Update: At a news conference at 3 p.m. ET on Tuesday afternoon, Milo Yiannopoulos announced that he was resigning from his Tech Editor position at Breitbart News.
“Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved. They have allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communities that would otherwise never have heard them,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a statement. “I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately." He added that the decision was his alone.
Original story:
In the span of 24 hours, self-proclaimed internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos lost a book deal and a major speaking gig and may even lose his job after an old video resurfaced of Yiannopoulos defending the idea of older men engaging in sexual activity with underage boys.
Yiannopoulos is an editor at Breitbart News, a site that has become popular with the "alt-right" (AKA white nationalists), where his work has included articles with headlines like "Gay rights have made us dumber, it's time to get back in the closet." In addition, he also harassed a transgender student during his recent college "tour," and last summer he was permanently banned from Twitter for making derogatory statements on the platform against actress Leslie Jones, in which he called her "barely literate" and tweeted about her being "rejected by yet another black dude."
Over the weekend, a conservative website called the Reagan Battalion posted on Twitter old clips of Yiannopoulos, who publicly identifies as gay, on a podcast called "Drunken Peasants." On the podcast, he said he was molested in his teens and tried to explain how the experienced helped him. "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 sort of rock," he argued.
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Regardless of his explanation or personal background, Yiannopoulos's words play into a long history of conservative causes trying to make gay men synonymous with pedophiles or child molesters, a move that tries to equate gayness with sexual perversion and deviance. This myth that pedophilia is part of for gay culture, however, has been debunked by professionals and researchers in the field of child abuse.
On Monday, Simon & Schuster announced that it had decided to cancel its $250,000 book deal with Yiannopoulos, following backlash over the tape. "After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos," the company said to media outlets in a statement. There's no word, however, on if the cancelled book deal means Yiannopoulos loses his advance.
Simon & Schuster isn't the only organization trying to walk back its involvement with Yiannopoulos. Last week, the American Conservative Union, a political organization that rallies around conservative causes, announced that it had invited Yiannopoulos to be a keynote speaker at its Conservative Political Action Conference, a major annual event. Shortly after the video surfaced over the weekend, however, the ACU rescinded the invitation on Monday, several hours before the book deal cancellation.
Furthermore, The Washingtonian reported that Yiannopoulos could potentially lose his position at Breitbart after several staffers threatened to leave the organization if he wasn't fired. "The fact of the matter is that there’s been so many things that have been objectionable about Milo over the last couple of years, quite frankly. This is something far more sinister," one senior editor told The Washingtonian on the subject. "If the company isn’t willing to act, there are at least half a dozen people who are willing to walk out over it."
On his Facebook page, Yiannopoulos said he was "horrified" by pedophilia but defended his words and said the only thing he was guilty of was "imprecise language." He also alleged that the clip was "selectively edited" and a "co-ordinated effort to discredit me from establishment Republicans." He also announced that he'd be holding a longer press conference on Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET to further discuss the tape.
Related: Twitter Troll Milo Yiannopoulos Has Been Given a Book Deal
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