Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Heave Ho With Milo

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

So then, Milo Yiannopoulos, world-class provocateur, had himself a week. After a pretty hot run, the bad guys finally got him, and they got him with their most powerful weapon—to wit, indignant hypocrisy.

Of course the hypocrisy of the Left goes without saying. We know all about that. We factor it into all our equations. No one is surprised anymore. We don’t even get out of our seats. We yawn and look away.

But the hypocrisy of conservatives still gets results. Among other things, Milo was disinvited from a speaking gig at CPAC, the convention for non-conserving conservatives. We are at the place in our decadence where an outrageous flamer had been invited to speak to the bastion of traditional values—which was okay because the surrounding culture mandates that we be okay with that kind of thing, and conservatives are nothing if not obedient to the demands of progressivism, and it is now against the law to use flamer retardant fabric in anything—and yet it was the work of two minutes to get them to withdraw the invitation to speak because it came out that the good Milo had said something considered immoral by the lynch mob. Immoral? What curious words you people use. By what standard? Who says? Why?


The charge was that he was okay with pedophilia, and even though there is reason to believe he actually wasn’t saying that, let’s pretend for a moment that he did say that, and that he was okay with pedophilia. America’s ongoing commitment to her lusts is Lake Oroville, and our quite arbitrary belief in the moral authority of the age of consent is that collapsing spillway. There is no conceivable way that you can give way to rampant perversion the way we have done, celebrating it the way we do, and demanding applause for it from the reluctant, without having it put enormous pressure on the few remaining hydro-normative dams.

But certain dams are still holding, and that is how they are able to get someone like Milo. Conservatives still react to some things as though it were the old days. They like pretending that we haven’t actually abandoned ourselves, and like to pretend that we still have a basis for our standards. No, what we actually have is a collapsing moral infrastructure, and some parts of the dam fall down before other parts do. It doesn’t fall down all at once.

To his credit, Milo does have a genuine hostility to the social justice crowd. If he didn’t, he could probably get his book deal back if he proposed to his boyfriend, set a date, and then went out to find an evangelical baker to sue.