Milo Yiannopoulos Uninvited From Keynoting At Conservative Confab In Washington

Two days after being invited to deliver keynote address at Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., controversial Breitbart Senior Editor Milo Yiannopoulos has been un-invited after the org seems to have discovered he is an unapologetic provocateur.

The invitation retraction comes same day the group announced that it had confirmed President Donald Trump to speak at the annual event and three days after Yiannopoulos’ controversial appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher.

Over the weekend, conservative blog Reagan Battalion posted a Yiannopoulos interview clip in which he made a flippant remark about pedophilia. The blog opposes Yiannopoulos’ scheduled appearance at CPAC, which begins Wednesday in Maryland.

“An epidemic of speech suppression has taken over college campuses,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp said when the booking was announced. “Milo has exposed their liberal thuggery and we think free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective.”

In the clip from a 2016 episode of The Drunken Peasants podcast, Yiannopoulos talked about his own sexual abuse as a teen. When he flippantly said young boys “discover who they are” through such relationships, the podcast host responded it “sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me.”

“I’m grateful for Father Michael,” Yiannopoulos replied. “I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him.”

Yiannopoulos has issued a statement in response to the Reagan Battalion post, in which he writes: “I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim. I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors. I am horrified by pedophilia and I have devoted large portions of my career as a journalist to exposing child abusers.”

The videos, some of which he claims are “edited deceptively,” paint a different picture, he acknowledged.

“I’m partly to blame,” Yiannopoulos said. :My own experience as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, ‘advocacy.’ I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past I different ways.

“Anyone who suggests I turn a blind eye … to the abuse of minors is unequivocally wrong. I am implacably opposed to the normalization of pedophilia, and I will continue to report and speak accordingly.”

Yiannopoulos has been the eye of many media storms of late, including his just-canceled book deal with Simon & Schuster; his planned speech at UC Berkeley that was canceled after protests turned violent; and his appearance on Maher’s show, which caused one guest to drop out.

Yiannopoulos’ CPAC speech would have been broadcast on C-SPAN.

Back in July, Yiannopoulos got banned from Twitter after attacking Leslie Jones on the microblogging site, stemming from her role in Paul Feig-directed Ghostbusters.

On Friday, he told Maher, as he had told ABC News’ Nightline previously, that he is a “virtuous troll” and mocks celebrities pretending to be fragile wallflowers when in fact they are sitting at home crying into their iPhones. He added that he was merely giving Jones’ movie a bad review.

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