Inside Milo Yiannopoulos' Dizzying Rise and Fall

With his book deal, CPAC speaking gig, and job at Breitbart now history, this hasn't been the greatest week for Milo Yiannopoulos, but it would be a mistake to think we've seen the last of him, writes Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. The alt-right provocateur will now take a page from President Trump's playbook and "re-create himself as a Republican martyr" maligned by the establishment, Taibbi writes, predicting that the older conservative crowd repulsed by Yiannopoulos will soon be "crawling back," just as they did after Trump's transgressions. "Why would the Mike Pence crowd ever rally behind a Brit with frosted hair who brags about getting blow---- from priests? It seems preposterous," he writes. "But watch it work." Click for his full column. In other coverage:

• German Lopez at Vox wonders why it took conservatives so long to disown Yiannopoulos, rounding up earlier offensive remarks such as his claim that he "went gay" to avoid "nutty broads."

• The Washington Post has a timeline of the dizzying 96 hours in which Yiannopoulos' "most considerable step yet toward leaving his alt-right adjacency and entering into mainstream conservative discourse" was swiftly reversed after comments seen as condoning pedophilia surfaced.
• Matt Lewis, conservative author of Too Dumb to Fail, tells the New York Times that the Yiannopoulos debacle is a product of a time when provocative personalities are stifling serious discussion of ideas. "You essentially have a world where there are no adults left, nobody exercising moral authority to say, 'No, this does or does not meet our standards,'" he says. "Everybody is just responding to perverse incentives to get more buzz."
• USA Today briefly recaps the career of the man who calls himself the "most fabulous supervillain on the internet."
• At the Week, Shikha Dalmia likens Yiannopoulos to the Joker. She says he "seduced" campus conservatives by getting them to think that having him speak was a victory against political correctness. "In fact, they were discrediting their own movement by allying themselves with a vicious troll—demonstrating that they hate their enemies more than they love their alleged principles," she writes.

(More Milo Yiannopoulos stories.)