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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?
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This is exactly the problem, you are adopting the nefarious means of people whose goal is anarchy and the devolution of society. If you behave like them you will come to think like them and in so doing you will help to achieve their goal of transforming the very nature of society along the lines they desire.
Kind of how Marx’s ideas were usually rooted in facts? I would prefer someone’s whole ethos and philosophy to be rooted in facts all the time not just some of it.
The thing with the political entertainment class is that I have no confidence they believe in anything really other than self promotion. Like a good magician they are always in character and have a trick up their sleeve to keep up pretenses and maintain the mystique.
It is, I am convinced, all an act devoid of any real substance. To base ones politics on it therefore is like basing ones religious doctrines on the advice of a fortune teller.
So is CPAC a serious conference on ideas or a carnival show?
The press is almost never interested in ideas.
Nice.
Indeed. If there’s another speaker going onto campuses and speaking out directly against abortion I’m not aware of it.
So how do you sell Broccoli? Anyone can sell desert, beer and burgers because those things are all awesome and pleasurable. But to sustain a decent society requires sacrifice and sacrifice is hard and not fun.
Who do you know that’s going onto campuses and speaking out against abortion?
I stand behind Milo because it takes a lot of nerve to do this.
You really should read the book, you are totally missing the point.
I really encourage people to watch this video. Milo is splendid.
As I recall, the afore-mentioned Jonah Goldberg, in fact.
HBO has blocked the video. I got through via RCP
Maher doesn’t really let Milo say his piece. . .
It’s just another paycheck for these people. Paid for by our subscription.
(Emphasis mine.)
Et tu, Ricochet editors? What next? Are you going to go Full Journalist and use the word amid in your articles?
Milo is an entertainer and self-promoter, but much of it is show. He is not the evil monster that the left and some on the right portray him as, and for all his bluster he is a bit of a coward. If you want brave conservatives standing up for free speech, and against political correctness and the SJW crowd the model should be Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, and Gavin McInnes. Gavin is what Milo wants to be, but doesn’t have the courage to be.
Last night on Greg Gutfeld’s show he also said that Trump is making the Right fun. He said that Trump is the Ramones and all of a sudden the Democrats are Air Supply.
Milo, Gavin McInnes, and Steven Crowder have all done speeches and events together. Ben Shapiro has a different style than Milo, but has the same basic formula; go to colleges and stand up for conservatives. I don’t know why you’d call Milo a coward?
First of all Broccoli is very tasty, if properly cooked. If people find it disgusting it is because those making it suck at cooking.
Do a good job governing, and lay out the proper way to run government and institutions with realistic goals and plans. If you sell broccoli like it is candy people will soon lose any faith in vegetables all together.
Sacrifice is hard, but it is rewarding. Why do people bother having children? They too are hard to deal with. Why bother being a Christian? Adults know that things are not always fun but that they need to get done anyway. Only juveniles require everything to be fun. The left has stunted our society with its self gratifying therapeutic attitudes and now we see even the right is infected by it.
The same weekend there were protests and riots at Milo’s speech in Berkeley and McInnes speech at NYU. Milo never made it in, but Gavin went in the front door, got maced/pepper sprayed for his trouble and still tried to give his talk. Ben Shapiro agrees with me – go listen to the very last minutes of Shapiro’s interview on the Rubin Report.
I think Milo is making a good contribution to the conversation, and I have no problem with CPAC having Milo speak. I just think that Milo is lionized way too much by some on the right.
To a large extent people are no longer bothering.
Milo has a place on the right: he provokes and challenges college students especially to reconsider their assumptions and biases, and he takes the battle to the left in a way they can identify with. It doesn’t hurt to have a provocateur who is a master of social media making unpopular arguments in hostile places.
That said, Milo is not keynote address material–that should either go to an aspiring statesman in the fray or to a serious conservative intellectual. Milo has his place, but he’s more a bulldozer than an architect.
If we’re looking for someone on the intellectual side who is more friendly to Trump than other more establishment elements have been but who still has some heft, I’d recommend someone like F. H. Buckley or Larry Arnn.
When Milo was at DePaul, protesters rushed the stage and grabbed his microphone and security did nothing to protect him. Watching the response of the Berkeley police, can you blame him for leaving? I commend Gavin for going to NYU and confronting the protestors, but I also have more faith in the NYPD to keep relative order in those situations.
All of them (Shapiro, McInnes, Crowder, and Milo) now all bring private security guards to their campus engagements.
My google-fu is failing me, can you give me some links to his presentations?
Ben Shapiro.
I thought the point is to win.
Milo Yiannopolous is a morally bereft opportunist whose british accent and quickish wit(-ish) has made him adept at “DESTROYING” leftists, feminists, etc. He makes bank of people who want quick, entertaining answers to complicated, difficult questions. He has found success and popularity because he knows who right-wingers hate and knows how to embarass them; he is good at putting on an anti-left spectacle. But since he is an opportunist, he’s bad for conservatism.
What does an opportunist do? They use their platform as an alleged defender of your beliefs to popularize their own thoughts, ideas, and brand. For example, Milo’s calling card (like many new celebrities on the right) is being an anti-SJW. This means that as an opportunist, he will use hatred for SJWs to redefine conservatism. Milo can call anything SJWism, and dozens of right-wingers will fall all over themselves to attack it and defend him, even though the object of his ire is, in fact, more in line with conservatism than Milo himself is. This is called opportunistically manipulating people, and it turns my stomach.
He has done it multiple times. For example:
Milo’s defense of Catholicism includes excusing pederasty and essentially writing away people who worry about it as SJWs.
According to Milo, anyone who does not allow, based on their statistical preponderance, that “Jews run the media” is a lilly-livered leftist.
(cont.)
As much as some would like to pretend the “alt-right”, at least as an online phenomenon, never existed, some might be interested in the (now historical?) fact that before he was banned from that platform, Milo would encourage all the literal nazis in the universe to attack his political opponents, and famously tweeted a black baby at Ben Shapiro because he was a “cuck” and apparently a black man must have impregnated his wife. If any of this seems wrong, you must be a progressive. He justified the truly anti-semitic acts of many of his supporters as mere playfulness.
He recently told a woman wearing a hijab that it is a thing that should be never seen on American women. Apparently if you don’t mind that religion existing in this country, you are an SJW.
He switches from Jewish to Catholic at will, depending on what is most politically expedient. His old, buried past is full of weird imagery that you have to do a lot of explaining away to, er, explain away.