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Milo Yiannapoulos, hero of the 'effyoucracy' is gone from Breitbart, but we're stuck with his bad ideas: Joel Mathis

Milo Yiannapoulos Art.jpg

Milo Yiannopoulos speaks during a news conference Tuesday in which he announced his resignation as a senior editor with Breitbart News. Mary Altaffer/AP

By Joel Mathis

Say what you want about recently departed Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannapoulos, but at least he has all the right enemies.

Joel Mathis (PennLive file)

That, at least, was the rationale for Yiannapoulos's fame among conservatives until this last weekend.

Yes, he was known for anti-semitic and racist activities that got him banned from Twitter, and which also provoked a near-riot at a California campus where he was scheduled to speak, but that was also the appeal.

Yiannapoulos made pointy-headed liberals furious with his "anti-politically correct" commentary, and in the Trump Era, there are few virtues on the right more valued than the ability to enrage a lefty or two.

Yiannapoulos excels at the task.

It was why, this week, he was invited to speak at CPAC -- an annual gathering of conservative activists -- and why he was also invited as a guest to be on Bill Maher's show.

He's so infuriating, in fact, that a fellow guest repeatedly directed a vulgarism at him.

We can't repeat that vulgarism on a family news website. But here's a hint: It involved two letters. Eff. You.

Yiannapoulos was disinvited from CPAC and he was forced to resign his position at Breitbart News for remarks appearing to condone pedophilia.

But here's why his rise and fall matters: It's proof, folks, that we're living in an effyoucracy.

An effyoucracy -- I just made up the term -- is a society where the purpose of politics is simply to make the other guy mad.

Enlightened governance? Working out our problems? Rationally debating the issues of the day? They all take second place to the ability to generate pure bile, the desire to take the other guy down a peg or two.

In an effyoucracy, actual ideas disappear from the debate, replaced by provocation.

Here's a Reddit thread, dedicated to the Milo phenomenon, that gets to the heart of it: "Does anybody else really like what Milo stands for, but hate what he says?" a poster asks.

"He's a guy who's made a lot of friends by having the right enemies," another commenter responds. Exactly.

That phrase -- "the right enemies" -- has become a handy stand-in on the right for any form of critical evaluation, and its power isn't limited merely to politics, but extends even to sports and movies. This isn't just dumb; it's kind of tedious, too.

The roots of the effyoucracy can be found, naturally, in conservative talk radio, where hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage have traded in rage for decades, accompanied by the rise of righty websites like -- where, not coincidentally, Yiannapoulos was, until recently, employed as a "tech editor."

The effyoucracy has even given Americans a president. Donald Trump ran for the White House with only the barest of a coherent platform, which is why his smarter supporters told journalists to take him "seriously, but not literally." Trump appealed because he was pugnacious, because he railed against "political correctness," because lot of people liked that he made "the right people" mad.

These days, that's all the platform you need to win the presidency.

Let's not paint all conservatives as willing acolytes of the effyoucracy. When Yiannapoulos's appearance at CPAC was announced this week, conservative commentators like Jonah Goldberg and David French were vocal in their opposition.

Yiannapoulos was eventually disinvited -- not because of his racist or anti-semitic comments, but because videos surfaced that seemed to show him endorsing illegal sex with teens too young to give legal consent.

Which means that some standards still remain, thank goodness.

But someone will take Yiannapoulos's place. We're knee-deep in the effyoucracy now, with no clear way out.

The result? We have a politics and a presidency that are like the tale told by Shakespeare's idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Joel Mathis, a former associate editor of Philadelphia Magazine, is a frequent PennLive Opinion contributor. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.