milo yiannopoulos was recently invited to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He was later uninvited after some comments surfaced that seemed to depict him condoning pedophilia. Whether or not he did that and whether he's a Nazi or anything else is not the topic of this article. Rather it's an explanation of where he came from for the many older conservatives wondering who this guy is and some commentary on Milo's rise.
Milo's beginnings: Gamergate
Milo first rose to prominence in America in 2014 as an early supporter of the Gamergate movement.
To understand him and why he's so popular among young men, you must understand Gamergate. How the whole thing started depends on who you ask. Some say it started because a game developer dumped her boyfriend and the boyfriend wanted revenge. Others say it started in reaction to mediocre games getting high scores from review websites like Kotaku in exchange for them buying ads and to be fair, there were people in the movement who were legitimately concerned about that. There are elements of truth to both accounts. However, it got hi-jacked.
It's hard to say why or when but the movement's concerns shifted but Milo played a role in it. What was once a concern about a lack of journalistic ethics in game publications morphed into a movement attacking game developers, industry figures, actresses and cultural commentators for daring to suggest that gaming needs more female and minority characters that weren't stereotypes and sex objects.
This has been a problem that has plagued the industry as well as pop culture in general. Basically the only time you see a black character is if they're some gangster anti-hero or a target for another anti-hero to shoot. Female characters are at best, princesses to save. At worst, they are sex objects. Gamergate got incensed by this commentary and the prospect that game characters would be more diverse and female characters might start wearing something resembling clothing.
At first, the rage started with forum posts but it escalated to Gamergate participants hunting down addresses of people who disagreed with them and sending them death threats.
For his role in egging on this nonsense, Milo was offered a job at Breitbart. Let's marvel for a moment at the fact that a person who got ticked off at the prospect of more minority video game characters has the audacity to call anybody else a "snowflake."
The irony of Milo's rise
At the end of the day, Milo's rise to fame was not because he was a Donald Trump supporter.
He got his start helping hyper-sensitive white boys fight against the creation of positive minority characters in media and the criticism of the lack thereof. A criticism that has long been made by conservatives, especially black conservatives since at least the 90's.
Go through archives of articles by people like Thomas Sowell and other black conservative commentators and you'll find pieces attacking the rap, television and game industry for glamorizing gang violence and calling for more positive role models for kids of all races. But Sowell is retiring. Assuming Milo manages to shake off recent scandals, he'll likely continue to be a standard bearer for conservatism. We'll have gone from "create more positive minority characters" to "positive minority characters are a plot by the PC-police!"
That's where we are now folks.
