No-one does identity politics quite like resentful white men—all the while bemoaning it. In a blaze of teeth-whitening Milo Yiannopoulos arrived on our shores late last year. With more swing than Tarzan and undoubtedly more leopard print, he beat his depilatoried chest pleading for riots. His provocations were so predictable that a refresher on his insults is already required. He dismissed Aboriginal art as laughably ‘crap’ and coming from ‘inferior’ people who failed to invent the wheel. (Yiannopoulis omitted to mention that the aerodynamic lift of the boomerang’s airfoil shape together with the gyroscopic precession associated with its rapid spin make it the first heavier-than-air flying machine ever invented by humans, and somewhat more useful on a continent devoid of domesticated and thus load-bearing animals than the wheel). He debased feminist columnist Clementine Ford as a ‘fat cunt’ and captioned a school photo of her with ‘Unfuckable’ (which seemed somewhat superfluous given Yiannopoulos is gay and she is pictured a minor). But I’m forgetting Goadboy has argued sexual relationships between 13-year-olds and adults can ‘happen perfectly consensually’. It was these pronouncements that lost him his book deal, among others too tiresome to repeat, that finally saw him banned from Twitter.

Milo works terribly hard at being original, which he confuses with shock, and similarly his conflation of hate speech and free speech is straight from the playbook of white male goading. He was welcomed here by a tragic chorus of dotard neocons and shockjocks—raging bullfrogs braying for his lead and pobblebonking from the legitimation of his youth. Yiannapoulos selfie-describes (he does this with a stick too) as a ‘one man wrecking crew’, a trolling ‘internet supervillian’ and ‘ready to offend’. We quake. He was excoriated so deliciously by his editor Mitchell Ivers (before Simon & Schuster dumped his book) we all had to forego dessert, sated for weeks.