Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos on Monday lost a book deal and his speaking slot at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after an older video resurfaced that showed him condoning sexual relationships with young boys and joking about instances of pedophilia within the Roman Catholic church.
“We initially extended the invitation knowing that the free speech issue on college campuses is a battlefield where we need brave, conservative standard-bearers,” Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, told the New York Times in a statement, referring to Yiannopoulos’s CPAC speech. But Schlapp decided to rescind his invitation after backlash over the video, calling Yiannopoulos’ comments “disturbing.”
Simon & Schuster, whose book deal with Yiannpoulos had already been controversial, said Monday that it would cancel publication of Yiannopoulos’ book Dangerous, which was set to be released next month.
“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,” Yiannpoulos said in a statement Monday, arguing that the video was “edited deceptively.”
The video featured Yiannopoulos’ interview with The Drunken Peasants podcast.
“In the homosexual world particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men the sort of coming of age relationships relationships in which those older men have helped those young boys to discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable — and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents,” Yiannpoulos said in the interview.