There is almost nothing more obnoxious than self-righteous commentators, conservative or liberal, treating every news development as an existential crisis. In fact, as a conservative, I find it even more irritating when other conservatives engage in this race to register the most indignant social media reaction to breaking stories.
I suspect this shared disdain for politically correct virtue-signaling is what attracted so many conservatives to Milo Yiannopoulos in the first place, and I urge them not to adapt it in their reactions to his disinvitation from the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Over the past couple of years, Yiannopoulos’ articulate and unapologetic takedowns of the political correctness advanced by elitists in both parties resonated powerfully and were especially alluring to conservatives coming from a homosexual British Catholic with Jewish heritage, a living rebuttal to the Left’s narrative that their opponents are all humorless simpletons who prey on marginalized people.
Much ink can and will be spilled analyzing CPAC’s decision to disinvite Yiannopoulos from speaking this week.
The conference was given an unfortunate gift in the form of an old video dredged from the depths of the internet where Yiannopoulos, himself a victim of sexual abuse, appeared to defend the practice of older men having sex with teenage boys.
That made CPAC’s decision easy.
In a statement announcing the disinvitation, American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp explained, “we initially extended the invitation knowing that the free speech issue on college campuses is a battlefield where we need brave, conservative standard-bearers.”
That is accurate. But Milo Yiannopoulos is not, and has never been, a conservative standard-bearer.
He is open about that.
Yiannopoulos is a smart libertarian polemicist who traffics in hyperbole that happens to align with conservatives’ stance on political correctness. Allowing him to implicitly represent conservatism behind College Republican podiums has been profoundly confusing for thousands of young people who are working to forge the set of beliefs that will inform their decisions for decades to come.
As someone who genuinely enjoyed his humor as early as the Gamergate controversy that rocketed him to prominence, I saw it as all great fun until conservatives began to claim Yiannopoulos as their own, allowing him to speak for us.
I could spend days outlining the myriad ways Yiannopoulos damaged the conservative movement, and the temptation is strong, but we’ve allowed ourselves to be distracted by him for long enough.
It is now time to move on.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
