Milo Yiannopoulos has built his career on lambasting the victimhood culture of the left, but today he painted himself as the victim.
He walked into a cramped room in an office building in lower Manhattan to hold a press conference and offer what he described as the first apology of his career. His mood was a bit dejected, less the combative punk and more the archetypal celebrity crawling out of a scandal dressed in his atonement outfit.
“I’m a gay man and a child abuse victim. Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they shouldn’t have. One of those men was a priest. At the time I didn’t see the relationships as abusive, but when I look back now it does.”
He detailed a sexual relationship between a priest when he was 13 and an older man when he was 17. The age of consent in the UK is 16. He said he regrets the use of the word “boy” to refer to teenagers, a term common in the gay community.
Over the weekend, video surfaced of Milo saying sex between 13-year-olds and older men can be “life affirming” in the gay community. The video was a select portion from a January 2016 episode of the Drunken Peasant podcast. It sparked an immediate firestorm, and led to his getting dropped as a keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Simon & Schuster also canceled plans to publish Milo’s book.
Milo blamed the scandal on the media selectively editing the tape, not getting his humor and a bit on his own tone deafness regarding child sexual abuse.
“This is about me apologizing for saying things I did not mean,” he said. “You freewheel and spitball these Internet live streams. You play with ideas and sometimes they come out half baked,” he said at the press conference, where he also announced that he was resigning as tech editor of the site Breitbart.
While Milo apologized for his flippant comments about sex with minors, he made even more flippant remarks at the presser, comparing child sex abuse to bankruptcy.
“It’s not the worst thing that’s ever going to happen to you,” he said. “And I know that some people will find that in itself to be an outrageous statement, but it simply isn’t the worst thing that will ever happen to you. Going bankrupt is worse.”
He claimed that some of his problems with alcohol and “nihilistic partying” on this past abuse. “I would encourage people to not buy into the victimhood culture and not let it color every decision you make. Most of my twenties partying were probably me running away from something. I didn’t know at the time, but it was probably the root cause.”
While press conference was going on, a protest of about a couple dozen people raged outside the Manhattan office building.
As for his next step, he said he will do “more of the same” and plans to publish his book Dangerous this year under a different publisher. “I don’t intend to go head-to-head with Breitbart. I intend to do more of the same, except not at Breitbart. More college tours, more TV, more video. Focus less on journalism. I’ve outgrown my role as tech editor at Breitbart.”
He also believes the controversy will inevitably help his career. “I don’t think this will do any harm to my profile. I have an opportunity now after what has happened to reach a larger audience.”
Can we really believe him? Milo’s career was built on saying or doing anything to cause offense and outrage, and never apologizing even when lines were clearly crossed. But apparently there is one line both conservatives and liberals dearly protect: children.
It’s hard to say that this outrageous scandal will help attract even more young men, to join the ranks of Milo’s followers, especially after seeing him cowed by public pressure into playing the victim.
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