Political correctness holds too strong a grip on too much of American life these days. Religious citizens who politely and conscientiously object to working gay weddings may be crushed by the state and driven into bankruptcy. In academia, the very place where the life of the mind is supposed to flourish, critiques of Islam, feminism, or transgenderism may be treated as thought crimes to be stamped out. On many a college campus today, saying 2+2=4 is an act of rebellion.
And so some conservatives have been drawn to Milo Yiannopoulos, a rebel whose cause is provoking the left and promoting himself. The flamboyantly gay Yiannopoulos made a name for himself as a Breitbart News personality who took his anti-p.c. message to colleges across the country on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour. Yiannopoulos made more headlines last week when he was announced as a headline speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and then disinvited two days later, after attention was drawn to a video in which he defended sex between adults and children as young as 13. “We’re talking about 13[-year-olds with] 25[-year-olds], 13[-year-olds with] 28[-year-olds]—these things do happen perfectly consensually,” he said in a January 2016 video. “In the gay world,” he went on, “some of the most important, enriching, and incredibly life-affirming, important shaping relationships [are] very often between younger boys and older men; they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys.”
The Yiannopoulos affair is a reminder that just because many on the left have lost their minds, along with any sense of decency and civility, that’s no excuse for conservatives to do the same. It shouldn’t have taken a video in which Yiannopoulos said child rape could be “perfectly consensual” for conservatives to cut their ties. His anti-Semitism and racism should have been enough. As Ben Shapiro, a conservative and Yiannopoulos’s former Breitbart colleague, wrote on February 3 at the Daily Wire:
When CPAC organizer Matt Schlapp appeared on Morning Joe on February 21, he explained that Yiannopoulos had been disinvited because his pederasty comments crossed “very important boundaries,” but he suggested anti-Semitism was not one of those boundaries. Joe Scarborough asked Schlapp: “[Yiannopoulos] has also made some extraordinarily offensive anti-Semitic remarks. So can’t you find somebody else . . . to fire off a speech against p.c. codes on college campuses? Get anybody at CPAC that’s not an anti-Semite?”
“Joe, it’s a fair point. But the other point is that, whether we like it or not, he is a big voice in this movement,” Schlapp replied. “The question is this: Is it okay for people who are offensive to speak on campus? And that was the point of why he was invited.”
What nonsense. Of course it is okay for people who are offensive to speak on campus. The violence and intimidation that shut down a Yiannopoulos speech earlier this month at Berkeley was criminal. College students who shout down speakers invited to campus are a disgrace. But supporting the right to free speech, including vile speech, does not obligate anyone to honor and promote vile speech.
As for the claim that Yiannopoulos is already a “big voice,” that looks more like an excuse to justify a poor decision. More important, it ignores the duty of conservatives to marginalize rather than elevate such voices. Yiannopoulos didn’t rise to semi-prominence all on his own. Breitbart News, whose former head Stephen Bannon is now President Trump’s chief strategist, gave Yiannopoulos a job and bankrolled his college tour. “Mr. Yiannopoulos, whose college tour was being subsidized by Breitbart, did not charge a fee,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported following a recent speech. “[Steve Bannon] made me into a star,” Yiannopoulos said in November 2016.
Bannon acknowledged that he wanted to make Breitbart News into a “platform for the alt-right.” In 2014 remarks, Bannon shrugged off anti-Semitic and racist elements within right-wing European parties and movements because “over time it all gets kind of washed out, right? People understand what pulls them together, and the people on the margins I think get marginalized more and more.”
That comment glosses over how marginalization takes place. It ignores the important work it took from prominent conservatives—men like William F. Buckley Jr.—to purge the American conservative movement of anti-Semitism. It ignores the role of people who control microphones and assemble audiences in deciding which “big voices” they will choose to amplify. Technological changes in the media may have made it more difficult to marginalize vile speech, but that’s no excuse for anyone who pretends to care about American conservatism to promote the idea that such speech is within the bounds of civil discourse.
