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Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns From Breitbart News After Pedophilia Comments Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns From Breitbart News After Pedophilia Comments
(about 2 hours later)
Milo Yiannopoulos, the conservative polemicist whose endorsement of pedophilia instigated outrage over the weekend, resigned on Tuesday from Breitbart News, the hard-right news and opinion website where he was a longtime editor. 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.
“I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important job, which is why today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately,” Mr. Yiannopoulos said at a news conference. It hardly mattered that he did not consider himself much of a conservative.
“This decision is mine alone,” he said. 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 — 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.
Mr. Yiannopoulos’s resignation followed days of tumult that intensified over the weekend after a conservative group called the Reagan Battalion posted a video that showed him condoning sexual relations between men and boys as young as 13 and jokingly dismissing the gravity of pedophilia by Roman Catholic priests. 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.
On Monday, the organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference revoked its invitation for Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak this week, and the publisher Simon & Schuster said it was canceling the publication of his book, “Dangerous.” 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.”
Appearing in rented office space in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, Mr. Yiannopoulos, in a sober suit and red tie, was both contrite and defiant. He apologized for his remarks, “I don’t think I’ve been as sorry about anything my whole life,” but also said he had been the victim of a “witch hunt” by detractors trying to derail his career. Many on the right are pointing to the Yiannopoulos controversies as a symptom of a trend toward conservatism as performance art, placing less value on ideas like small government and self-reliance than it does on attitude, personality and provocation. While there are respected conservative thinkers on issues like tax reform, immigration and health care, they say, provocateurs like Mr. Yiannopoulos suck up most of the oxygen, becoming the public face of the movement and pushing more serious ideas to the sideline.
He said that he would move forward with publishing a book, saying other publishers were interested, and that he was planning to start a media venture of his own. “I’m proud to be a warrior for free speech and creative expression,” Mr. Yiannopoulos said, adding, “I’m not going anywhere.” “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,’” said Matt Lewis, the conservative author of “Too to Fail,” which dissected how conservatives have abandoned ideas for outrage. “Everybody is just responding to perverse incentives to get more buzz.”
Mr. Yiannopoulos’s announcement was met with glee in some quarters and dismay in others. Some commenters on Breitbart.com expressed disappointment that the site had severed ties with one of its marquee provocateurs, suggesting the site had given in to pressure from liberal critics. Mr. Lewis said he would bet that most conservatives had no idea where Mr. Yiannopoulos stood on taxes, abortion or any other issue that has traditionally been important to them. “The only thing we know about him is he’s vulgar, he’s a provocateur and he fights political correctness,” he said. “And I guess that’s what the definition is now for being a conservative.”
But within the Breitbart newsroom, there was a sense that Mr. Yiannopoulos had gone too far in his remarks on pedophilia. Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, called the comments “indefensible” and “appalling” during his radio program on Tuesday morning. One staff member said that while many of his colleagues were pained to see their site under attack, they believed that Mr. Yiannopoulos’s extreme remarks had given him no choice but to leave. On a smaller scale, Mr. Yiannopoulos’s stardom fits neatly with the political culture of a Republican Party that watched Donald J. Trump, a reality television star and businessman, triumph over a party structure that prized loyalty and legacy. That came after personalities like Mr. Yiannopoulos, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck had drowned out the conservative movement’s once-revered intellectual voices.
In the past, Breitbart steadfastly defended Mr. Yiannopoulos even after he made provocative, critical statements about Muslims, transgender people, immigrants and women’s rights. Even on Tuesday, the site still offered a degree of support. Provocateurs like Mr. Yiannopoulos became even more popular the more they rail against the left and its perceived intolerance of their most over-the-line remarks. It almost did not matter who Mr. Yiannopoulos was fighting — an African-American television star, campus demonstrators, the corporate leadership of Twitter — as long as he was fighting.
In a statement on Tuesday, Breitbart News praised Mr. Yiannopoulos’s “bold voice,” adding, in words sure to inflame some liberals, that the provocateur “has sparked much-needed debate on important cultural topics confronting universities, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, the press, and the tech industry.” “We’ve created a competition for being the most offensive and the most outrageous in order to stay relevant, and then we must rally around and defend you,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative radio personality and author of the forthcoming “How the Right Lost Its Mind.”
On his program, Mr. Marlow also defended Mr. Yiannopoulos, saying there was no evidence Mr. Yiannopoulos had acted as a sexual predator and that he had been a victim of a “coordinated hit” by liberal groups intent on hurting his ascent. “That knee-jerk defensiveness takes conservatives down some weird, dark alleys,” Mr. Sykes added.
Even as it let Mr. Yiannopoulos go and condemned his comments on pedophilia, Breitbart was defiant.
Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, called the comments “indefensible” and “appalling” during his radio program on Tuesday morning. But he also described the release of the audio, by a conservative group called the Reagan Battalion and after Mr. Yiannopoulos had been announced as a speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a “coordinated hit” by liberal groups intent on hurting his ascent.
“There seems to be growing evidence that this was all coordinated to wait for a peak moment when Milo was red-hot,” Mr. Marlow said. “They sat on this story and they held it for maximum political damage.”“There seems to be growing evidence that this was all coordinated to wait for a peak moment when Milo was red-hot,” Mr. Marlow said. “They sat on this story and they held it for maximum political damage.”
This is not the first time that Mr. Yiannopoulos, a staunch defender of the so-called alt-right — a far-right fringe movement that embraces white nationalism and a range of racist and anti-immigrant positions — and an avid supporter of President Trump, has inspired outrage. His lectures on college campuses have been met with protests that have at times turned violent. Several weeks ago, his planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley, was canceled after rioters set fires and smashed windows. (The cancellation, in turn, prompted a debate about free speech while also drawing a rebuke from Mr. Trump on Twitter.) Mr. Yiannopoulos echoed his former boss in his remarks on Tuesday. “But let’s be clear what is happening here,” he said. “This is a cynical media witch hunt from people who don’t care about children.”
The board of the American Conservative Union, which decided to rescind Mr. Yiannopoulos’s speaking invitation, denounced his comments on Monday, calling them “disturbing.” At Breitbart, staff members debated whether he should be allowed to remain. “It was something that was a total surprise to people in the Breitbart organization,” Mr. Marlow said on the radio program. By naming him a speaker at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference — a stage for the right’s most prominent voices — movement leaders were telegraphing how big of a space Mr. Yiannopoulos had come to occupy in their world, whether they agreed with him or not.
Mr. Yiannopoulos tried to explain his comments in posts on his Facebook page, saying he was a victim of his own “British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor,” but his explanations appeared to have little effect. The chairman of the American Conservative Union, Matt Schlapp, seemed to acknowledge on Monday that the decision to invite Mr. Yiannopoulos, 33, was at least in part a nod to voters, especially younger ones, who respond to his antics.
“There’s a lot of older traditional conservatives who are looking at younger voters, younger people in the country, and they despair for the fact they think they have lost them,” Mr. Schlapp said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“We have to deal with the reality in which we live,” he said. “And I think it is unfortunate.”
As he gained notoriety, Mr. Yiannopoulos’s presence on college campuses became as much about what would happen outside the lecture hall as what he would say inside. Realizing that, conservative groups began holding him up as a baton-carrying defender of the First Amendment, seeking him out with greater interest because of the outrage he was almost guaranteed to provoke.
And that backlash, illustrated in its most extreme form at the University of California, Berkeley, this month when rioters smashed windows, set fires and threw rocks at police, would become a tailor-made exhibit for the right in their case against the intolerance of conservative thought in academia.
When that appearance was canceled, even Mr. Trump expressed his outrage on Twitter.
“Do we want to extract the intolerance of the left so we can expose it? That’s part of it,” said Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a group that has helped bring Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak at colleges across the country. “Is that the only reason we bring him to campuses? No,” he added. “Sometimes people need to hear some things they don’t want to hear.”
For now, Turning Point will keep its distance from Mr. Yiannopoulos, but not permanently, Mr. Kirk added. “As an organization, we’re probably going to take a break from engaging with him directly.”
It appears that Mr. Yiannopoulos does not expect to be off the stage for long. He said on Tuesday that he would proceed with publishing a book, saying other publishers were interested, and that he was planning to start a media venture.
“I’m proud to be a warrior for free speech and creative expression,” he said, adding, “I’m not going anywhere.”