Breitbart Writer Asks Big Gubmint to Return His Twitter Checkmark

Here, Milo, you can have all my checkmarks.  That’s how that works, right? 

Breitbart Tech writer, professional troll, and #Gamergate supporter Milo Yiannopoulos recently had the dishonor of losing his Twitter verification early this year.  This ridiculous nontroversy spawned an even more ridiculous hashtag, #JeSuisMilo — because losing one’s little blue Twitter checkmark is totally the same as falling victim to a terrorist attack. 

When the hashtivism failed to return his coveted checkmark, and talks of boycotts went nowhere, Milo took things to the next level, upstaging a White House press briefing and asking Press Secretary Josh Earnest for assistance.  Seriously. 

“It’s becoming very clear that Twitter and Facebook in particular are censoring and punishing conservative and libertarian points of view,” he remarked. “ And the president made some encouraging comments about free speech, he said, for example, that university students shouldn’t be coddled, Perhaps suggesting that the safe space, trigger warning culture isn’t something he believes in.  Is there anything the president can do to encourage Silicon Valley to remind them of the critical importance of open free speech in our society?”  The correct answer, of course, is no.  The president can certainly voice his opinion on what he believes Twitter’s company policies ought to be, but he otherwise has no control over what it as a company does. 

And I know that Milo is the type of guy who once floated the concept of “World Patriarchy Day” because he doesn’t know how to make sandwiches, but it seems that even he has a vague understanding of this, as he pointed out — following the usual nothing answer from Mr. Earnest — that President Obama “obviously can’t enforce the First Amendment on private corporations.” 

Nonetheless, Milo asserted that there “seems to be a very clear trend” since his “verification check was taken away for making fun of the wrong group of people.”  Yet this begs the question of why Milo disrupted a White House press conference to ask this ridiculous question since he knows full well that the First Amendment doesn’t entitle him to a Twitter checkmark.  The obvious answer to this is that it’s a publicity stunt on behalf of himself and his employers at Breitbart.  Either way it’s amusing to hear a purportedly conservative “journalist” from a government-hating website asking the federal government for assistance over such a trivial matter.