Milo Yiannopoulos, the revolting bête noire of the Alt-Right, a person who is such a reactionary American that he's British, seems to have made a critical mistake. Surely, conventional wisdom holds, even Republicans will balk at being asked to equate liberty with child molestation? 
 
 Related See Bill Maher, Milo Yiannopoulos Talk Free Speech, Trolling Self-proclaimed internet troll butts heads with Larry Wilmore over transgender rights in "Overtime" segment 
 
 As onetime conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes put it, "Anti-Semitism, ok. Racism, ok. Alt-right, ok. Advocacy of pedophilia? Is THAT the bridge too far?" 
 
 Along with longtime Breitbart cohort Steve Bannon, the foppish Yiannopoulos – the co-author of the Alt-Right's unofficial manifesto – has until now been extremely successful in selling the various intellectual justifications for Trumpism. 
 
 In particular, he's been one of the main voices pushing the idea that Donald Trump's most lurid and offensive behaviors are "conservative," because they represent a front in the war against speech limits and political correctness. 
 
 "He'd rather grab a pussy than be one," was Milo's pithy take on then candidate Trump's Access Hollywood scandal. 
 
 Not all traditional conservatives bought these clunky rhetorical gymnastics, which were designed to give Fox viewers permission to vote a Bible-averse, model-humping New Yorker into the White House. But enough did to win Trump the presidency. 
 
 Still, there has been a lingering unwillingness among the National Review/Weekly Standard crew of Reagan Republicans to embrace Yiannopoulos and all he represents. That unwillingness spilled into open conflict when the loathsome campus agitator was named a keynote speaker at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference. 
 
 A blog called the Reagan Battalion re-circulated excerpts of a year-old interview of Milo by the Drunken Peasants podcast, in which he clearly endorses sex between men and underage boys. 
 
 Yiannopoulos talked about how "we get hung up on this kind of child abuse stuff," dismissing what he calls the "oppressive idea of consent." 
 
 "In the homosexual world particularly," said Yiannopoulos, who is gay, "some of those relationships between younger boys and older men [are] sort of coming-of-age relationships ... in which those older men have helped those young boys to discover who they are." 
 
 When one of the podcast co-hosts suggested that it sounded like he was talking about Catholic priest molestation, Yiannopoulous quickly co-signed, claiming personal experience in that area. 
 
 "You know what?" he shouted. "I'm grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him." 
 
 When challenged that he seemed to be endorsing pedophilia, Yiannopoulos then retreated to a semantic argument. 
 
 "You're misunderstanding what pedophilia means," he said. "Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old, who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty." 
 
 After a scandal blew up over these words, Yiannopoulos used a technique that Donald Trump has used often in the past two years: He simply claimed he didn't say what he said. 
 
 Blaming "sloppy editing" for the controversy, Yiannopoulos insisted on his Facebook page, "I was talking about my own relationship when I was 17 with a man who was 29." He added, "The age of consent in the UK is 16. That was a mistake." 
 
 This was despite the fact that Yiannopoulos explicitly talked about "sexually mature" 13-year-olds in the context of who can and cannot be a consenting adult. He has made similar remarks before – he revels in them, in fact. When he appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast last summer, for instance, he couldn't help himself when Rogan brought up the "semen warrior" culture in Papua New Guinea. 
 
 "These men who take these young boys, " said Rogan, "and inseminate them, and put cum in their mouths and their asses to make them grow..." 
 
 "Sounds like homosexuality," Yiannoploulos quipped. "Sounds great." 
 
 The furor currently raging over Yiannopoulos's comments is exactly the sort of thing this professional button-pusher relishes. Like Trump, his shtick is to say crazy things to get attention, and then manipulate ears and eyeballs to his advantage mid-furor. 
 
 A favored tactic is to direct his audiences toward some overemotional sap who has made the mistake of calling for him to be banned, at which point he triumphantly declares himself a champion of liberty, and his enemies censors and authoritarians. 
 
 
 
 Timothy Fadek/Redux 
 
 In his Alt-Right manifesto, Milo self-consciously celebrates the trolling phenomenon as something inspired, meaningful and "undeniably hysterical." And like all trolls, Yiannopoulos thinks his provocations are brilliant, when actually he's just a goof with an accent and a C-minus mind who says witlessly obnoxious things and through sheer accident of historical circumstance gets rewarded for it. 
 
 He seems genuinely to believe that he's one of the first people ever to notice that you can make a good living through lying and the unscrupulous use of hate speech. With the confidence of a person who hasn't yet discovered the depth of his own unoriginality, he leans into controversies instead of recoiling from them, sure he can always spin things in a pinch. 
 
 One of his main affectations is a flaunting of duplicity as a revolutionary virtue. For instance, it was predictable that this longtime critic of "victimhood culture" would cling to his own victimhood in a crisis. 
 
 "I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim," he wrote, cloaking himself in multiple layers of the very identity politics he claims to despise. He even used AIDS patients as a human shield, which was a bit excessive even for him, but not out of character: 
 
 "If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an Internet livestream with a crime I was the victim of that's my prerogative. It's no different to gallows humor from Aids [sic] sufferers." 
 
 The "oppressive idea of consent" rant seems to have created problems for Yiannopoulos. Staffers at Breitbart, where he is a senior editor, are threatening to walk out unless he's fired. Moreover, he's been disinvited from CPAC, a development he will no doubt portray as an overreaction by a defeated and humorless Republican establishment. 
 
 Milo's obvious play will be to use all of this coverage as free PR, seeking to come out the other side with his rebel credentials burnished. He'll recreate himself as a Republican martyr, unfairly maligned by a corrupt priesthood that fears the true movement. 
 
 On the outside, this looks like a mistake. The Bannonite Alt-Right crew Milo represents imagines itself a brilliant group of intellectual danger-seekers, but trying to sell boy-buggering to the American Conservative Union sure seems more stupid than daring (and it's plenty daring). 
 
 After all, the success of the Trump movement depends upon a nervous coalition of aging religious conservatives and young, race-baiting, Internet-addicted morons – the people GOP consultant Rick Wilson once called "childless single men who masturbate to anime." 
 
 The link between these two groups has always been tenuous at best. Really, it's an absurd semantic misunderstanding, a classic Americanism, confusing the words "liberty" and "libertine." 
 
 There's a big difference between believing in limited government, and completely rejecting all behavioral and sexual morality. But people like Yiannopoulos and Trump have been successful at blurring these lines, because we're not a very bright people. Also, we're inexperienced when it comes to this kind of high-level political con artistry. 
 
 A dynamic that all good swindlers understand is that once you've gotten a person to make one embarrassing decision, it's easier to get him to make the next one. A person who loses 10 grand trying to buy the Brooklyn Bridge is a good bet to spend 20 more chasing the loss. Con artists call this "reloading." 
 
 The Trump phenomenon has been like this. Megachurch moms and dads across the country grit their teeth when the "grab them by the pussy" tape came out, quietly convincing themselves that "locker-room talk" was less horrifying than a Hillary Clinton presidency. 
 
 When they cast their votes weeks later, it was like a secret transgression that bound them to the new leader. This counter-intuitive brand of politics is very effective. It's why no one should be too quick to put this week's seeming fiasco with CPAC in the Republicans' loss column. 
 
 One would think the last thing you'd want to do if your intent was to hold a fragile Republican coalition together is pitch Milo Yiannopoulos as a defender of family values. Why would the Mike Pence crowd ever rally behind a Brit with frosted hair who brags about getting blowjobs from priests? It seems preposterous. 
 
 But watch it work. A week from now, the same conservatives who are beating their breasts about Yiannopoulos now will go crawling back into the Trump camp to fight the hated liberals on a dozen other issues. They will look weak and indecisive, and privately will be demoralized, while the Trump/Bannon/Milo crew will look like poker players who won a bluff. It's always about the next news cycle with these people. 
 
 Trolling doesn't take brains. But it works, and it will keep working, until we learn to see through the provocations in real time. 
 
 Until he joined Trump's team, Steve Bannon ran a news site that stoked hatred of everyone from women on birth control to President Obama. Watch here. 
 
 ||||| Milo Yiannopoulos had everything he needed to be a smash success in today’s conservative world: a big personality, an intuitive sense for baiting the left and no inhibitions about causing offense. 
 
 It hardly mattered that he did not consider himself much of a conservative. 
 
 But Mr. Yiannopoulos’s downfall this week — a dizzying 24 hours in which he lost his speaking slot at the pre-eminent conservative conference, had a book deal canceled and, on Tuesday, resigned under pressure from his job as a senior editor at Breitbart News — was a sign that in today’s political culture, when each day seems to bring a fresh lowering of the bar for decency and civility, some limits still remain. 
 
 His glib remarks about pedophilia by Roman Catholic priests and his endorsement of sexual relations with boys as young as 13 drew widespread condemnation from many of the conservatives who had long stood by him, even as he offended so many others with his insulting remarks about Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims and Jews. 
 
 Mr. Yiannopoulos, appearing in Lower Manhattan wearing a sober suit and red tie on Tuesday afternoon, uttered the words that he had refused to say so many times before: I’m sorry. “I don’t think I’ve been as sorry about anything in my whole life.” ||||| ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 Milo Yiannopoulos has finally gone too far. 
 
 The lightning rod Breitbart News editor was dumped by the Conservative Political Action Conference and Simon & Schuster on Monday, following the surfacing of videos in which Yiannapoulos seemed to condone pedophilia. And it's true, this was awful behavior from Yiannopoulos. But it's hardly the first — and probably not even the 10,000th — awful thing he's said or done. 
 
 The University of California, Berkeley, is still smoldering from the violent rampage triggered by the appearance of the hate-mongering Breitbart News editor. And at least until this latest controversy, college Republicans, who organized the Berkeley event, were vowing to invite him back (along with right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones) to deliver his aborted address. 
 
 That it took these pedophilia comments for conservatives to finally turn on Yiannopoulos speaks volumes about how low their movement has fallen. Yiannopoulos was a hate-peddling provocateur long before this. By inviting him to speak at universities around the country, many college Republicans apparently thought they were taking a brave stance against the forces of political correctness, and scoring one for free speech. In fact, they were discrediting their own movement by allying themselves with a vicious troll — demonstrating that they hate their enemies more than they love their alleged principles. 
 
 Republican students have a right to invite whomever they want to say whatever they want (short of a targeted call for violence) unmolested and without censorship. Berkeley is a public university and is required not just by the First Amendment but its own mission to be a broad purveyor of ideas to create a "safe space" for Yiannopoulos. And CPAC is a private gathering that can put whomever it wants on its roster — and also remove those same people. 
 
 But if Republicans have a right to invite Yiannaopoulos wherever they want, others have the right to judge them for the company they keep. And Yiannopoulos is very, very bad company. 
 
 For starters, he writes for Breitbart, a go-to site for the alt-right movement, a loose conglomeration of long-standing nativist outfits such as VDare and FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), and white supremacists. They all hate the left's political correctness and multiculturalism not because it offends America's commitment to individual rights and universalistic notions of justice, but because it comes in the way of their ethno-nationalistic project — which the site aids by peddling a constant stream of the vilest xenophobia (as I wrote here). 
 
 But Yiannopoulos is a devilishly cunning man who is not easily categorized. He has devised an elaborate straddle, serving the alt-right while hiding behind his complex identity as a gay, Catholic, partly Jewish immigrant to make fun of the left's growing regime of intolerance. 
 
 To be sure, this regime needs attacking. It has become impossible to challenge leftist orthodoxy on race, gender, sexuality, and other issues without being dubbed a racist, sexist, and bigot. The left has made discussion of too many issues taboo and vastly narrowed the terms of discussion on those that are allowed. But if "nothing goes" in the leftist moral universe, "anything goes" in Milo's and his fellow alt-right trolls'. And that, too, is a big problem. 
 
 Yiannopoulos wants to replace the left's protective authoritarianism with the alt-right's nihilistic anarchism. If the left wants to empower the state to mollycoddle minorities, Yiannopoulos and his social media warriors want free rein to viciously bait and bully minorities — and mock them if they refuse to grin and bear it. It is a profoundly degraded and dehumanized spectacle. It's political sado-masochism. 
 
 Now, in Yiannopoulos' appearances on campuses and elsewhere, there is often nothing particularly objectionable about him. To the contrary, he is funny, charming, knowledgeable, edgy, entertaining, and sometimes even insightful. Even his profanity-laden attacks aren't out of line compared to what you hear from contemporary stand-up comics. 
 
 If that was all there was to Milo, you could simply shake your head at his over-the-top taunts, laugh a little, and move on. But it isn't. 
 
 Yiannopoulos agrees with the alt-right that certain pop cultural products remain firmly the purview of white men and yield not another inch to diversity or feminizing. The first big battle on this front was the GamerGate blowup two years ago, when video-game-playing (mostly white) men unleashed a torrent of invective and abuse against female game developers who they felt were hell-bent on feminizing their products. Yiannopoulos tweeted and wrote constantly in support of the gamers, joining them in their attacks and depicting them as the real victims — a political jujitsu that he has now perfected to an art. 
 
 Yiannopoulos was later banned from Twitter over his attacks last summer on Leslie Jones, a black woman starring in the new Ghostbusters. Yiannopoulos instigated and mobilized his massive alt-right Twitter brigade — already worked up about the movie's all-female cast — against Jones. They called her an "ape" and other terrible things. Then they created a fake Twitter account in her name and sent a series of tweets with anti-Semitic, homophobic slurs. When a distraught and bewildered Jones protested, Yiannopoulos simply berated her for playing the victim. 
 
 Yiannopoulos and his fellow alt-righters don't just abuse leftists and their symbols. They also go after fellow right-wingers who disagree with them, especially on Trump. Milo's former Breitbart colleague, Ben Shapiro, who quit when the site became, as he put it, "Trump's Pravda," recounts that when his child was born, Yiannopoulos tweeted a picture of a black baby to taunt him for being a "cuckservative." (This is alt-right slang for a cuckolded conservative who enjoys watching his wife have sex with a black man, a metaphor for having been seduced by the left's multiethnic vision.) Now, Shapiro is no slouch himself when it comes to fighting the PC culture. He has written books like Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth. But because he is anti-Trump and Jewish, alt-righters flood him with anti-Semitic tweets replete with references to gas chambers. 
 
 Yiannopoulos dismisses all of this with a flick of his thick artificial-blonde shock, glibly insisting that speech is not violence and most of his followers don't actually believe what they say. They are simply doing it for kicks and to shatter taboos. That's debatable. But what's not is that speech affects culture and culture affects politics. Otherwise, what would be the point of zealously defending free speech? Indeed, as Andrew Breitbart, the late founder of Breitbart, used to say, "politics is downstream from culture." And a culture where threatening minorities and dissenters with imagery from the Holocaust is tolerated will, at minimum, expand the outside limits of the inhumanity that is politically possible. 
 
 So why are conservatives cozying up to such hideousness? The best explanation they offer is that inviting someone so beyond the pale will shatter the tight boundaries drawn by political correctness and open the space for a wider airing of ideas. But the problem is that by using a stink bomb like Yiannopoulos they'll make their own ideas malodorous. Who will take conservative praise of civility, tradition, family values, manners, honor, moderation, and dignity seriously if a 31-year-old, out-of-control adolescent is their champion? 
 
 Milo Yiannopoulos is like the Joker in Batman. He has turned chaos and nihilism into a business model for notoriety and wealth. Conservatives won't defeat their liberal enemies by making a deal with this devil. Rather, they will validate the liberal critique of the right as a front for bigotry and prejudice, discrediting everything they claim to defend and declaring their own moral bankruptcy. ||||| Milo Yiannopoulos finally went too far for conservatives. On Monday, he lost his book deal, and his speech at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was canceled. And on Tuesday, he resigned from the ultra-conservative website Breitbart. 
 
 But it wasn’t his racism, sexism, transphobia, or other kinds of bigotry that led to Yiannopoulos’s fall. Nope. After all that, it’s comments apparently supporting child molestation that did Yiannopoulos in. 
 
 Here’s the backstory: Over the weekend, it was revealed that Yiannopoulos was invited to give a speech at CPAC, the biggest mainstream conservative conference in America. That sparked a lot of outrage — particularly among the left, which pointed out that Yiannopoulos has a long history of making all sorts of bigoted comments. 
 
 But liberal outrage wasn’t what got CPAC to pull the plug or Yiannopoulos to resign from Breitbart. Instead, the final straw was a video resurfaced by the conservative website Reagan Battalion — in which Yiannopoulos defended the idea of “13 year olds” having sex with “older men,” referencing his own story that he benefited from a priest molesting him when he was a teenager. 
 
 Here is the uncut 5 minute video of Milo Yiannopoulos advocating for Pederasty involving "13 Year old" and "older men." HIS WORDS.@Mschlapp pic.twitter.com/mAgmfpuyvu — The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) February 20, 2017 
 
 “In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationships — the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable sort of rock,” Yiannopoulos said. 
 
 That, apparently, was the tipping point for CPAC. In a statement, CPAC organizers said they originally invited Yiannopoulos, whose speaking event at a college campus had to be canceled because it literally caused riots, to stand up for free speech — but that Yiannopoulos’s comments on child molestation went too far. 
 
 “Due to the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia, the American Conservative Union has decided to rescind the invitation of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference,” American Conservative Union Chair Matt Schlapp said in a statement. 
 
 Yiannopoulos has since apologized. In a Facebook post, he clarified that he doesn’t believe pedophilia and child molestation are okay: “I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors. I am horrified by pedophilia and I have devoted large portions of my career as a journalist to exposing child abusers.” 
 
 As for his actual remarks, he explained, “As to some of the specific claims being made, sometimes things tumble out of your mouth on these long, late-night live-streams, when everyone is spit-balling, that are incompletely expressed or not what you intended. Nonetheless, I've reviewed the tapes that appeared last night in their proper full context and I don't believe they say what is being reported.” (Who among us hasn’t accidentally defended child molestation on a late-night live stream?) 
 
 But the apology didn’t stop the enormous backlash. Later in the afternoon, Simon & Schuster and Threshold Editions announced that they have canceled their book deal with Yiannopoulos. And under apparent pressure from Breitbart staff who demanded Yiannopoulos’s resignation, he quit on Tuesday. 
 
 For many people, the whole controversy has raised more questions than answers. Why was it that it took something as low and awful as support for child molestation to finally get conservatives to disown Yiannopoulos? What about all the bigotry he has pushed in the past? Why were those other remarks not enough? 
 
 What’s remarkable about this whole affair is how unsurprising it is. The video that the Reagan Battalion resurfaced has been around since July 2016. And Yiannopoulos has a long history of making offensive, provocative remarks; it’s what he’s known for. It was totally predictable that a mainstream conservative group’s attempt to reach out to someone who’s basically an internet troll would blow up in some way — yet the fact CPAC and other conservatives even felt compelled to reach out to someone like Yiannopoulos says a lot about conservatism today. 
 
 Yiannopoulos is a troll — and this is far from his first offensive remark 
 
 As journalist Nicole Hemmer explained, none of this should be surprising to anyone: “As someone who’s been on this beat for a while: everything you’re learning about Milo has been public for ages. CPAC made its choice.” 
 
 Yiannopoulos, after all, has a long history of offensive remarks. Here are a few examples: 
 
 He claimed he “went gay” so he “didn’t have to deal with nutty broads.” 
 
 He was banned on Twitter after he launched a racist, sexist harassment campaign against black actress Leslie Jones, whom he described as “barely literate” and “a man.” 
 
 He often mentions that he only dates nonwhite men — in a way that deliberately exoticizes and stereotypes black men. In one column, he asked, “am I racist for not dating white dudes?” He later added, “These days, I wouldn’t actually write ‘no whites’ on my profile. Some people would find that offensive. But I would come up with a formulation to achieve the same effect, like, say, ‘9 inches and over, and don’t contact me if you can name more than four hockey players.’” 
 
 He named and showed the picture of a transgender student previously at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee during a speech at the school — effectively doxxing a nonpublic figure and opening her up to harassment because he didn’t like her feminist activism. 
 
 He repeatedly argued on Real Time With Bill Maher last week that trans people are “disordered,” and even suggested that gay people might be as well. (Major medical groups, like the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association, say being transgender or gay is not a mental disorder.) 
 
 He hired a black porn star, Jovan Jordan, as a bodyguard when attending a meetup for video gamers. “My most ardent haters are feminists, and their fear of penises is well-known,” he argued. “It was vital, therefore, that I sought the services of a man believed to have the biggest dick in the porn industry.” 
 
 He said that men shouldn’t be kicked out from universities for groping women. 
 
 He declared his birthday “World Patriarchy Day.” 
 
 He created the “Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant,” a college scholarship available only to white men to put them “on equal footing with their female, queer and ethnic minority classmates.” 
 
 This is who Yiannopoulos is: As my colleague Zack Beauchamp explained, his entire shtick is to say something inflammatory, anger a whole lot of people, get widespread media attention, refuse to back down, and say he did it all to stand up for free speech — because no one can control what he says. Yiannopoulos pushes the boundaries just enough to force this chain of events, which conveniently prop him up as a hero. 
 
 But Yiannopoulos’s child molestation remarks crossed the line. For one, condoning child molestation goes too far for just about everyone, regardless of political party. 
 
 But the remarks also may have crossed the line because they played into longstanding conservative fears about gay men — specifically, the myth that there’s a link between homosexuality and pedophilia. 
 
 The Family Research Council, a conservative anti-LGBTQ group, still promotes this myth on its website. And it was used in the past to demonize gay men and block the advancement of gay rights — such as, retired UC Davis professor Gregory Herek explained, “in 1977, when Anita Bryant campaigned successfully to repeal a Dade County (FL) ordinance prohibiting anti-gay discrimination, she named her organization ‘Save Our Children,’ and warned that ‘a particularly deviant-minded [gay] teacher could sexually molest children.’” (The empirical research shows there is no scientific basis to this myth.) 
 
 In this context, Yiannopoulos’s support of child molestation as a gay man played into preexisting conservative fears about homosexuality, making him a particularly alarming figure. That, coupled with society’s total rejection of pedophilia, may have contributed to Yiannopoulos’s fall — leading not just to a lost book deal and canceled speech, but to him quitting from Breitbart, the media outlet where he made so many of his past offensive remarks. 
 
 Yiannopoulos claims he’s just defending free speech 
 
 In the past, Yiannopoulos has explained away his offensive remarks by arguing that he’s simply standing up for free speech. This was the tack he took when he appeared on Bill Maher’s show over the weekend. 
 
 “All I care about is free speech and free expression,” he said. “I want people to be able to be, do, and say anything.” 
 
 To this end, he points to college campuses as evidence of liberal “political correctness” running amok in a way that’s stifled free speech. He can claim some personal experience here, like the time anti-fascists rioted at UC Berkeley when he was scheduled to give a speech there and forced him to cancel his event. But this is part of a broader conservative talking point about “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and other examples of left-leaning students on college campuses doing things that, according to critics, stifle free speech. 
 
 This isn’t something that’s exclusive to conservatives. Maher, who identifies as liberal, appeared to invite Yiannopoulos to his show at least in part because he agrees that liberals are too sensitive to speech that they disagree with. “You make liberals crazy for that part of liberalism that has gone off the deep end,” Maher told Yiannopoulos. 
 
 But other liberals have argued that this supposed defense of free speech is really just a ruse to say all sorts of racist, sexist, and bigoted things. 
 
 ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum pointed out, for example, that despite CPAC’s claim that it invited Yiannopoulos to defend his free speech rights, they disinvited him when his speech went too far for them. The racism, sexism, and other offensive remarks were apparently fine, but it was the support for child molestation that apparently crossed a line. 
 
 4. Conservatives pretend their insistence on providing platforms to disgusting people is about free speech, not content — Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 20, 2017 
 
 5. But as the Milo incident reveals, they believe certain kinds of speech should not be given a platform — Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 20, 2017 
 
 7. Conservative "free speech" advocates simply believe that racists, sexists and other kind of bigots should get lots of access — Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 20, 2017 
 
 After all, CPAC knew of Yiannopoulos’s past offensive remarks. It’s one of the reasons people rioted in Berkeley, decried Yiannopoulos’s invitation to Maher’s show, and told CPAC not to invite Yiannopoulos in the first place. 
 
 Yet CPAC invited him, publishers signed book deals with him, and Breitbart employed him anyway — at least until his pro-pedophilia comments surfaced. 
 
 Modern conservatism has a problem with bigotry 
 
 The entire debacle, however, shows a broader issue: Modern conservatism has a huge problem with bigotry in its ranks. 
 
 Consider Donald Trump. He called Mexican immigrants “rapists” who are “bringing crime” and “bringing drugs” to the US during his campaign launch event. He proposed banning Muslims, an entire religious group, from entering the US. He argued that a federal judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit should be disqualified because of his Mexican heritage. And at campaign events and as president, he has spoken of black people through coded language that suggests all black people live in jobless, crime-ridden “inner cities” and all may even work for the Congressional Black Caucus. 
 
 What’s more, racism and xenophobia appeared to predict support for Trump. One telling study, conducted by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Stanford shortly before the election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump — suggesting there’s a significant racial element to his support. 
 
 And this doesn’t even get into the other offensive remarks Trump has made, including about sexual assault — like when he said he can grab women by the genitals and get away with it because he’s a celebrity. 
 
 Yet Trump won the Republican primary and, ultimately, the 2016 general election. He’s not only continued to get the backing of the Republican Party but is also scheduled to talk at CPAC this week. 
 
 Or consider Yiannopoulos’s resignation from Breitbart — one of the most read news outlets on the right, based on online traffic numbers. Breitbart is a news outlet that has run all sorts of explicitly racist, sexist, and bigoted articles. That was, apparently, fine under the website’s editorial standards. But once Yiannopoulos’s pro-pedophilia remarks surfaced, only then did he apparently go too far for Breitbart. 
 
 Some conservatives have looked at all of this in shock and horror. Conservative pundit Glenn Beck, for one, has become a top critic on the right of the Trump administration. In one instance, after Trump appointed former Breitbart head and alt-right champion Steve Bannon in November as his chief strategist, Beck suggested that Americans are racist if they let Trump keep Bannon in charge. 
 
 “When people really understand what the alt-right is, this neo-nationalist, neo-Nazi, white supremacy idea that Bannon is pushing hard,” Beck said, “I hope they wake up because, if not, we are racist. If that’s what we accept and we know it, then we are racist. I contend people don’t know what the alt-right is yet.” 
 
 But Beck seems to represent a minority on the right, given Trump’s ascendance to the White House and his continued support from Republicans. 
 
 Conservatives’ apathy to such racism, misogyny, and other offensive remarks is how CPAC and other conservatives could overlook Yiannopoulos’s racism, sexism, and other kinds of bigotry when they touted him as a free speech champion — only to consider his child molestation comments beyond the boundaries of accepted free speech. 
 
 Watch: It’s now on America’s institutions — and Republicans — to check Donald Trump ||||| Self-described troll and conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart News on Feb. 21, but his far-right speeches and provocative comments aren't going anywhere. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post) 
 
 Before Milo Yiannopoulos gained (and lost) a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) invitation, a book deal and a job, the now-former Breitbart News writer had already said and written many offensive things. That’s his appeal to the people who admire and elevate him: “Milo,” the personality, is built on the idea of triggering liberals. His Breitbart archives contain a regular stream of articles arguing all sorts of things designed to demean and offend: that feminism makes women ugly, that he would prefer it if teenagers self-harmed rather than discuss trans issues on Tumblr, and that women will be happy only if we “un-invent” the birth control pill and the washing machine. 
 
 None of these things, including the fact that the writer had already been banned from Twitter for, the platform said, inciting harassment against actress Leslie Jones, stopped Yiannopoulos from becoming a voice that CPAC felt was of value to their movement on free-speech grounds. Or for that matter, from appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show and finding common ground with the more liberal comedian. Those opportunities for Yiannopoulos came right after the University of California at Berkeley canceled a speaking engagement of his because of intense protests — gaining him at least one indirect tweet from President Trump. 
 
 If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017 
 
 But about 96 hours after his appearance on Maher’s “Real Time” program, Yiannopoulos’s most considerable step yet toward leaving his alt-right adjacency and entering into mainstream conservative discourse, he became a castaway. 
 
 Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart on Tuesday. The day before that, he lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster, and his invitation to speak at CPAC was rescinded. The reason, as CPAC put it, was “the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia.” That’s in reference to a series of videos that the Reagan Battalion, a conservative site, tweeted out days ago, showing examples of Yiannopoulos’s past comments on pedophilia and consent. Yiannopoulos has claimed that the videos were “selectively edited” to make it appear as if he was defending child abuse, and that their release was part of a “co-ordinated effort to discredit me.” 
 
 Here is a rough timeline of how Yiannopoulos went from a breakthrough moment to the opposite in a matter of days. 
 
 Friday night, Feb. 17, 10 p.m.: Yiannopoulos appears on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” The two sit down for a one-on-one interview, which is mostly friendly. The interview follows days of controversy over the very fact that Yiannopoulos is appearing on the show at all. He also sits down for a panel discussion with Maher’s other guests. It is substantially less chummy. 
 
 Saturday, Feb. 18, 1:40 p.m.: Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, announces that Yiannopoulos will be a speaker at CPAC: 
 
 We think free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective. #CPAC2017 pic.twitter.com/ssDS6HVmLN — Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) February 18, 2017 
 
 In the minutes following, several prominent conservative writers and leaders start to protest the decision on Twitter, pointing to Yiannopoulos’s long history of remarks that, in their opinion, don’t fit with the values of CPAC. 
 
 Sunday, Feb. 19, 2:30 a.m.: The Twitter account for the conservative blog Reagan Battalion, which had been tweeting and re-tweeting criticism of CPAC’s invitation to Yiannopoulos, tweets a link to a video interview between Yiannopoulos and Joe Rogan, saying that it shows him “defend [ing] pedophilia and pedophiles.” In the 2015 clip, Yiannopoulos discusses a parish priest who had a sexual relationship with him when he was a teen, declines to name the priest, and says, “It was perfectly consensual.” He adds: “When I was the 14, I was the predator.” 
 
 Sunday, Feb. 19: 11 a.m.: The Reagan Battalion tweets out another video, which edits together several of Yiannopoulos’s more controversial remarks. It includes a long segment from a separate statement Yiannopoulos has made about pedophilia in the past. 
 
 That statement comes from a January 2016 episode of the podcast Drunken Peasants, in which Yiannopoulos appears to defend sexual relationships between adults and “younger boys” in their teens. 
 
 Specifically, he says: “Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming-of-age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents.” 
 
 “I’m grateful for Father Michael,” he said, in what appears to be an attempt at a joke. “I wouldn’t give nearly such good [oral sex] if it wasn’t for him.” He then argues that “pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet who have not gone through puberty,” and not someone who is 13 years old and “sexually mature.” 
 
 The videos start to gain traction, and soon the outrage about Yiannopoulos starts to focus on these statements. 
 
 It starts to appear the writer is becoming the subject of a tactic he helped to popularize, that is, making noise about your opponents until it becomes unavoidable. In his case, the noise he began about one of his “enemies” could escalate into mob abuse. That’s why he was banned from Twitter months ago, after the platform said he broke their rules against inciting harassment. 
 
 [Just how offensive did Milo Yiannopoulos have to be to get banned from Twitter?] 
 
 In July, Yiannopoulos mocked actress Leslie Jones as she received an onslaught of viciously racist tweets. The harassment, it seemed, stemmed from the fact that she was one of the co-stars of the “Ghostbusters” remake. In one tweet, Yiannopoulos shared faked screenshots that made it appear as if Jones had tweeted profane and offensive things. Yiannopoulos called his suspension from the platform “cowardly” and disputed that he was directly involved in the harassment. 
 
 His use of Twitter was an extension of the sort of journalism for which he was known: opposition research-style investigations into the personal lives of people he sees as enemies, with the intention of discrediting them. His Breitbart archives include articles based on unverified claims that social justice activist Shaun King, who identifies as biracial, is lying about his ethnicity. King has said that the evidence cited by Yiannopoulos and other conservative writers is incorrect, and that the reports are “lies.” He has also written similar pieces, framed as exposés, about several feminist activists. At a December campus visit to University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, he spent time during a speech there to mock a transgender student by name, displaying her photograph on a screen. 
 
 Sunday, Feb. 19, 9 p.m.: Yiannopoulos posts a statement denying that his remarks were a defense of pedophilia. It reads, in part: 
 
 The videos do not show what people say they show. I *did* joke about giving better head as a result of clerical sexual abuse committed against me when I was a teen. If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an internet livestream with a crime I was the victim of that’s my prerogative. It’s no different to gallows humor from AIDS sufferers. 
 
 The rest is here. 
 
 Sunday, Feb. 19: 9:45 p.m.: CNN’s Jake Tapper starts tweeting about the videos: 
 
 Friend of mine, conservative, could not be more distraught by this Milo tape. Was molested as a child. Horrified. — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 20, 2017 
 
 My friend, a survivor of sex trafficking: "Milo straight up defended abusing 13 yr old boys…Please don't let that be normalized" — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 20, 2017 
 
 More from survivor of sex trafficking: "Please please please don't let that mess he said go away." How on earth can CPAC defend this? — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 20, 2017 
 
 In response, Yiannopolos offers to go on Tapper’s show to “clear all this up.” 
 
 Monday, Feb. 20, 1 p.m.: CPAC announces that Yiannopoulos will no longer be speaking at CPAC. 
 
 "@ACUConservative has decided to rescind the invitation of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at #CPAC2017." pic.twitter.com/sVWGnPCW7C — Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) February 20, 2017 
 
 Monday, Feb. 20, 1:30 p.m.: Yiannopoulos releases another statement on Facebook, which reads, in part: 
 
 “I’ve repeatedly expressed disgust at pedophilia in my feature and opinion writing. My professional record is very clear. But I do understand that these videos, even though some of them are edited deceptively, paint a different picture. I’m partly to blame. My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, “advocacy.” I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past in different ways.” 
 
 The rest of that statement is here. 
 
 Monday, Feb. 20, about 5:15 p.m.: Simon & Schuster cancels Yiannopoulos’s book. Meanwhile, discussions are reportedly building at Breitbart about Yiannopoulos’s future there. Here’s what Dave Weigel and Robert Costa reported for us at the time: 
 
 By late Monday afternoon, there were ongoing discussions at Breitbart about Yiannopoulos’s future at the company, according to two people familiar with the organization who were not authorized to speak. Inside the newsroom, several staffers made clear to senior leadership that they felt uncomfortable and may decide to leave if he stays, the people said. There was also an aggressive liberal campaign to get advertisers to quit Breitbart News. 
 
 Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2:30 p.m.: Shortly before a news conference, Yiannopoulos announces that he is resigning from Breitbart. 
 
 “Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved. They have allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communities that would otherwise never have heard them,” Yiannopoulos said in a statement. “They have been a significant factor in my success. I’m grateful for that freedom and for the friendships I forged there.” 
 
 “I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately. This decision is mine alone.” 
 
 At 3 p.m., he held a news conference. 
 
 More reading: ||||| Milo Yiannopoulos is a British writer and public speaker who has become a flashpoint in national debates over freedom of speech. He just lost a big book deal with Simon & Schuster over tapes from a year ago that just came to light in which he seems to advocate for pedophilia. 
 
 From college campuses to conservative circles, it seems that everyone’s talking about Milo. If you’re wondering who this guy is, here are some things to know about him. 
 
 Basically, he’s an alt-right British writer and public speaker 
 
 Yiannopoulos, 32, grew up in England and is currently based in the United States, known for his provocative statements. He has branded himself as being aggressively pro-free speech and anti-political correctness. His conservative stances — including his announcement that he was creating a “privilege grant” to “provide college funding assistance to white males” — have associated him with the alt-right movement. 
 
 Among other things, he has railed against safe spaces, trigger warnings, identity politics and feminism — he created the hashtag #FeminismIsCancer and has deemed rape culture “fake.” 
 
 He calls himself a “supervillain” and a free speech advocate 
 
 Yiannopoulos has called himself the “most fabulous supervillain on the Internet” and “Chief Executive Triggerer.” He appears to delight in offending and skewering liberals — though he has said “the left is responsible for me” — and calling out what he sees as hypocrisy on the left. 
 
 He was a Breitbart News editor 
 
 Yiannopoulos was the tech editor for the conservative publication Breitbart News, but he authored numerous articles that have more to do with politics than tech, like “Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber, It’s Time to Get Back in the Closet.” Many of the posts on his byline at Breitbart consist of the full text of speeches he has given on college campuses. 
 
 Then Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart. 
 
 He founded The Kernel 
 
 He founded the web magazine the Kernel, which Daily Dot Media bought in 2014. Under Yiannopoulos, the Kernel was accused of failing to pay contributors. 
 
 He regularly tours college campuses and is often met by protesters 
 
 He calls his tour “The Dangerous Faggot Tour.” A scheduled talk by Yiannopoulos roiled the UC Berkeley campus, where protests escalated into a riot. But students and others have protested and walked out of his talks on campuses across the country. 
 
 Protests over his campus appearances have sparked spirited debates over the line between free speech and hate speech. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, for instance, he attacked a transgender student. 
 
 Twitter banned him for a campaign against Leslie Jones 
 
 He got kicked off Twitter for his role in the trolling of actress Leslie Jones. Since then, he’s been active on Facebook, where he posted a defense of his comments about pedophilia and saying that he is victim of child abuse himself.
– With his book deal, CPAC speaking gig, and job at Breitbart now history, this hasn't been the greatest week for Milo Yiannopoulos, but it would be a mistake to think we've seen the last of him, writes Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. The alt-right provocateur will now take a page from President Trump's playbook and "re-create himself as a Republican martyr" maligned by the establishment, Taibbi writes, predicting that the older conservative crowd repulsed by Yiannopoulos will soon be "crawling back," just as they did after Trump's transgressions. "Why would the Mike Pence crowd ever rally behind a Brit with frosted hair who brags about getting blow---- from priests? It seems preposterous," he writes. "But watch it work." Click for his full column. In other coverage: German Lopez at Vox wonders why it took conservatives so long to disown Yiannopoulos, rounding up earlier offensive remarks such as his claim that he "went gay" to avoid "nutty broads." The Washington Post has a timeline of the dizzying 96 hours in which Yiannopoulos' "most considerable step yet toward leaving his alt-right adjacency and entering into mainstream conservative discourse" was swiftly reversed after comments seen as condoning pedophilia surfaced. Matt Lewis, conservative author of Too Dumb to Fail, tells the New York Times that the Yiannopoulos debacle is a product of a time when provocative personalities are stifling serious discussion of ideas. "You essentially have a world where there are no adults left, nobody exercising moral authority to say, 'No, this does or does not meet our standards,'" he says. "Everybody is just responding to perverse incentives to get more buzz." USA Today briefly recaps the career of the man who calls himself the "most fabulous supervillain on the internet." At the Week, Shikha Dalmia likens Yiannopoulos to the Joker. She says he "seduced" campus conservatives by getting them to think that having him speak was a victory against political correctness. "In fact, they were discrediting their own movement by allying themselves with a vicious troll—demonstrating that they hate their enemies more than they love their alleged principles," she writes.