The right needs to get over its pointless obsession with trolling liberals

If the most important thing to you is how many people you've ticked off, you probably haven't accomplished much at all

Making someone mad is the easy part
(Image credit: Brain light / Alamy Stock Photo)

How far would you go to make the people you don't like mad? Over the weekend, we found out how the Conservative Political Action Conference, the premier gathering of conservative activists, answers that question. The conference invited semi-famous internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos to be a keynote speaker at this year's confab, then disinvited him after videos emerged of him condoning sex between 13-year-olds and adults. The misogyny and racism Yiannopoulos traffics in were apparently not a problem, but pedophilia was just a bit too far.

Yiannopoulos is, in the end, not a particularly interesting figure on his own terms (see here if you want to know what he's all about). He's a troll, a provocateur, someone whose schtick is to say outrageous things and then goad liberals into objecting to him or even trying to keep him from speaking on college campuses, and they often eagerly oblige. Indeed, before cancelling Yiannopoulos' appearance, the head of the American Conservative Union, which mounts CPAC, defended the invite — to a conference that will feature speeches by President Trump, Vice President Pence, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, and a lengthy list of political and media luminaries from the right — on the grounds that it was good to hear Yiannopoulos' "important perspective" on fighting political correctness on campus.

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.