The Milo Yiannopoulous story is far from over; the conservative personality announced his resignation from Breitbart News at a press conference Tuesday afternoon, stating:
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. They have been a significant factor in my success. I’m grateful for that freedom and for the friendships I forged there. But 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.
As Liberty Nation reported on Monday, February 20, Milo’s disinvitation from the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) came on the heels of a video where Milo made a joke regarding sexual molestation perpetrated by Catholic priests. CPAC said in a statement that “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.”
Milo Yiannopoulous in a press conference, February 21, 2017.
Hours after the CPAC statement, Simon & Schuster – the publishing house planning to release Milo’s book, Dangerous, canceled his book deal in a public declaration.
As his initial Facebook post explained, Milo was a survivor of clergy sexual abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest in his native U.K. and chose to deal with that using dark humor. Mr. Yiannopoulos used his press conference to reject the claims that he condoned pedophilia, calling the present claims a “politically motivated witch-hunt.”
“I don’t see why I can’t make a joke about clerical sexual abuse but a drag-queen in a club can,” Milo stated bluntly, “and that’s a double standard, and it’s got a lot to do with politics.”
Milo seems to exist in a constant state of targeted outrage. He was banned by Twitter, caused riots at Berkeley and drives the left to distraction. As a homosexual Jewish immigrant to the United States who has a strong preference for black boyfriends, he could lay bare the left’s tactic of simply screaming racist or homophobe at people they want to silence. For that, the left – and some on the right – saw Milo as especially dangerous, and targeted him for attack and elimination.
According to Mr. Yiannopoulos, no journalist who wrote about the “controversy” really believed he supported or defended pedophilia. Milo dismissed the idea that anyone in the media saw the accusation as valid, claiming “[i]t’s an absurd and ridiculous allegation, but they gleefully printed it anyway.”
Milo’s book is still expected to release before the end of the year; during the press conference, he spoke of “interest” from other publishing companies in the wake of the video’s release. Other projects he hinted at included efforts similar to his work at Breitbart.
