Remember Milo Yiannopoulos? Deplatformed ‘ex-gay’ reduced to flogging Catholic iconography on YouTube

Cast your mind back to 2016 and you might recall the name Milo Yiannopoulos – although we could forgive you for completely blocking it out altogether.

The British commentator and journalist became synonymous with the alt-right movement in the United States which helped elect Donald Trump to the White House.

His unapologetic far-right views should have seen him maligned by the political and cultural landscape but his fame and stock kept rising, even after he was banned from Twitter for instigating an onslaught of abuse against actor Leslie Jones.

However, Yiannopoulos’s influence plummeted when video clips of him advocating paedophilia emerged online in 2017. Yiannopoulos, who was openly gay, claimed that the clips had been badly edited and that he had been a victim of child abuse.

This backlash to this controversy resulted in the 37-year-old being forced out of his position at the Conservative news outlet Breitbart, losing the opportunity to talk at CPAC and the publisher Simon & Schuster cancelling his planned autobiography. Yiannopoulos was also banned from Facebook in 2019.

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The de-platforming of Yiannopoulos has seen the controversial figure virtually fall of the face of the planet, at least in a digital sense. In recent months he has cropped up again in headlines when he told the right-wing Christian website LiteSite that he was now an “ex-gay” and that he had demoted his husband to being his “housemate.”

Yiannopoulos’ newfound faith in the Lord appears to have manifested itself into him becoming a sales rep for a US-based YouTube channel and website called Church Militant which is kind of like QVC but for religious trinkets.

The first episode, which was shared earlier this month but has since been flagged by the Twitter account Right Wing Watch, sees Yiannopoulos, alongside a woman named Deborah Vaughn, attempt to sell viewers a statue of the Virgin Mary for $87.50

Yiannopoulos’ descent into the more obscure realms of YouTube and shilling pieces of Catholic merchandise has inevitably resulted in much mockery but has also led to many people pointing out that limiting controversial figures’ outreach on the internet will reduce them to this kind of level.

It should be mentioned that Church Militant isn’t any old Christian website. It has been flagged by outlets like NBC News as part of the Catholic alt-right movement, so it would appear that he is right at home.