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.”