The name Milo Yiannopoulos may have been appearing on your screen recently in the past couple months. Yiannopoulos—to put it in a simple way—is a gay-British provocateur, self-proclaimed troll and journalist who, in a paradoxical way, happened to be the senior editor of a far-right-conservative publication, Breitbart News.
Confused? It gets worst. Yiannopoulos' reporting and TV appearances have infuriated many, including journalists, for attacking and criticizing feminism, homosexuality, Muslims, anti-semitism, Black Lives Matter, immigration, defending the Alt-right group, Donald Trump and—the most recent one—pedophilia. All in the name of free speech.
But things changed recently. He resigned from his position as senior editor of Breitbart News, lost a juicy-book contract, got disinvited to participate as a speaker on the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and was forced to publicly apologize right after a video of him justifying pedophilia started circulating on the internet.
“You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means,” he told the hosts of a podcast a year ago. “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.”
Now to be fair, he never said he agreed or seemed to favor pedophilia. One of the hosts, Joe Rogan, started cornering Yiannopoulos into talking about his early sexual life.
"Did [Father Michael] make you suck his dick?" Rogan asked.
"He didn't make me," Yiannopolous replied.
"How old were you at the time?" Rogan asked.
"Quite young," Yiannopoulos replied, and that is how it all started.
Yiannopoulos told the Rogan that he sought the company of mature men when he was a teen.
"When I was 14, I was the predator," Yiannopoulos said.
The problem here is that Yiannopoulos always chose the most polemical topics to comment on. He would always attempt to say things that would spark a scandalous debate, but that is how he built his career; out of offenses and insults to others.
Yiannopoulos would always justify his doing by using freedom of speech as his shield—as if just because one has the freedom to say whatever the heck one wants, there are no preconceptions to deal with later. Clearly not. Yiannopoulos just taught us that there are lines that others would not allow you to cross; not even the Alt-right's favorite publication.
And this idea that one can call people out "for what they are" or say things "as they are," based on one's views, is a rhetoric some have built their careers on. Just take Ann Coulter and Tomi Lahren.
