By Matthew Vadum -- Front Page Mag——Bio and Archives--March 2, 2018
American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
I was very glad to meet everyone at a recent lunch. You seem to be a great group of students with serious aspirations and a strong interest in conservatism. As you will recall, in my remarks I expressed the hope that you would follow the traditional debating society model of the Harvard Republicans rather than the epater les SJWs performance art model of the University of Colorado Republicans as described in Binder and Wood’s Becoming Right. You will also recall a very specific corollary I mentioned: Do not invite Milo Yiannopoulos. It was for this reason that I was surprised when I learned Tuesday that you were doing exactly that, and for a talk entitled “10 Things I Hate About Mexico.”Rossman certainly had a lot of leverage over people he had only met with one time. Apparently, not inviting Yiannopoulos was an order, not a suggestion, along the lines of an offer from Don Corleone that couldn’t be refused. The professor refers to himself as “one of the few conservative faculty at UCLA, and one of a very few who knows the campus club.” He vowed in the open letter that “should the event go forward, I will decline to have any association with the Bruin Republicans until it has experienced a complete turnover in membership." Rossman described the talk by Yiannopoulos as “evil on the merits,” and attacked conservatives for their willingness “to embrace a man who says despicable things for the purpose of ‘triggering snowflakes.’”
Support Canada Free Press
In two years, and dozens of colleges, I have never seen students crumble this quickly before. And all because I wanted to tell a few jokes about MS-13. It’s shameful. 60 million people in America voted for Donald Trump and their point of view is being exterminated from public life — with the help of so-called Republicans on campus. This is why the Left wins and will continue to win the big cultural victories: conservatives in this country have no stomach for the fight.Rossman is engaging in “intimidation, plain and simple,” according to Milo:
This is a new front in the Left's war on campus conservatism: applying pressure in the media while pretending to respect free speech to bully students into canceling the most popular -- and therefore the most dangerous -- conservative speakers.
I’m not even far-right, or all that controversial. I'm a gay Jewish immigrant married to an African-American who talks about free speech. But because I'm effective, and popular, and because unlike other conservative speakers I persuade moderates, the censors go crazy any time my name is mentioned. And so do the snobs of the Republican establishment who can't understand how someone as gauche and attention seeking as me could possibly be popular.The conservative movement needs an intellectual street fighter like Milo Yiannopoulos and what his critics deride as his performance art. Milo reaches people conservatives traditionally have difficulty reaching and has the good sense not to accept his enemies’ premises. As Mark Bauerlein, an English professor of at Emory University and Senior Editor at First Things Magazine, writes at Newsmax,
When your own political leaders let the other side set the terms and put you ever on the defensive, you want someone like Milo to cut the game off from the start. Forget whether President Trump spoke inappropriately in a closed meeting. Instead, he's likely to say, "Democrats ought to stop acting like teenage girls indignant over what one of them said about another one. Grow up!" Or something funnier than what I can come up with. This is why Milo matters. Reputable Republicans push for tax cuts, but they wilt whenever a charge of racism is in the air. They want market deregulation, but they don't want to go near LGBT issues no matter how much Human Rights Campaign bullies and smears social conservatives. Battles are being fought over religion, manhood, historical statues, and bias at Google, but "responsible" conservatives want to avoid them. Liberals and leftists have made them nervous and conciliatory.There are conservatives like Gabriel Rossman who want to be seen as respectable, and there are conservatives like Milo Yiannopoulos who want to win and take America back from the Left. The Rossmans of the conservative movement had their chance. They need to step aside for someone who can get the job done.
View Comments
Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.