Milo Yiannopoulos‘ ascension to celebrity became one of the most divisive talking points in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, with the Breitbart Tech editor having taken his “online troll” persona into the mainstream, hosting a series of talks on college campuses while bagging a $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster in the process. But now the wheels are coming off the Milo train, after old footage of the alt-right “provocateur” seemingly condoning child abuse was brought to light by a Conservative blog.
The videos, taken from podcasts/livestreams Milo appeared on last year, show Milo discussing sexual relations between men and “young boys” on both Joe Rogan’s podcast and another hosted by the YouTube show Drunken Peasants. These videos have now been brought to light prior to Milo’s now-cancelled talk at the Conservative Political Action Conference, with the American Conservative Union’s Matt Schlapp releasing a statement regarding the matter. “We continue to believe that CPAC is a constructive forum for controversies and disagreements among conservatives,” Schlapp said. “However, there is no disagreement among our attendees on the evils of sexual abuse of children.” Simon & Schuster also revealed that they would be canceling his book, while there are rumors that Breitbart’s staff members are preparing for a mass exodus if the outlet doesn’t fire him.
Milo has proven to be a useful ally for the alt-right, with him subverting stereotypes of the political group as a result of his homosexuality, while also proving unfailingly persistent when it comes to targeting their perceived “enemies” (i.e. outspoken feminists on Twitter). In many ways he has become the personification of the online alt-righter with a Pepe avatar, funneling their collective anger into more constructive projects, such as “red pilling” young students in his college tour and appearing as a guest on high-profile shows such as Real Talk with Bill Maher. As a result of both this and the right’s general distrust of the mainstream media, there is reluctance on behalf of his supporters to accept his comments as they are being reported, with allegations of “fake news” inevitably encircling this story. So let’s take a look at the videos in question and see just how “fake” they are:
The “Drunken Peasants” Video
This is the full video of the podcast which sparked the unfortunate chain of events for Milo, with it featuring the Breitbart editor appearing alongside YouTube personalities such as TheAmazingAtheist and PaulsEgo. The relevant portion of the video begins at around the 52:25 mark, in which the hosts show a “slanderous” video of Milo appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast (we’ll get to that later) that depicts him as a pedophile apologist.
The video sees Milo responding to his own claims he made that he had slept with an older “drag queen” when he was 13 years old. “So you were a kid and you fucked all kinds of men, correct?” asked the show’s co-host Ben, to which Milo replied: “No, not a kid. I’d say I was a sexually aware, promiscuous 13 or 14-year-old able to give consent…” “If I knew someone my age who had sex with a 13-year-old, I’d be creeped out,” Ben continued. When Ben noted that he’s 35 years old, Milo replied: “Oh, okay, well I’m talking about 28-year-olds.”
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While this could be considered a warped, upsetting viewpoint adopted by a child abuse victim, it’s Milo’s next comments that prove to be the most egregious. “I’ve never said this publicly… but we’re talking about 13/25, 13/28 (year olds), these things do happen perfectly consensually,” he said. “Often, and by the way it is the women who are suffering this, what normally happens in schools is that it’s an older woman with a younger boy, and the boy is the predator in that situation. The boy is like, “let’s see if I can fuck the gym teacher,” or “let’s see if I can fuck the hot maths teacher,” and he does. The women fall in love with these nubile young men, these athletic young boys in their prime, and end up having their lives destroyed. They end up having to move schools, move country or whatever.” Milo then goes on to say that he was the “predator” in his own sexual encounters with older men as a teenager.
Image Credit: YouTube / Drunken Peasants
He continued: “We get hung up on abuse… this is a controversial point of view I accept, but we get hung up on this child abuse stuff, to the point where we’re heavily policing even relationships between consenting adults, grad students and professors at universities.” PaulsEgo added that he doesn’t believe consent is as “black and white” as it is perceived. “But the reason these age of consent laws exist is because we have to set some kind of barometer here. We have to pick an age and say, this is the age where we can reasonably be assured you’re an adult and you can give consent and you understand the risks of pregnancy, for instance.”
“And I think the law is probably about right,” Milo replied. “It’s probably roughly the right age. 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, I know people who were sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world, and in many cases these relationships with older men… and this is one of the reasons I hate the left, their stupid one size fits all policing of culture, this arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent which totally destroys the understanding that many of us have, of the necessities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. People are messy and complex, and in the homosexual world particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort 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 rock…”
At this point co-host Ben interjected, saying that what Milo described “sounded like priest molestation.” Milo replied: “You know what, I wouldn’t give nearly as good head if it wasn’t for Father Michael.” When PaulsEgo pointed out how Milo had previously condemned the left for supposedly supporting pedophilia despite him seemingly doing the same thing, Milo replied: “You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to someone who is 13 years old who is sexually mature, pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty, pedophilia is attraction to people who do not have functioning sex organs yet, who have not gone through puberty, who are too young to be able to understand the way their body works. That is not what we’re talking about. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you think I’m defending it.”
These comments seem to contradict the statement Milo posted on Facebook, which reads: “I do not believe sex with 13-year-olds is okay. When I mentioned the number 13, I was talking about the age I lost my own virginity.” He added: “I am certainly guilty of imprecise language, which I regret,” but this “imprecise language” doesn’t really account for him saying that relationships between 13 and 25 or 28-year-old men happen “perfectly consensually.” In the statement, Milo claims that reuploads of the video were “deceptively edited” with the intention of making him look bad, but the comments above have been taken verbatim from the near 3-hour-long livestream.
The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast
Another video that is resurfacing as a result of this wave of controversy is Milo’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, with him touching on his previous comments with the Drunken Peasants, though expanding further on his sexual contact with the priest he refers to as “Father Michael.” The above video is a condensed reupload of the segment, but you can watch the podcast in full here with this conversation taking place at roughly the 2:33:00 mark.
When Rogan attempted to find out more information about the priest, Milo replied that he’s “going to get lynched.” He added that Rogan was employing a “feminist strategy,” to which Rogan replied: “What, trying to out pedophiles?” “I told you it wasn’t pedophilia,” Milo retorted, adding that he was “something like” 14 years old when the incident took place. “14 is pedophilia, buddy,” Rogan replied. “I don’t know how they rock it in merry old England.” The age of consent in England is 16, while the age of consent in the US ranges from 16-18 between states.
“You’re saying you’ve never seen a 15-year-old girl, at any point in your life, you’ve never seen a 15-year-old girl that you thought was hot?” Milo added, to which Rogan replied: “Yeah, when I was 15!” “No, when you were 25, when you were 30, you will have seen girls that were 15 that you thought were hot,” Milo continued, repeating “bullshit” when Rogan informed him that this wasn’t the case.
Image Credit: YouTube / Joe Rogan Experience
Milo then went on to discuss a Hollywood party he had attended that reportedly had “very young” boys taking drugs and having sex with its guests. “I don’t want to be indiscreet about certain people, because I think it’s going to be dangerous. But I can tell you the truth without dropping anyone in it… some of the boys there were very young. Very young.” He continued: “There were some very young boys around that time … there were some drugs, a lot of twinks taking drugs and having unsafe sex with older men and some of these boys were very young, desperate for a job, y’know?” Milo doesn’t mention the specific ages of the boys at the party, but the implication appears to be that they were below the age of consent, which is why he doesn’t want to discuss the names of those who were at the party. It could also be argued that he didn’t want to “out” any gay men attending the party whose sexual orientation had not been made public, but given the context of the conversation this seems unlikely.
In his Facebook statement, Milo said that he “shouldn’t have used the word “boy” — which gay men often do to describe young men of consenting age — instead of “young man.” That was an error.” However, in the videos he uses “boy” to specifically reference teens from 13 – 15 years of age, which is below the age of consent.
Part of these discussions surrounding Milo’s views on the age of consent certainly come across as a sexual abuse victim attempting to justify the actions of his abusers, even though Milo denied that he had been the victim of such crimes. In those cases, it’s disagreeable to vilify an abuse victim for their coping strategies. However, Milo’s justification of sexual abuse between an adult of consenting age and a minor certainly falls well out of the boundaries of reason, regardless of his retroactive attempts to paint the reporting of his own comments as a hatchet job by the media. Milo said he is “partially to blame” for the resulting controversy, but as evidenced above, these abhorrent comments are entirely his own doing.
