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Milo to be Keynote Speaker at CPAC
CPAC has announced that this year’s keynote speaker will be Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversial Breitbart editor whose talk was shut down earlier this month through violence at the University of California at Berkeley.
Yiannopoulos told The Hollywood Reporter that he will discuss his “experiences in America battling feminists, Black Lives Matter, the media, professors and the entertainment industry.”
…According to The Hollywood Reporter, those protests are part of the reason CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp decided to host Yiannopoulos as the meeting’s keynote speaker.
“An epidemic of speech suppression has taken over college campuses,” Schlapp said. “Milo has exposed their liberal thuggery and we think free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective.”
Yiannopoulos appeared on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday, where he sparred with the show’s liberal host and took aim at high-profile female celebrities, including Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer.
The Conservative Political Action Conference will be held February 22-25, just outside of Washington at National Harbor, MD.
The first CPAC in 1974 featured Ronald Reagan as the keynote speaker. Gay conservative groups were banned from having a booth at the conference until last year.
Exit question: What do you think it says about the state of the conservative movement that CPAC has chosen as its keynote speaker an openly gay free speech activist with alt-right leanings? A good move, bad move, or somewhere in between?
Published in Politics
With this history, and his obvious opportunistic tendencies, why would CPAC invite him? Because this is the way the wind now blows politically, and because he will draw big crowds and make money. Also, many people are trying to convince themselves they’re comfortable with gays in “conservatism”, and he’s the stick-out token.
I beg you, try to remember that our political cause existed long before “political correctness”, and that being against “political correctness” or SJWs is not all we stand for.
I highly recommend everyone to read more about Milo in detail in James Kirchik’s excellent analysis here. And please step back and ask yourself if even two years ago you would want someone like this representing Conservatism at CPAC. I find it hard to believe that you would.
lol, if the entire contents of the book is “win” there wouldn’t be much point in reading it!
Read your Sun Tzu as well…
Cowardice is a bit of a strong claim. You’re gonna need a bit more proof to back this up.
Now you’re just showing a bit of ignorance. One of the watershed moments in the fight against the PC/SJW crowd was “The Triggering” at UMass, with Milo, Crowder, and Christina Hoff Sommers.
Yes, but their personal standards, morality, and consistent devotion to conservatism beyond mere free speech and anti-SJW issues is very different.
Please just explain how you understand it.
Ah, of course! I should have suspected that, Thanks!
Sure, most brief summary:
Some people get all grumpy when the message becomes fun. I submit to you that this is not a winning strategy.
I’m kind of surprised on the Keynote. Milo is certainly someone you should invite and showcase, but I figure the keynote should have a bit more intellectual heft, and less trolling. Milo is a lot more intelligent than he lets on, but he plays the provocateur so much that it is hard to separate out
For example, Kurt Schlicter is certainly amusing, but he brings the knowledge of a army officer and lawyer to the table, and he has been laying out matters in his TownHall column without bashing Trump needlessly.
Just listened to interview with Milo very plainly arguing that a sexual relationship between a grown man and 13 year old boy is acceptable and pedophilia only involves children that aren’t sexually developed. Nice job CPAC, once again won’t feel bad I’m not ther
I haven’t watched a presentation and I’m not 100% sure (hence the fudged “as I recall”). But I do know, first, that he speaks frequently at college campuses and doesn’t mind tussling with liberal students, and, second, that he’s pro-life and brings that fact up frequently in his writing. So it seems probable that it would come up on campus.
Milo is completely accurate with regard to the use of the word pedophilia. Attraction to the a thirteen year old is Hebephilia.
Brilliant catch. thanks
I think the word we’re all looking for is “wrong”
Milo draws the attention of young people to the value of freedom of expression. Milo draws the attention of young people to the actions of thugs who commit violent political intimidation. I hope he makes a big pile of money. He shall have earned it.
Good information, Tzvi. Thanks for the links and background. I like Camille Paglia for many of the same reasons I like Milo. Paglia has said some controversial things, too. But overall these two have joined our side as a last resort. They get it. The see what the left is doing to society — it is destroying everything good and gaining more power into their hands at the same time. The left must be destroyed as a power in our society. They are a small Bolshevik contingent that rules us more every day.
Do you realize how obscene it was to join forces with Stalin in WWII for some people? He was truly evil, non-democratic and was instrumental in starting the war. There are people on our side in this new American civil war who will fight and there are people who will become Quislings (Bill Kristol, for example) and then there are drones like me and most people watching from afar. As long as Milo is landing blows and is engaged in battles for our side I’m for him. I don’t want to be his best friend and when there is a less existential situation I will probably drift away from my interest in him.
If you want to say he shouldn’t be a keynote speaker that’s one gradation that I might support but to go fully against him I’m not willing to be that pure. I’m sick and tired of the pure who do nothing but prevent others from doing something. We want everyone willing to go to the battlefield to do so. He’s in the arena and he’s fighting those who are out to do me and my family harm.
There is no war, there is no arena, there is no battle.
All he does is make leftists angry. That is the sum-total of his job and his success.
It’s just feelings. That’s the whole battle. That’s all he’s accomplishing. There are no Jews in ovens. He is not saving Europe. Political pundits making fun of feminists are not saving anyone’s lives.
And in turn you are inviting someone who does not have your best interests at heart to speak at CPAC.
The analogy is so faulty in general. If a german soldiers dies they’re dead no matter who kills them. What is the political equivalent? What is the ocean keeping Stalin far away from us if you’re inviting him to speak at your convention?
There are no blows (which committed leftists is he convincing, exactly, by the way?) and he’s not for “our side” if our side means family, traditional values, decency, the negation of pederasty, the total driving of anti-Semitism and neonazism from any level of acceptability, etc. etc.
Well, then your position is clear here. We needn’t discuss anything then. We aren’t dealing with the same set of facts evidently.
That’s not how you win this war. This will NEVER happen and it shows that you don’t know this debate very well.
I understand and sympathize with your point … to a point.
But politics can be serious fun and watching the unfolding career of one Thomas Bryant Cotton is very serious fun. Every time I find the space between the conservative/populist base and the DC conservative class being occupied with intelligence, common sense and medium-term political smarts, Senator Cotton is standing there.
It’s fun to watch.
Please, enlighten me
Yes, you are definitely right, and we should support everyone who is speaking out.
I’m shouting out for Milo now because he’s the one taking incoming fire right now.
I really appreciate Milo because he stood up for me when most conservatives (if they were aware of the issue at all) dismissed people being fired from their jobs for their political opinions as “gamers in their mothers’ basements.”
I realize that. The word for the entire discussion is semantics. Who cares if it isn’t the exact definition of pedophilia? His proposition that it is a coming of age event for said boy is sick no matter what the wording.
Woo hoo! If only I were as eloquent as Larry this is what I would say!
So I responded at length in the member feed. This is what I mean when I say he is indiscriminate. I watched the interview, too. He’s not arguing semantics. What he’s arguing is that when he was 14, he entered into a consensual sexual relationship with an older man (a priest), where he was the one seeking out the relationship. That the relationship was, for him, fulfilling and educational and safe. That there was consent all around. It does not require work to figure out that he is blasting away the foundations of the “affirmative consent” rules on campus by taking a case everyone is going to say “you can’t do that!” and showing it meets those consent rules. His interlocutor never rises above simply asserting the wrongness of the relationship.
The problem is, he’s also blasting away the “children should not be put in the position of having to make these decisions” foundation. The problem with adult-child sex is not that children cannot consent to it (Milo is explicit that he was a very adult 14 year old). It is something else; something only weakly proxied by consent. And Milo is, whether he means to or not, destroying both.
Oh he will, that’s what attention seeking publicity hounds create controversy for. Of course the people that fall for his act are the ones that keep him around so it’s basically a vicious circle.
And as to my discussion of Milo as the Boromir Option, GamerGate is a pretty good example of it. No one backed the non-conforming gamers, conservative, libertarian, or whatever. And that environment really was a closing iron vice. And setting off Milo in that circumstance is much more justifiable.
Hence, I have conflicted feelings about the whole thing.
I actually feel his position (if we could pretend for a moment this were actually his position) is more salient as a libertarian one than a conservative one, where the government would not even interfere by defining what consent meant.
Notwithstanding, I am going to enjoy the defenses of this behavior from the right for the coming days.
I’ll agree with you it’s probable it may have come up. And I support him fully for that. If only he had a prominent website he could use to publicize his talks! ;)
Here’s Milo’s talk on the subject:
transcript:
http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2017/01/31/milo-cal-poly-state-university-no-dead-babies/
We don’t share enough ideas in common to have a meaningful debate about any of this. As Dennis Prager says: I prefer clarity over agreement if I can’t get both. Clarity is not possible, I’m afraid — so agreement is off the table and so is my ability to “enlighten” you.
…Okay then