Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos resigns from Breitbart News
Milo Yiannopoulos, the conservative provocateur whose comments on race have been assailed by Democrats and Republicans alike, resigned Tuesday from his senior editor position at Breitbart News.
In recent days, nearly a dozen reporters at the conservative news organization had threatened to resign if Yiannopoulos was not fired for remarks he made that critics said endorsed pedophilia.
Moreover, Yiannopoulos, a staunch defender of the alt-right white nationalist movement, was supposed to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, but his invitation was rescinded Monday. And Simon & Schuster announced it was canceling the publication of Yiannopoulos’ upcoming book, “Dangerous.”
Yiannopoulos denounced pedophilia and said his words were taken out of context.
“Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved,” he said in a statement Tuesday. “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.”
Shortly after it was announced he would speak at CPAC, a viral online video was released, showing Yiannopoulos making comments that many felt were supportive of pedophilia.
“In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men – the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship – those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents,” he said in a video leaked on Twitter by a conservative group called the Reagan Battalion.
After Yiannopoulos announced his resignation, Breitbart News released a statement, calling the 32-year-old a “bold voice (that) has sparked much-needed debate on important cultural topics confronting universities, the LGBTQ community, the press, and the tech industry.”
In the last year, Yiannopoulos has, among other things, called Black Lives Matter activists “extremists,” said “America has a Muslim problem” and suggested that women should stop going online so “I, Donald Trump and the rest of the alpha males will continue to dominate the Internet without feminist whining.”
Last month, the University of California, Berkeley canceled a speech Yiannopoulos was set to deliver after violent protests erupted.