Breitbart editor out following outrage
Yiannopoulos, in interview, condoned sexual relations with boys as young as 13
Milo Yiannopoulos, the incendiary writer who helped make Breitbart News a leading organ of the alt-right, resigned from the news organization Tuesday after a video of him endorsing pedophilia resurfaced online over the weekend.
Yiannopoulos has been a flame-throwing provocateur whose writing has offended women, Muslims, blacks and gay people ever since former Breitbart executive chairman Stephen Bannon hired him as a senior editor in 2014.
Bannon, now President Donald Trump’s senior adviser, championed the Britishborn Yiannopoulos’ inflammatory commentary and promoted him as a conservative truth-teller and champion of free speech.
In turn, his popularity helped raise Breitbart’s profile among Trump’s supporters and the alt-right, a vaguely defined collection of nationalists, anti-immigration proponents and antiestablishment conservatives. Adherents of the alt-right are known for espousing racist, anti-Semitic and sexist points of view.
“Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved,” Yiannopoulos said in a statement announcing his resignation. “They have been a significant factor in my success.”
But Yiannopoulos’ views on pedophilia apparently went too far even for Breitbart.
The site was under pressure to take action against Yiannopoulos, 32, from its own staff, which had threatened to revolt if he wasn’t fired or disciplined, according to people familiar with the discussions.
In a video interview early last year, Yiannopoulos condoned sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and joked about a sexual encounter he said he had with a Catholic priest as a teenager.
“You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means,” he told the hosts of a podcast. “Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty.”
A group called the Reagan Battalion was among those calling attention to the interview to highlight its opposition to Yiannopoulos’s speaking role at the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference in the Washington area.
The reemergence of the video triggered a cascade of adverse consequences for Yiannopoulos.
First, CPAC’s organizer, the American Conservative Union, rescinded its invitation to him as a conference speaker.
Then publisher Simon & Schuster canceled an agreement to publish Yiannopoulos’s forthcoming memoir, Dangerous, for which it paid him a $250,000 advance.
The publisher said it decided to cancel the book — which had drawn opposition even before the pedophilia flap — “after careful consideration.”