The California College Republicans made a New Year's resolution to create a state-wide speaker tour featuring Milo Yiannopoulos, whose brand of provocation and controversy, they said, delivers a "great message regarding conservative values."
Announcing their goals for 2018 on its Facebook page, CCR said plans were underway to roll out the Yiannopoulos tour, calling him a "speaker in high demand among College Republicans."
Ariana Rowlands, CCR chairwoman and a senior at the University of California-Irvine, said in a statement, "Milo is a great speaker to have on college campuses because not only is he entertaining and popular, his speeches always have a great message regarding conservative values that he can deliver in a fun, easy way to understand."
The group touted Yiannopoulos's "highly successful" speech at California State Univeristy-Fullerton in October, where his presence wrought mayhem, class cancellations, and the arrests of at least eight protesters.
CCR said it was after that appearance that they began organizing this tour.
Elliot Kaufman—a senior at Stanford University who takes credit for having once prevented Yiannopoulous from being brought to Stanford by the right-leaning student paper where he then served as an editor—explained that for Republican students, inviting Yiannopoulous "is a cheat code."
"Conservative campus groups have three eternal problems. They are always broke; their leaders are always about to graduate, with no long term planning in place; and no one on campus ever cares about what they have to say," said Kaufman. "Milo charges no speaking fees, and his people handle the organizing. So, without doing much legwork or difficulty, the group immediately become the talk of the campus, of the city."
Kaufman published a piece at National Review Online this summer lambasting College Republicans for aiding in the rise of the alt-right by celebrating and promoting Yiannopoulous. Yiannopoulous responded to Kaufman Facebook writing, "National Review has gone full-on steaming social-justice retard."
Speaking with the Washington Free Beacon, Kaufman listed Yiannopolous's sins: he has defended pedophilia and has been intimately linked to neo-Nazis; he has said he does not generally employ gays because "I don't trust them," and maintains that Jews control the media.
Kaufman urged students to resist the publicity that follows the former Breitbart editor, which comes at the "cost of alienating so many and attracting the wrong kinds of people."
Kaufman said he worried about the continued radicalization of the College Republicans, and that he would like to see the national organization disband the California group.
"If they [CCR] are successful in making conservatism like this, it's terrible for the movement." he said. "Whatever attention they get for Milo, the price will be their souls."
"Calling it an abandonment of conservative values is underselling it. It is an abandonment of any values you would want to be associated with it," he added.
Kaufman's advice to students looking to avoid the Milo brand of conservatism was to "watch less Youtube videos, read more books and magazines; the right on Youtube is very weird place."
Joel Miskiel, CCR communications director, did not respond to a request for comment.
Yiannopoulous is currently suing Simon & Schuster for cancelling his book deal for Dangerous, which he then self-published. He announced earlier this week that he will be representing himself in the lawsuit, after his attorney withdrew due to "irreconcilable differences."
The editor's notes of the Dangerous manuscript—filed as evidence at the New York county clerk's office, and dug up and posted on Twitter—found popularity on the internet for its stern commentary, like, "Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke," "This section feels phenomenally petty," and "This is not the time or place for another black-dick joke."