Milo Yiannopoulos will speak at CPAC (although he is not, as some have reported, the keynote speaker.)

A controversy has arisen concerning his comments suggesting that 13-year-old boys can consent to sexual relationships with older men; that sexual attraction to “sexually mature” 13-year-olds is not pedophilia; and that sexual relationships between young boys and older men can be “hugely positive.”

Milo has posted a statement that claims that the controversy arises out of “selectively edited videos.” (He does acknowledge some “sloppy phrasing” too.)

I thought it might be a public service, then — if a somewhat distasteful one — to publish a lengthy transcript from a video that appears unedited to me. The following excerpt is about four minutes in length, and you can navigate in the video to watch the whole 2 3/4 hour video if you wish. Make up your own mind about whether Milo Yiannopoulos appears to advocate older men having sexual relationships with boys as young as 13.

And if it appears that he does, you must decide whether that is an opinion that you want representing you as a conservative. [Discussion is NSFW.]

PaulsEgo: The whole consent thing, for me, is, it’s not this black and white thing that people try and paint it. Are there some 13-year-olds out there capable of giving informed consent to have sex with an adult? Probably. But I was also a 13-year-old. I hung around with 13-year-old guys, you know, when I was 13, and there were some of them that still thought girls were f*cking icky at 13. Like not many, but like, they were just coming out of that phase. I don’t know that I was ready at 13 to get f*cked in the *ss by a 28-year-old black drag queen is what I’m saying. So, you can’t, the reason these age of consent laws exist is because we have to set some kind of a barometer here.

Yiannopoulos: I completely understand…

PaulsEgo: We’ve got to pick an age and go, okay, look, this is the age where we can reasonably be assured you’re an adult, you can give informed consent, you understand the risks of pregnancy, all that bullsh*t.

Yiannopoulos: Of course, of course, and I think the law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age, I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them. People who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world, by the way. And in many cases, actually, those relationships with older men — this is one of the reasons I hate the left, this sort of stupid, one-size-fits-all policing of culture, this sort of, this arbitrary —

Ben: You know, Milo —

T.J.: Let him talk.

Ben: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was just —

Yiannopoulos: This arbitrary — I’m just gonna — I’ll be quick. This arbitary and oppressive idea of consent which totally destroys, you know, the understanding that many of us have of the complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex, and actually, in the homosexual world particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, those kind of coming-of-age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable — a sort of a rock for when they can’t talk to their parents. Some of those relationships are some of the most —

Unknown: It sounds like priest molestation to me.

Ben: It sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me.

Yiannopoulos: And you know what? I am grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him.

Ben: Oh, my God. Oh, my God, I can’t handle it.

Unknown: What is wrong with you, Ben? Come on?

PaulsEgo: It’s funny because Ben gave me some homework on you, Milo, he gave a few videos to watch to brush up on my Miloisms, and one of the things you said in one of these clips was that transgenderism is the new, you know, frontier of, you know, rights, my wording is bad here, but, um, you know, it’s the new frontier of social progress and the next thing in line is gonna be pedophilia – and yet, here you are talking about how, look, you know, some of these kids that get diddled by these priests, I mean, it’s a good thing for them! They’re getting this love! Now they are also getting a d*ck —

Yiannopoulos: You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to someone 13 years old who is sexually mature.

PaulsEgo: OK, ephebophilia or whatever.

Yiannopoulos: Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet, who have not gone through puberty, who are too young to be able to understand the way their bodies —

Unknown: Ann Coulter.

Yiannopoulos: That is not what we’re talking about.

T.J.: Ann Coulter.

PaulsEgo: Sure, granted.

Yiannopoulos: You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you think that I’m defending it, ’cause I’m certainly not.

PaulsEgo: No, no, no. I’m not saying you’re defending it, I’m saying you’re walking the borderline.

Yiannopoulos: No it’s not. You said I was defending it, and you’re wrong.

PaulsEgo: OK, OK, fine. I retract my statement, Milo. I retract my statement. I shan’t slander you further. But you are advocating for cross-generational relationships here, can we be honest about that?

Yiannopoulos: Yeah, I don’t mind saying, I don’t mind admitting that, and I think particularly in the gay world – and outside, the Catholic Church, if that’s where some of you want to go with this – I think in the gay world, some of the most important, enriching and incredibly, you know, life-affirming, important, shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys, they can even save those young boys from desolation, from suicide, from drug addiction, all those things, provided they’re consensual. Provided they’re consensual.

Manufactured controversy or genuinely disturbing and immoral nonsense? You be the judge.

UPDATED to correct one line from PaulsEgo.

UPDATE x2: Milo has now been disinvited from CPAC and Simon and Schuster says they will not be publishing his book.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

[guest post by Dana]

[Ed. note: According to CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp’s twitter feed tonight, Milo will not be the keynote speaker, but one of many speakers at the event.]

Organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) have announced that Milo Yiannopoulos will be this year’s keynote speaker. Like it or not, this is yet another step in the Right’s march toward the new “normal,” which is made up of bright, shiny, novelty items collected under an even more bigly Big Tent.

In spite of some noteworthy Republicans speaking at the event, including Sen. Ted Cruz, Vice-president Mike Pence and Gov. Scott Walker, it is Milo that will be allotted the most time on stage.

According to CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp:

An epidemic of speech suppression has taken over college campuses. Milo has exposed their liberal thuggery and we think free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective.

Here is Milo appearing as a guest on Bill Maher’s show last night:

NSFW:

And yet, here is another view of Milo:

(Absolutely NSFW):

People, good and decent people can make themselves overlook the inexcusable when it’s necessary and beneficial to their cause.

Question: If you find Milo’s views expressed in the second video reprehensible, do you think Cruz, Walker, Pence, etc. should decline to appear at the conference?

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: Please watch this video.

Here is a longer cut where Milo Yiannopoulos says that he "is advocating" for legal sex between 13 year olds! & older men. #CPAC2017 pic.twitter.com/1fiuv7TSKs

— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) February 19, 2017

UPDATE BY DANA: Here is CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp’s statement regarding the controversial selection of Milo Yiannopoulos as keynote speaker:

“We realize that this invitation will be accompanied by controversy which we think the conservative movement and our CPAC attendees can handle. Each will use his or her individual judgment as to the worthiness of each speaker, including Milo. ACU has publicly taken on racism and the alt-right and will continue to do so aggressively, like ACU’s founders before us.

We look forward to hearing Milo’s message and having him sit down with Scott Walter to answer some tough questions. We believe that all of us are up to the challenge at a time when political correctness is properly being discarded.”

[guest post by Dana]

Last night, I spent time with two successful individuals from Los Angeles who work in the movie industry. They are both liberals who voted for Hillary Clinton, and both are aghast that Donald J. Trump is now our president. They are also very clear-eyed about the media’s role in helping Trump get into office. They understand that Trump was given far more print space and air time than any other candidate in the running. This by a media desperate for the ratings and hits, and as a result, they essentially launched his win. So the press’s current hysterical reactions and doomsday proclamations of everything Trump – whom they helped put into office – is nothing but a clanging gong of unhinged dishonesty grating on the last nerve of this couple. With regard to the mainstream media, their view is: You made him, now own it. No backsies, no re-dos, so just shut-up.

I couldn’t agree with them more. I loathed the mainstream media, before the election, and even more so after. Their dishonesty and complicity with the Democratic party, their refusal to ensure that newsrooms have equal representation of varying political views (which should not matter, but undeniably does), and sheer arrogance reveals jut how unable they are to see the world through any other lens than a very-narrowly defined one of liberalism. Thus after decades of this partisan bias, it’s no wonder that we are now here: polarized and frustrated as one side seeks its revenge against the powerful entity that is the American press. An entity which has long-mocked, dismissed and sneered at a large swath of the population. A populace now counting on President Trump to exact a long-sought after revenge. And with this thirst for a comeuppance, there comes a willingness to lower the bar of reasonable standards and look the other way at dishonest and unethical behavior from their champion. The end now justifies the means. On the side of the press, the still-smoldering anger over the devastating election loss, an election that they believe was their “owed” win, has turned to an hysterical, over-the-top reaction of hit jobs and Fake News reports. That the election was lost to someone like Trump still cannot be believed. This inability to accept reality is also similar to the press’s continuing inability to grasp that their long-exposed collective biases have rendered them mostly irrelevant, save for a few pocketed regions of liberalism.

As readers here already know, I have not been a Trump supporter. I don’t see any reason to re-hash the basis for my concerns, but suffice it to say, that post-election, my concerns and fears about the president haven’t changed.

With that, I want to point you to an excellent article addressing the simple fact that it is very possible – and I am proof of this, as is the liberal couple with whom I conversed – that one can dislike equally both President Trump and the American press. Those are not mutually exclusive positions. This is not a binary choice that we have to make: either reject Trump or reject the press, either support Trump or support the press. Says who?

NRO’s Kevin D. Williamson offers thoughts on this, to which I heartily concur:

…Every Republican president is “the most extreme ever,” or so Democrats and their media friends insist. (“We do always say that,” one Democratic friend acknowledged. “And it is always true.” Well . . . )

In this corner, the American Press; in the opposite corner, the American President. The time has come for choosing sides — or so do many of our friends on the left and in the media (there is some crossover in that group) insist, as do more than a few of our friends on the right.

On Friday, I was scolded by Joe Hagan of New York magazine (he must have taken a break from the vital service he is offering to the republic at the moment, composing a biography of Jann Wenner) for daring to criticize my media colleagues in the age of Trump, “since you are supposedly a journalist.” It is, he insisted, “as if you, as a conservative, can’t see objective reality along with somebody you assume is a political opposite.” No, it is as if the American news media is predictably biased and incompetent, and would be writing almost precisely what it is writing about Donald Trump if the election had been won by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, or Pat Sajak. …

It is possible, if you are not mentally crippled, to hold your mind two non-exclusive ideas: Donald J. Trump stinks, and the press stinks. Trump’s spat with the press is a bloodless Iran–Iraq war, and I myself am cheering for (metaphorical) casualties. If you find yourself only able to focus on which party stinks worse, then you have adopted the pre-kindergarten “binary choice” rhetoric of the campaign, in which both Trump and Clinton supporters insisted that we must ignore the obvious character defects, financial shenanigans, lies, and foolishness of A or B on the theory that B or A is so much worse that we simply cannot acknowledge any shortcomings on the other side.

…

Those of us who have not entirely surrendered our neocortices to one cable-news tribe or the other are perfectly capable of criticizing Trump and criticizing the media. Of course the American media is terrible. Everybody knows this. Everybody who follows the public debate about guns, taxes, or abortion knows this. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, knows this, which is why he sheepishly acknowledged that the so-called Newspaper of Record and its editors “don’t get religion.” And that is just a little bit of what they don’t get. Other senior editors at major media outlets know this, too. The people who run the Washington Post know this. The reflexive Democratic affiliation of most of the major media is a simple fact of life that you’d have to be foolish or dishonest to deny[.]

The tragedy of all this is that, yeah, we really could use an effective, active, and credible press right now. We have an active one five days out of the week, an effective one five days out of the month, and a credible one . . . not that often. My criticisms of Trump do not go so far as those who believe that he is a budding fascist dictator on the verge of building concentration camps, but if you really did believe that, wouldn’t you wish, at least a little, that the media hadn’t been exactly as hysterical when faced with the bland, anodyne visage of Mitt Romney? Or John McCain? You want to be taken seriously now after insisting that Dick Cheney was the new American Gestapo?

Williams goes on to point out that unfortunately, everyone’s view of a credible source differs greatly. It may be Maddow or Chris Hayes one side of the aisle, and Limbaugh or Hannity on the other side (I’m spit balling here, because honestly, I don’t even know about the right anymore…). Regardless, to my mind, the American people have fought too long and hard to settle for this current lot in life:

We deserve a better press, and a better president, too. If you are the sort of partisan who cannot entertain the possibility that both of these things may be true at the same time, then you ought to consider the possibility that you are one of the reasons why we do not have a better press or a better president.

We need to keep fighting. For both.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana