politics

How a teenage girl took down the world’s most famous troll from her bedroom.

Many have tried and failed to unseat alt-right leader Milo Yiannopoulos from his ultra-conservative throne, but it took a 16-year-old girl to do it.

For those not familiar with Yiannopoulos, he is a renowned troll with a penchant for hate-speech, whose targets include everyone from feminists to Muslims to trans people.

Despite being openly gay, he’s sort of the millennial poster boy for bigotry.

Recently, the 32-year-old was invited to speak at the high-profile Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which is currently underway in the US, but a Canadian high school student had other ideas.

The teenage girl, who defines herself as “very socially liberal” but fiscally conservative, according to Vox, managed to dig up old footage of Yiannopoulous in which he appeared to champion the sexual abuse of young boys.

Milo Yiannopoulos. Source: Facebook

“I see Milo as this embodiment of the awfulness you see over the past few years with the general tilt of millennial conservatism,” the girl, who has chosen to be known only as "Julia" for safety reasons, explained to Vox.

“It’s diverged from this traditional conservatism so much. You’ve seen it essentially become full of awfulness and all about attacking the left and not about actual principles."

As a result of the video surfacing, Yiannopoulos lost not only his speaking slot at the conference but a profitable book deal — worth $US250,000.

On Tuesday, he also resigned from his position at right-wing website Breitbart.

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So, how exactly did a high schooler manage to bring down a seemingly untouchable troll? She turned his own side against him.

Julia is an avid follower of American politics and remembered hearing Yiannopoulos defending "13-year-olds" having sex with “older men" as a “sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship” in an obscure podcast from July, 2016.

“Those older men help those young boys to discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love,” he argued.

When she managed to track the video down online, rather than sharing it with her own small social media network, she reached out to a little-known conservative blog, Reagan Battalion, who then posted it on their Twitter account.

“I thought it would only get, like, 200 retweets,” Julia told Vox.

“I had no idea that it would blow up to the extent that it did.”

Thousands of shares later, the story has made international news, not least because it proves even the provocative right has its limits of acceptability.

The MMOL team talk about another kick arse woman doing a kick arse thing of total kick arsery, single mum Whitney Kittrell:

Reneging Yiannopoulos' invite to CPAC, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, Matt Schlapp said:

“We continue to believe that CPAC is a constructive forum for controversies and disagreements among conservatives, however, there is no disagreement among our attendees on the evils of sexual abuse of children."

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Other guests of the conference included President Donald Trump, Vice-President Mike Pence and Senator Ted Cruz.

For his part, Yiannopoulos has expressed regret over his "poor choice of words" and promised to donate 10 per cent of royalties from his book 'Dangerous' – which he claims will now be published elsewhere – to child sex abuse charities.

STATEMENT DELIVERED AT PRESS CONFERENCE 2/21/07I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim.Between the ages of 13 and...

Posted by Milo Yiannopoulos on Tuesday, 21 February 2017

The controversial journalist has also vowed to remain in the US, leading to rumours the British national may have found a new gig already.

Still, the events of the last few days are certainly a lesson for the reactionary right, not to mention anyone who has ever underestimated a teenage girl.

“You shouldn’t have to feel intimidated to stand up for what you believe in,” Julia said.

“Hopefully they’ll realise that you can’t keep being this reactionary movement — if you can even call it that. You can’t just keep looking for enemies to attack and pointing the finger. Eventually, you have to stand up for something.”