Jim Wagner
Straight eye for the queer guy
By Jim Wagner
The devolving saga of the world's most dangerous faggot is tragic for a multitude of reasons, not only on a personal level but more particularly as it is playing out on the political battlefield. I have seen several articles about Milo Yiannopoulos' recent dis-invitation by the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), and nearly all of them have one thing in common. The authors, many of whom I admire by the way, don't know much at all about Milo. And they don't seem to care. Derek Hunter went so far as to offer as his opening – as a point of pride in fact – that he knows nothing about Milo. https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2017/02/23/cpacs-selfinflicted-wound-n2289132 And Cliff Kincaid lightly dismisses Milo with the platitude that there can be no such thing as a homosexual conservative. http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kincaid/170222
But tell that to Tammy Bruce, who entered the fight as a champion of conservative values long ago and identified "The New Thought Police" before most "real conservatives" had even begun to realize that political correctness is a battle tactic of the left designed to gain absolute power over us by suppressing not only our speech but the ideas upon which it must necessarily be based. Tammy Bruce became a lesbian during her teens, after she was seduced by the wife of actor Bill Bixby. A former president of National Organization for Women (NOW) in LA and national spokeswoman for both abortion and radical feminism, today, while still a lesbian, she is one of the staunchest warriors against progressive Fascism, and against radical feminism in particular.
If we are to "hate the sin but love the sinner," how will that be possible if none of those guilty of that one particular sin can be accepted as allies, even in the most limited sense? From whence will our converts come, if not from amongst the sinners? Not all of them will come to us like St Paul, delivered from the gates of hell all at once by a full and blinding revelation and miraculously elevated from our foremost persecutor to our most energetic apostle. Most of them will convert gradually, with fear and trembling, trial by trial and bit by bit, like the rest of us. At least that is possible if we give them the chance. And Milo has already come a very long way along his personal road to Damascus.
As preface to what I am about to say, I should explain that as a 12 year old boy scout I was molested by a scouting official. To make a long story short, my parents caught me with a hunting knife tucked up my sleeve, heading off to a scout meeting which over my objections they had insisted I attend. Under the bright lights that glared above our kitchen table they extracted from me that I intended to kill the man rather than submit to his advances. So I know very well what child sexual exploitation is. And I find it both morally repugnant and palpably disgusting.
All of this happened before any real harm was done me, or at least any physical harm. But that is not to say that attempts to sexually exploit me did not leave a psychological mark. I feel a particularly visceral disgust towards anyone who would corrupt a child in that way. And yet in spite of my revulsion, or rather because of it, I am open to the possibility that one less fortunate than myself, one who was truly and destructively exploited, can still strive toward the light. So I try to imagine what it would be like to be homosexual as a result of such tragic victimization (roughly half of all male homosexuals were first seduced by an adult male while they were still boys), and at the same time be a lover of truth.
How would one come out of the closet with that burden, particularly in these times when to be gay is presumptively to be progressive? In the case of Milo Yiannopoulos, one might say that the spirit seems heroically willing while the flesh remains conspicuously weak. And yet how lonely he must be in his particular struggle. Having eschewed all things of the left but that one dreadful compulsion that was imposed upon him against his will, and now broadly mistrusted by conservatives who repudiate him with their fists full of stones, Milo is an army of one. And the Philistines are many.
I have been an observer of Milo for perhaps the last year. While his act is not ready for the children's hour, it is often thought provoking and insightful. I have watched many of his videos, including some of his panel appearances with Christina Hoff Summers of The War on Boys fame. He is wildly entertaining, brilliant in argument, disarmingly suave, and contagiously persuasive. But more importantly, he stands with us on every social issue I can think of, from radical feminism and abortion to homosexuality and gay marriage. And he is willing to beard the leftist lion in its den, as he recently did at Berkeley. In short, he is William F. Buckley with a more pronounced lisp. And he has fortitude. When they spit on him, he calls it dew. All of which goes to suggest that he is indeed dangerous.
But is he dangerous to us? Perhaps, if we have latent gay inclinations.... Yes, his mannerisms are disconcerting and even off-putting. I would never argue that we should employ him to babysit our children. (But of course I wouldn't let most of our colleges do that either.) On the other hand, I have seen Milo lament his homosexuality and say not only that he would not choose to be "gay" but that he does not believe many homosexuals would choose it. And he opposes gay marriage specifically because it will promote to young people the misguided notion that homosexuality is a good or fulfilling life choice.
Milo calls himself "the world's most dangerous faggot" because he challenges most of the underlying assumptions of the left. He also mocks his own sexual proclivities, though often admittedly by flamboyant exaggeration, whistling, as it were, as he passes the graveyard. And like Tammy Bruce, he is open about the fact that he was seduced as a child into his sexual abnormality. But more importantly, he fights with enormous courage and persistence for those essential values invidiously labelled "libertarian" by Pharisees of the right. But these are values more properly identified as "classically liberal." They are the values of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. But sadly, these are just the values which many of today's pocketbook conservatives secretly despise. (I am referring in particular to those die-hard "Never Trump" conservatives.) Milo stands, in other words, for the Bill of Rights.
And this is Milo's true sin. Like Donald Trump, he is a threat not to that moral establishment of which we hope one day to be a part, but to the comfortable establishment of Mammon. Those in the Washington apparatus, and those who aspire to be, see Milo in the same way they see Trump. And for that reason he has many of the same enemies. How is it that, of all the avant garde agitators out there striving to bring down our society by introducing novel theories about the evils of Western Civilization, not one has ever been called a "provocateur" by the establishment right? Not the "Black Lives Matter" instigators! Not the leaders of the "Occupy Movement!" Even Keith Ellison, recently promoted to the number two position in the Democratic National Committee and a proud Louis Farrakhan acolyte, has ever been called a provocateur. Even the famed "artist" Robert Bullwhip-Butt Mapplethorpe has never been called a provocateur by any conservative, as far as I know.
And yet you will rarely see Milo's name in print or hear it on Fox News without encountering the mandatory "provocateur" as a qualifier. The sudden outrage over Milo's likely wistful but certainly unwise approval of pederasty (not pedophilia – there is a difference) is disheartening to be sure. (Like Trump, he was careless with his words.) But what are we to make of those now rending their garments over him? Were they not able to infer from the fact that he is gay the corollary that he is attracted to pubescent boys? That redundancy seems obvious enough to me. To be clear, I do not in any way support Milo's sick inclination, or his folly in exposing it. But what did they imagine his homosexuality was all about? Did they think he had fantasies about the shuffle board crowd at the American Legion? Have they no familiarity with classical history? Whom did they imagine all of those pervert priests were raping?
In light of the rampant gay promotion in our media culture and our politics, why was Milo's revelation of personal weakness seen as such an outrage? I understand that Milo violated the Clinton rule: "Don't ask, don't tell!" But as a Catholic, I am more concerned about concrete manifestations of evil by Church leaders than by the whimsical self-disclosures of our allies in the trenches. Pope Francis, who once clarified his rather meager opposition to homosexual activism by demanding to know, "Who am I to judge," recently commuted the liturgical sentences that had been imposed on a whole flock of pederast priests who repeatedly sodomized vast numbers of catamite children in their care, and there has been scarcely a murmur about this from the conservative press. Many of those pervert priests have now been reinstated by Francis with only the requirement that they serve "a lifetime of penance," whatever that means. https://www.rt.com/news/378682-popes-clemency-for-pedophile-priests/ Pope Francis even went so far as to scrap the tribunal set up to investigate the bishops who enabled and shielded those priests. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/religion/pope-francis-scraps-abuse-tribunal-bishops-who-cover-pedophile-priests-n585841 And yet where is the conservative outcry over this!
Similarly, I find it more disturbing when our political leaders side with the perpetrators of child sex abuse and punish their defenders. Under the Obama Administration, an American soldier was court marshalled for assaulting an Afghan police official who had been caught sodomizing young boys. http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/28/politics/green-beret-discharged-for-beating-alleged-child-rapist-speaks-out/index.html Green Beret Sergeant Charles Martland was involuntarily discharged and placed under a gag order as punishment for his defense of victim boys, and yet he never gained the celebrity in our conservative press that Milo has as a result of his one long-ago slip of the tongue. And yet Milo, in spite of an instant apology by which he made clear that he wholly deplores pedophilia, has been unceremoniously drummed out of the corps.
To be quite honest, I am baffled by the naiveté of these "Never Milo" conservatives. Many of those now attacking Yiannopoulos for revealing that his homosexuality is...well, really and truly homosexual I guess, have heretofore gone to great lengths to persuade the world they are not "homophobic." And yet now, in the case of this one self-defined faggot who has proven to be so dangerously efficient at debunking the left, all of their latent homophobia seems to have boiled over. Why? I'm afraid it is because Milo is a fighter, an unequivocal champion of free speech even now in its death agony, and an unapologetic advocate for Western Civilization. And perhaps even more because he is associated with Breitbart (which establishment conservatives now unfairly associate with alt right white supremacism) and by implication with Donald Trump. For all of these reasons he must be suppressed.
Should Milo have been allowed to speak at CPAC? I don't know. It is a question more of prudence than of principle. Maybe Milo really is too much the provocateur for that forum, though in my view we desperately need even more such provocateurs. After all, it has been just such provocateurs that have formed the vanguard of the "progressives" in their long advance against us. Perhaps all those buttoned down "conservatives" who have passively gone along with gay marriage and transgender access to the girl's shower room would be too shocked by Milo's appearance at a CPAC forum. We certainly don't want to shatter our fragile conservative base at this crucial juncture, or alienate those conservatives who reinforce their social values by watching the Ellen DeGeneres show.
But in my view Milo is a great resource wasted. I believe that a homosexual, like any other sinner, can be an ally in the struggle between good and evil. And more importantly I believe Milo was an effective outreach not only to homosexuals and those metrosexual millennials who have fallen prey to leftist social doctrine but also to vast numbers of college students otherwise held virtually captive to leftist propaganda. And so I am disappointed by the cannibals now waving their long knives at Milo.
But more importantly, I am disappointed that as a body we who seek the Light have allowed the allies of darkness to dupe us yet again into cannibalizing one of our own. Never have we conservatives collectively opposed the pedophile wing of the gay alliance with such vigor as we now bring to bear against Milo. Never have we denounced The North American Man Boy Love Association ("Sex before eight or else it's too late") with such indignation as we have brought to bear on poor shunned Yiannopoulos, this blemished ally with a single stain. We conservatives have once again devoured one of our own young. And that is the real tragedy.
© Jim Wagner
March 1, 2017
The devolving saga of the world's most dangerous faggot is tragic for a multitude of reasons, not only on a personal level but more particularly as it is playing out on the political battlefield. I have seen several articles about Milo Yiannopoulos' recent dis-invitation by the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), and nearly all of them have one thing in common. The authors, many of whom I admire by the way, don't know much at all about Milo. And they don't seem to care. Derek Hunter went so far as to offer as his opening – as a point of pride in fact – that he knows nothing about Milo. https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2017/02/23/cpacs-selfinflicted-wound-n2289132 And Cliff Kincaid lightly dismisses Milo with the platitude that there can be no such thing as a homosexual conservative. http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kincaid/170222
But tell that to Tammy Bruce, who entered the fight as a champion of conservative values long ago and identified "The New Thought Police" before most "real conservatives" had even begun to realize that political correctness is a battle tactic of the left designed to gain absolute power over us by suppressing not only our speech but the ideas upon which it must necessarily be based. Tammy Bruce became a lesbian during her teens, after she was seduced by the wife of actor Bill Bixby. A former president of National Organization for Women (NOW) in LA and national spokeswoman for both abortion and radical feminism, today, while still a lesbian, she is one of the staunchest warriors against progressive Fascism, and against radical feminism in particular.
If we are to "hate the sin but love the sinner," how will that be possible if none of those guilty of that one particular sin can be accepted as allies, even in the most limited sense? From whence will our converts come, if not from amongst the sinners? Not all of them will come to us like St Paul, delivered from the gates of hell all at once by a full and blinding revelation and miraculously elevated from our foremost persecutor to our most energetic apostle. Most of them will convert gradually, with fear and trembling, trial by trial and bit by bit, like the rest of us. At least that is possible if we give them the chance. And Milo has already come a very long way along his personal road to Damascus.
As preface to what I am about to say, I should explain that as a 12 year old boy scout I was molested by a scouting official. To make a long story short, my parents caught me with a hunting knife tucked up my sleeve, heading off to a scout meeting which over my objections they had insisted I attend. Under the bright lights that glared above our kitchen table they extracted from me that I intended to kill the man rather than submit to his advances. So I know very well what child sexual exploitation is. And I find it both morally repugnant and palpably disgusting.
All of this happened before any real harm was done me, or at least any physical harm. But that is not to say that attempts to sexually exploit me did not leave a psychological mark. I feel a particularly visceral disgust towards anyone who would corrupt a child in that way. And yet in spite of my revulsion, or rather because of it, I am open to the possibility that one less fortunate than myself, one who was truly and destructively exploited, can still strive toward the light. So I try to imagine what it would be like to be homosexual as a result of such tragic victimization (roughly half of all male homosexuals were first seduced by an adult male while they were still boys), and at the same time be a lover of truth.
How would one come out of the closet with that burden, particularly in these times when to be gay is presumptively to be progressive? In the case of Milo Yiannopoulos, one might say that the spirit seems heroically willing while the flesh remains conspicuously weak. And yet how lonely he must be in his particular struggle. Having eschewed all things of the left but that one dreadful compulsion that was imposed upon him against his will, and now broadly mistrusted by conservatives who repudiate him with their fists full of stones, Milo is an army of one. And the Philistines are many.
I have been an observer of Milo for perhaps the last year. While his act is not ready for the children's hour, it is often thought provoking and insightful. I have watched many of his videos, including some of his panel appearances with Christina Hoff Summers of The War on Boys fame. He is wildly entertaining, brilliant in argument, disarmingly suave, and contagiously persuasive. But more importantly, he stands with us on every social issue I can think of, from radical feminism and abortion to homosexuality and gay marriage. And he is willing to beard the leftist lion in its den, as he recently did at Berkeley. In short, he is William F. Buckley with a more pronounced lisp. And he has fortitude. When they spit on him, he calls it dew. All of which goes to suggest that he is indeed dangerous.
But is he dangerous to us? Perhaps, if we have latent gay inclinations.... Yes, his mannerisms are disconcerting and even off-putting. I would never argue that we should employ him to babysit our children. (But of course I wouldn't let most of our colleges do that either.) On the other hand, I have seen Milo lament his homosexuality and say not only that he would not choose to be "gay" but that he does not believe many homosexuals would choose it. And he opposes gay marriage specifically because it will promote to young people the misguided notion that homosexuality is a good or fulfilling life choice.
Milo calls himself "the world's most dangerous faggot" because he challenges most of the underlying assumptions of the left. He also mocks his own sexual proclivities, though often admittedly by flamboyant exaggeration, whistling, as it were, as he passes the graveyard. And like Tammy Bruce, he is open about the fact that he was seduced as a child into his sexual abnormality. But more importantly, he fights with enormous courage and persistence for those essential values invidiously labelled "libertarian" by Pharisees of the right. But these are values more properly identified as "classically liberal." They are the values of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. But sadly, these are just the values which many of today's pocketbook conservatives secretly despise. (I am referring in particular to those die-hard "Never Trump" conservatives.) Milo stands, in other words, for the Bill of Rights.
And this is Milo's true sin. Like Donald Trump, he is a threat not to that moral establishment of which we hope one day to be a part, but to the comfortable establishment of Mammon. Those in the Washington apparatus, and those who aspire to be, see Milo in the same way they see Trump. And for that reason he has many of the same enemies. How is it that, of all the avant garde agitators out there striving to bring down our society by introducing novel theories about the evils of Western Civilization, not one has ever been called a "provocateur" by the establishment right? Not the "Black Lives Matter" instigators! Not the leaders of the "Occupy Movement!" Even Keith Ellison, recently promoted to the number two position in the Democratic National Committee and a proud Louis Farrakhan acolyte, has ever been called a provocateur. Even the famed "artist" Robert Bullwhip-Butt Mapplethorpe has never been called a provocateur by any conservative, as far as I know.
And yet you will rarely see Milo's name in print or hear it on Fox News without encountering the mandatory "provocateur" as a qualifier. The sudden outrage over Milo's likely wistful but certainly unwise approval of pederasty (not pedophilia – there is a difference) is disheartening to be sure. (Like Trump, he was careless with his words.) But what are we to make of those now rending their garments over him? Were they not able to infer from the fact that he is gay the corollary that he is attracted to pubescent boys? That redundancy seems obvious enough to me. To be clear, I do not in any way support Milo's sick inclination, or his folly in exposing it. But what did they imagine his homosexuality was all about? Did they think he had fantasies about the shuffle board crowd at the American Legion? Have they no familiarity with classical history? Whom did they imagine all of those pervert priests were raping?
In light of the rampant gay promotion in our media culture and our politics, why was Milo's revelation of personal weakness seen as such an outrage? I understand that Milo violated the Clinton rule: "Don't ask, don't tell!" But as a Catholic, I am more concerned about concrete manifestations of evil by Church leaders than by the whimsical self-disclosures of our allies in the trenches. Pope Francis, who once clarified his rather meager opposition to homosexual activism by demanding to know, "Who am I to judge," recently commuted the liturgical sentences that had been imposed on a whole flock of pederast priests who repeatedly sodomized vast numbers of catamite children in their care, and there has been scarcely a murmur about this from the conservative press. Many of those pervert priests have now been reinstated by Francis with only the requirement that they serve "a lifetime of penance," whatever that means. https://www.rt.com/news/378682-popes-clemency-for-pedophile-priests/ Pope Francis even went so far as to scrap the tribunal set up to investigate the bishops who enabled and shielded those priests. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/religion/pope-francis-scraps-abuse-tribunal-bishops-who-cover-pedophile-priests-n585841 And yet where is the conservative outcry over this!
Similarly, I find it more disturbing when our political leaders side with the perpetrators of child sex abuse and punish their defenders. Under the Obama Administration, an American soldier was court marshalled for assaulting an Afghan police official who had been caught sodomizing young boys. http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/28/politics/green-beret-discharged-for-beating-alleged-child-rapist-speaks-out/index.html Green Beret Sergeant Charles Martland was involuntarily discharged and placed under a gag order as punishment for his defense of victim boys, and yet he never gained the celebrity in our conservative press that Milo has as a result of his one long-ago slip of the tongue. And yet Milo, in spite of an instant apology by which he made clear that he wholly deplores pedophilia, has been unceremoniously drummed out of the corps.
To be quite honest, I am baffled by the naiveté of these "Never Milo" conservatives. Many of those now attacking Yiannopoulos for revealing that his homosexuality is...well, really and truly homosexual I guess, have heretofore gone to great lengths to persuade the world they are not "homophobic." And yet now, in the case of this one self-defined faggot who has proven to be so dangerously efficient at debunking the left, all of their latent homophobia seems to have boiled over. Why? I'm afraid it is because Milo is a fighter, an unequivocal champion of free speech even now in its death agony, and an unapologetic advocate for Western Civilization. And perhaps even more because he is associated with Breitbart (which establishment conservatives now unfairly associate with alt right white supremacism) and by implication with Donald Trump. For all of these reasons he must be suppressed.
Should Milo have been allowed to speak at CPAC? I don't know. It is a question more of prudence than of principle. Maybe Milo really is too much the provocateur for that forum, though in my view we desperately need even more such provocateurs. After all, it has been just such provocateurs that have formed the vanguard of the "progressives" in their long advance against us. Perhaps all those buttoned down "conservatives" who have passively gone along with gay marriage and transgender access to the girl's shower room would be too shocked by Milo's appearance at a CPAC forum. We certainly don't want to shatter our fragile conservative base at this crucial juncture, or alienate those conservatives who reinforce their social values by watching the Ellen DeGeneres show.
But in my view Milo is a great resource wasted. I believe that a homosexual, like any other sinner, can be an ally in the struggle between good and evil. And more importantly I believe Milo was an effective outreach not only to homosexuals and those metrosexual millennials who have fallen prey to leftist social doctrine but also to vast numbers of college students otherwise held virtually captive to leftist propaganda. And so I am disappointed by the cannibals now waving their long knives at Milo.
But more importantly, I am disappointed that as a body we who seek the Light have allowed the allies of darkness to dupe us yet again into cannibalizing one of our own. Never have we conservatives collectively opposed the pedophile wing of the gay alliance with such vigor as we now bring to bear against Milo. Never have we denounced The North American Man Boy Love Association ("Sex before eight or else it's too late") with such indignation as we have brought to bear on poor shunned Yiannopoulos, this blemished ally with a single stain. We conservatives have once again devoured one of our own young. And that is the real tragedy.
© Jim Wagner
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