During the 2017 primaries, Hillary Clinton spoke so eloquently about how accepting the presidential election results was the “way our democracy works,”
“We’ve been around 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections and we’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them.”
It was a nice little speech about how democracy works in America. Then, when the results of the election showed Donald Trump to be the clear winner, all that talk about “accept[ing] the outcome” no longer mattered. It was Hillary and her supporters who didn’t accept the results of the election; 240 years down the drain.
This had to be the biggest example of hypocrisy I have ever witnessed.
Then, far-right provocateur and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at U.C. Berkeley on February 1, at the invitation of the local campus group of conservatives. But the University students and professors had other plans.
The university came under lockdown when riots and protests caused the campus (and Milo himself) to cancel his speaking engagement because of safety issues. The campus suffered smashed windows, overturned cars, fires, as well as people being assaulted, and rocks being thrown at the police.
The whole situation was rife with irony and hypocrisy. Berkeley is known for starting the “free speech” movement in 1964. The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley when students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech.
The riots were lambasted by the Right and by Conservatives as a ban on free speech. This was the topic on all the alternative media websites, on all the newsites, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and you name it. There was no way to escape the coverage.
Fast forward to February 20, 2017.
The American Conservative Union, the “premier conservative voice” had invited Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference which will be headlined by Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Steve Bannon, and Reince Priebus.
The CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp told Hollywood Reporter that Milo was booked after the protests of his U.C. Berkeley appearance prevented him from speaking: “An epidemic of speech suppression has taken over college campuses. Milo has exposed their liberal thuggery and we think free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective.”
The ACU eventually gave in to pressure and decided to rescind the invitation when the Breitbart editor appeared to “condone pedophilia” in a newly released video online.
I guess for Schlapp, free speech only pertains to bashing the Left and calling them out on their hypocrisy. What does Schlapp think that Milo was going to be talking about at the CPAC? Something from the obscure video of him that had edited out the context of his outrageous conversation or just maybe, something that had to do with politics?
In the recently resurfaced episode of “The Drunken Peasants” podcast, Mr Yiannopoulos recalled his own sexual abuse as a teen and appeared not to condemn similar relationships between children and men. In the podcast, Milo said young boys “discover who they are” through these types of relationships.
All this false outrage and finger pointing over pedophilia at a person who wrote an earlier column in Breitbart, “Here’s Why the Progressive Left Keeps Sticking Up for Pedophiles” blaming the Left for defending pedophilia. He writes,
“Pedophilia itself is of course not confined to one side of the political spectrum. But defending it does seem to be. Pro-pedophile activism continues to surface on the Left in a way that it simply doesn’t on the Right.”
You might want to rethink that point Milo.
There had been some controversy about the invitation of Milo in the first place. The controversy? Some on the Right at CPAC didn’t consider Milo to be a conservative but a spokesperson for the alt-right and were clearly critical of the CPAC’s invitation. It’s no surprise that the podcast episode of “The Drunken Peasants” were repackaged and published on Twitter by the conservative group The Reagan Battalion just before the convention.
The Reagan Battalion is funded by the “Never Trump” organization Stop Trump PAC which is associated also with 2016 presidential candidate Evan McMullin. The Stop Trump PAC was the creation of Nathan Lerner.
Lerner is also the executive director of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, which describes itself on Twitter as “the home of #AntiTrump movement. #BoycottTrump app developer & #TrumpLeaks creators.”
The Reagan Battalion, Nathan Lerner, and the Stop Trump PAC may either be funded by Obama’s Organizing for Action group (OFA) or part of the Deep State.
Now, of course it goes without saying that I don’t approve of pedophilia, and that’s not the point of my blog post. The point is, where’s the outrage that freedom of speech is being suppressed?
Where are all the Conservatives at who condemned U.C. Berkeley for preventing Milo from “unpopular” speech? Where’s the strict Constitutionalists and the pro-First Amendment crowd?
When you get down to the nitty-gritty, there’s no difference between the Liberals and Conservatives, or any politician for that matter. The only difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives are that the Conservatives didn’t destroy or burn the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center down.
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