Milo Yiannopoulos

As a young journalist in the mid-2000s, there was the occasional circumstance where I was asked to ‘prove it’: upon showing up to a news event I was covering, whoever ran check-in insisted that I show some press credentials. You know, those badges you see on episodes of Law & Order to denote that someone’s a reporter. (More often than not, the guest star probably holds it up and indignantly yells ‘Press!’ in order to enter a crime scene.) Working for a digital-first outlet – CNET Networks, later acquired by CBS – I never had anything like it except maybe business cards. To me, it seemed like an antiquated request; to the people checking my legitimacy, it was an obvious question.

Hours after being knocked off Facebook and Instagram last week, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, Patient Zero for Twitter-banning, joined the messaging app Telegram and wasted no time firing off the n-word. To his growing list of followers there, he wrote, ‘Like John Lennon, I take “n*gger” to mean any oppressed person. Today’s n*ggers are me, Laura [Loomer], and Alex Jones,’ adding that his black husband gave him permission to write that. That, of course, would have never been allowed on Facebook or Twitter. But Telegram is the new platform of the damned (Tommy Robinson has over 35,000 followers there).

Poor old Louis Farrakhan. There he was, happily vomiting hatred as one of the talented tenth of octogenarians who can navigate a Facebook page, doing no harm other than to Jews, white people, race relations, and the minds of the morons who follow him — and then he’s expelled from the kingdom of Zuckerberg along with Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s the stuff of Farrakhan’s nightmares: purged by the minions of a white Jew, and cast into the media wilderness with a gay Trumpist. It couldn’t have happened to a nastier person. Actually, it could, but it won’t. There are even nastier people that Farrakhan on Twitterbook and Instaface, but they do their vomiting in languages other than English.