[And timing is everything. The day after I wrote an encomium to Milo, who speaks forcefully about (among other things) gender dysphoria and the danger to children in bathrooms, PJ Media claims he supports gay pedophilia — or, at least, being a provocateur, provocatively says things he implies he does. Milo is certainly firm in his outrage against the accusation. His defense makes sense to me, especially given how familiar I am with gay culture thanks to growing up and working in SF. This new data point doesn’t change the main points below. Here’s the deal: gay culture is different and one of Milo’s strengths is that he says America should not subordinate itself to gay culture.]

UPDATE: Milo seems to have been destroyed. Despite his books status as a best seller, Simon & Schuster has dumped it. Breitbart is silent about him.

As best as I can tell, thanks to Stephen Green’s research, these are the two worst things Milo said that would lead to an accusation that he’s a pedophile:

Milo’s money quote, which was edited out of the video, is this:

The law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age. I think 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, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way. In many cases actually those relationships with older men…This is one reason I hate the left. This stupid one size fits all policing of culture. (People speak over each other). This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys you know understanding that many of us have. The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex. 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 and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents. Some of those relationships are the most -”

And this was edited out as well:

“You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13-years-old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet. Who have not gone through puberty… That’s not what we are talking about. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you are saying I’m defending it because I’m certainly not.”

In other words, Milo never said that he had sex with little boys or that he intended to do so. What he did say was that older gay men often introduce younger gay men into sex. I certainly saw that enough when I was living and working in San Francisco. It was too common practice for sexually confused 20 or 22 year olds to be taken under the wing of a 30 or 40 year old gay man. It was not pedophilia, it was gay mentoring and it’s obvious that Milo is referring to that practice.

As for Milo’s comment about pedophilia being a perverted passion for children who have not gone through adolescence, he’s correct. He’s also correct that children mature at different speeds. In my neighborhood, one kid at 12 had a nascent mustache and a voice deeper than my husband’s. Another finally got his growth spurt when he went off to college, although he’s still not shaving. Having said that, Milo made it clear that, given this variability, he has no problem with the current age of consent laws.

It’s very disturbing that this take-down of one of the most effective voices for conservativism came from the #NeverTrump crowd having a petty pique fit over Milo’s invitation to CPAC. Having said that, the information was out there, and if the renegade right hadn’t published it, the Lefties would have and in a way that was even worse.

I’ve heard from friends that Lefties are already piling on to this man who did nothing wrong other than making observations about the realities of the gay world and the physical maturation process. More than that, I find it incredibly ironic that this tut-tutting comes from the Left. These are the same people who demand that condoms, birth control advice, and abortion information should be given to kids as young as 11 in their schools, and who insist that a child can get an abortion with an adult okaying it something that is, of course, the best possible way for a true pedophile to destroy any genetic evidence of his crime.

And by the way, if this seems familiar, you’re seeing the same takedown that the Left and #NeverTrumpers did to Trump. He observed accurately enough that, if you’re rich and famous, women will indeed let you do anything to them. He did not say that he took advantage of this reality, yet he was instantly called a molester and subjected to the harshest castigation. And of course, most of the screaming came from the same side that was fine with Clinton raping women and using the pressure of his fame and power to coerce a women young enough to be his daughter to engage in a sordid workplace affair.

This whole thing sickens and disgusts me. We are in a political sewer in our country.

And now back to my original post.

Milo Yiannopoulos — rude and crude, but also smart, brave, funny, and bitchy. He’s a necessary counterweight to Progressives’ lethal Political Correctness.

With a swirling debate about whether Milo Yiannopoulos will be a keynote speaker at this year’s CPAC, I have a confession: I didn’t like Milo Yiannopoulos when he first popped up on my radar. At a first, superficial, glance, he was everything that rubs me the wrong way: His humor seemed to rely on crude insults and too often to trade in racial and religious stereotypes, he relentlessly leveraged those insults and stereotypes into media face time which seemed to drag conservativism down not build it up, and he had that whole drag queen vibe. I have issues, which I’ll explain in a few minutes, with the drag queen vibe. Having reached these conclusions, I dismissed Milo. There. Done.

The thing is, if you’re a conservative, Milo is not a person who can be — or should be — dismissed. I first got an inkling of this from my teenage son. Sick and tired of being on the receiving end of misanthropic third-wave feminist tirades at his school (which cannot be challenged because doing so is an unacceptable manifestation of cisgender male privilege and domination), he headed to the internet looking for rebuttals to these feminists. Even if the school’s uber-liberal environment bans voicing the rebuttals, at least he had the comfort of knowing they were there.

My son’s research led him directly to Steve Crowder and Milo. He appreciated Crowder’s unflinching, and almost invariably funny, take Islam’s issues with the West and he was completely awed at Milo’s ability to (in my son’s words) “destroy those feminazis.” My son therefore insisted I watch Milo’s epic feminazi destruction in action. I agreed, somewhat worried that I’d get one of Milo’s unpleasant, uber-queenie, racist, shock-value moments. Instead, I got this:

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