Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos resigns following outrage over his past comments about pedophilia

"In a video interview early last year, Yiannopoulos condoned sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and joked about a sexual encounter he said he had with a Catholic priest as a teenager."

Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos resigns following outrage over his past comments about pedophilia
By Paul Farhi February 21 at 7:15 PM

Milo Yiannopoulos, the incendiary writer who helped make Breitbart News a leading organ of the alt-right, resigned from the news organization Tuesday after a video of him endorsing pedophilia resurfaced online over the weekend.

Yiannopoulos has been a flame-throwing provocateur whose writing has offended women, Muslims, blacks and gay people ever since former Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon hired him as a senior editor in 2014.

Bannon, now President Trump’s senior adviser, championed the British-born Yiannopoulos’s inflammatory commentary and promoted him as a conservative truth-teller and champion of free speech. In turn, his popularity helped raise Breitbart’s profile among Trump’s supporters and the alt-right, a vaguely defined collection of nationalists, anti-immigration proponents and anti-establishment conservatives. Adherents of the alt-right are known for espousing racist, anti-Semitic and sexist points of view.

“Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved,” Yiannopoulos said in a statement announcing his resignation. “They have been a significant factor in my success.”....

But Yiannopoulos’s views on pedophilia apparently went too far even for Breitbart.

The site was under pressure to take action against Yiannopoulos, 32, from its own staff, which had threatened to revolt if he wasn’t fired or disciplined, according to people familiar with the discussions.

In a video interview early last year, Yiannopoulos condoned sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and joked about a sexual encounter he said he had with a Catholic priest as a teenager.

“You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means,” he told the hosts of a podcast. “Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty.”....

Yiannopoulos, meanwhile, defended himself on Facebook on Sunday and Monday as the tide of controversy rose.

“I do not support pedophilia. Period,” he wrote. “It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst. There are selectively edited videos doing the rounds, as part of a coordinated effort to discredit me from establishment Republicans, that suggest I am soft on the subject.”

The openly gay writer made his name with a knack for taunting various groups and manipulating the outrage that followed. He led a Twitter campaign last year against “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones that was so vitriolic that Twitter banned him. He has called feminism “cancer” in his campus appearances, and he once wrote a Breitbart story headlined, “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” ....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/milo-yiannopoulos-resigns-from-breitbart-news/2017/02/21/0217c128-f7cc-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html