Revisionism
There's no defending Milo Yiannopoulos, but that doesn't justify the Berkeley riots against him
Today we know that Milo Yiannopoulos is a very disturbed individual who has been involved in, and advocated, detestable things. That's why the Conservative Political Action Conference rightly revoked its invitation to him to speak. It also appears to have cost him his book deal with Simon & Schuster, and may cost him his job at Breitbart as well.
Tough stuff, but given what we now know about the guy, there is simply no defending him. (And if you're inclined to try, you might want to check this out first. If you're still inclined to try, please leave HermanCain.com.)
As to the larger question of whether Yiannopoulos's known opinions prior to this qualified him as a real conservative as opposed to some sort of alt-right provocateur, I'll just say this: Conservatives sometimes make the mistake of thinking that anyone who enrages the left must be their friend, and that more enraged the left is, the better the friend. Yeah. That's a mistake.
I don't want to give Yiannopoulos a lot of space here now, especially since I never gave him much space before. The only time I ever mentioned him, as far as I can recall, was when this happened. The scary right-winger's invasion of the Berkeley safe spaces was simply too much for the these left coast snowflakes, and the inevitable response was violence, fires and property destruction.
Now that we know what a twisted individual Yiannopoulos is, let's not revise history. The Berkeley riots took place 20 days ago. None of this was publicly known at the time. Their problem with Yiannopoulos was that he holds opinions they didn't like, and they were willing to riot rather than see those opinions expressed on their campus.
By the way, I do not need to be offering a defense of every Yiannopoulos opinion to object to the riots. It would be gratuitous for me to sit here and tell you all my objections to Yiannopoulos's worldview now because I didn't do it then. That's because it wasn't the point. The point was that in America we aren't afraid to let a person express a point of view, and we don't entertain the idiotic idea that if you come and say something at my invitation, that means I legitimized what you said.
When I ran the old North Star syndicate, I distributed writers who were very left-wing. At least two of them were atheists. At least three were socialists. I sold their columns to newspapers for money. That was the business I was in. I was not "legitimizing" their opinions and I often wrote my own opinions countering theirs. But everyone got a chance to have their say. No one was afraid of that and no one rioted.
UC Berkeley and its rioting snowflakes can't use the excuse of what's now known about Yiannopoulos to justify what happened three weeks ago. All they were doing then was violently acting out their fear of a point of view. There is no more defending that than there is defending Yiannopoulos now.
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