This week I was thinking about how crazy it is that problems in society go unsolved, while the greedy placate “prophets for profit.”
The person who comes to mind here is Milo Yiannopoulos, a shock journalist and internet personality who has the ear of the Trump administration and perhaps many of its local supporters.
This week it was reported that footage was released from last year showing Yiannopoulos defending pedophilia. According to the New York Times and the Washington Post, he is shown during a podcast condoning sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and joking about a sexual encounter he claims to have had with a Catholic priest during his teenage years.
“No, no, no. You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means,” Yiannopoulos says. “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.” Yiannopoulos disagrees with the notion that 13-year-olds are children and dismisses consent laws as “arbitrary and repressive.”
Yiannopoulos, who is openly gay and said he was abused as a child, later apologized for his comments and added that he was the victim of a smear campaign. However, the damage was done.
On Monday, publisher Simon & Schuster announced it was canceling the deal it made with Yiannopoulos to release his upcoming book, Dangerous. During the following day, Yiannopoulos resigned from his position as a senior editor for Breitbart News, a site known for its provocative commentary and opinion, after some of its staff demanded action be taken.
Yiannopoulos has been described as a “conservative commentator” and calls himself “a cultural libertarian.” Maybe I’m missing something, but last time I checked there is nothing conservative or libertarian about promoting sexual involvement between children and adults, or making light of it.
Second, I must ask the same question others are asking: Why didn’t Simon & Schuster and other companies that have worked with Yiannopoulos dump him long before this week’s revelation?
Was it not enough that he incited tens of thousands of people to hurl personal insults against people who disagree with them on social media? Was it not enough for Yiannopoulos to cosign misogynist behavior? Was it not enough that he got banned from Twitter — which actually takes effort — for encouraging racist and sexist trolling against actress and comedian Leslie Jones?
Roxane Gay, an author and English professor at Purdue University, was on point when she said this week that Simon & Schuster made a business decision the same way they made a business decision when they decided to publish Yiannopoulos’ book in the first place, and when his comments about pedophilia/pederasty came to light, the publisher realized it would cost more money to proceed with him than he could earn for them.
“They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies,” said Gay, who canceled the upcoming release of her own book, Hunger, with the publisher after its earlier decision to release it and Yiannopoulos’ book on the same day, June 13.
“They were fine with his transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. They were fine with how he encourages his followers to harass women and people of color and transgender people online. A great many people were perfectly comfortable with the targets of Milo’s hateful attention until that attention hit too close to home.”
Taking this matter a step further, I would like to ask: Why didn’t more conservatives and Republicans speak out and distance themselves from Yiannopoulos before the Conservative Political Action Conference canceled its invitation for him to speak?
It is true that free speech is an American virtue protected by the First Amendment, and Yiannopoulos should be able to freely express his views. However, true conservatives should not stand by as individuals like Yiannopoulos try to distort the conservative political brand.
Eugene Scott, a CNN political reporter who is African-American, said it best when he wrote, “Milo is sometimes called a conservative journalist. That’s unfair to conservatives. That’s unfair to journalists.”
This issue is important, given that conservatives are usually associated with the Republican Party, and that party now has control of our federal and state governments. Currently, it seems there are two conservative groups vying for influence in the GOP: those who promote traditional conservative principles, and those of the so-called alt-right, which has often been tied to people with racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, homophobic, neo-Nazi and white supremacist views.
Since we now have a government dominated by conservatives, it is important to ensure they are at least guided by a form of conservatism that is productive and not destructive.
For generations, conservatives ranging from Black activist Booker T. Washington, who promoted education and entrepreneurship as the keys to real freedom, to free market advocate Milton Friedman, who has a foundation in Indianapolis named after him, have promoted conservative principles based on what they see as the proper role of government and the individual.
That kind of conservatism often highlights the importance of strong families, the rewards that come from hard work and the “rugged individualism” that shows how prosperous a person can become with excellence in their craft and without the burden of regulations.
Even recent commentators such as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, despite their relentless criticism of the Obama administration, have usually stated their views without resorting to matters of race, religion, gender and sexual orientation.
Yiannopoulos, on the other hand, has called himself a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right. His former boss at Breitbart, current White House advisor Steve Bannon, has called Breitbart “a platform” of the alt-right, a movement whose negative internal divisions could spread like a cancer throughout the country.
It could be said that Yiannopoulos is a “prophet for profit,” or someone who preaches and promotes certain principles for financial gain, without living up to the principles themselves. One can see this just by taking a look at his questionable financial dealings with The Kernel, a technology publication, and the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant, a scholarship supposedly created for “disadvantaged white men.”
People who are true to their stated political beliefs spend time showing how those beliefs can make society better; they don’t waste time fueling hate with inflammatory comments and attacking celebrities.
In other words, there is a difference between real conservatives who want to promote solutions in our community and ambitious people who seek fame by telling conservatives what they want to hear.
I can only pray that enough supporters of Trump and the GOP can tell the difference.
