twitter after spearheading a horrific campaign of abuse against Black actor Leslie Jones, who had starred in the remake of “Ghostbusters.” At the time, Yiannopoulos was the tech editor of Breitbart News.
Championed by then-Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon, Yiannopoulos wrote pieces titled “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?” His birthday, he declared, would be called “World Patriarchy Day.”
In 2017, Yiannopoulos fell out with his Breitbart overlords after he claimed that sexual relationships between 13-year-old boys and adults could be “perfectly consensual.”
The episode led Simon & Schuster to cancel a $250,000 book deal, and Yiannopoulos was disinvited from that year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.
When the clamor to cancel him became too loud to ignore, Yiannopoulos said he had been molested by a priest as a child and was using gallows humor as a way of processing the abuse. In 2021, Yiannopoulos, now 41, renounced his homosexuality and claimed to be raising funds for a “reparative therapy” center for gay men in Florida, though no such center was built.
Until he was deported, Yiannapoulos was living in Los Angeles. He works for Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, managing the artist’s attorneys.
In a tearful interview with Piers Morgan in London on Sept. 1, Yiannopoulos railed against his deportation, claiming he didn’t know about the missed court hearings that led a Miami judge to order his removal.
Yiannopoulos made a pretty good case that he was the object of a selective immigration action, accusing Laura Loomer, the unmoored right-wing influencer who has Trump’s ear, of being behind it. Indeed, Loomer, who was once friendly with Yiannopoulos, has taken credit for siccing immigration authorities on him. Yiannopoulos said he has been married to an American man since 2017, although the pair has reportedly been locked in a divorce battle for nearly a year.
“You’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of a movement which has attracted a lot of white supremacists, anti-women people, antisemites, racists, and so on,” Morgan said. “And now all your chickens have come home to roost.”
Yiannopoulos said his provocations were “mean-spirited, exaggerated jokes,” and not necessarily his sincere beliefs. But when Morgan confronted him about his misogyny, Yiannopoulos doubled down.
“Only deeply physically unattractive women are drawn to a movement that is terrible for men and women,” Yiannopoulos said, “and has in fact made women more unhappy.”
He claimed that only 7% of women describe themselves as feminists: “This is not a popular movement. Feminism has lower approval ratings than some serial killers.”
(According to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, about 61% of American women say the word “feminist” describes them.)
“You sound like a flaming misogynist,” Morgan said. “It’s the kind of thing Andrew Tate would say.”
Yiannopoulos was unfazed.
“If the bigotry you get me on is woman hating, I can live with that,” he replied. “If I’m guilty of a really serious hatred toward anyone, maybe I do hate women a bit.”
You don’t say.