The Americans are not a forgiving lot. They can be harshly judgmental and moralistic. They can be dreadfully PC: left, right and centre. Milo Yiannopoulos is in the process of finding out just how much.
Apparently he made some remarks at some point recently that young gay males might discover who they were by means of sex with older men, and he meant people in their late teens, but the wall has fallen in on him.
I cannot imagine Milo Yiannopoulos NOT having made such remarks at some point in his short and much exposed life. In fact he made them in some radio show somewhere where he thought he had licence to be outrageous. He has suddenly been made aware that the United States is a literal, irony-free society, and can summon a fury of self righteousness in a split second.
In case you have been living in isolation for the past six months Milo Yiannopoulos is a provocative British faggot who has been talking about the dangers of Islam, feminists and political correctness to gays and to freedom in general. He has been getting away with it because he is witty, charming, fundamentally intelligent, faggy, well spoken, and essentially sound in his arguments.
He draws the opprobrium of the political Left the way a tank draws fire on a battlefield; if you cannot knock it out, you are doomed. Yiannopoulos has been drawing fire towards himself, including full scale riots at the U of C campus at Berkeley.
The idea that this fairy imp is a conservative shows how desperate the situation has become. He is only conservative of the right to speak and think; he is in all senses of the word a liberal. He is for freedom in all its forms, especially of thought, speech and whom you can laugh at. Nor is he a leftist.
On Monday, he wrote on Facebook: ‘I’m partly to blame. My own experiences 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 in different ways.’