Lies, Damn Lies, and the Washington Square News’ Use of Evidence

What do you do if you are a student or professor at one of the nation’s top universities faced with the prospect of a speaker coming to your campus to talk about the importance of costumes and why “cultural appropriation” is simply the way art works, and—assuming that you even know what he is going to be talking about—you panic because you have no way of countering his arguments with fact, logic, reason, or even the semblance of academic rigor?

Easy, if you are at NYU.

You call him names—“‘alt-right’ leader,” “white nationalist,” “white supremacist”— and you virtue signal about how hard it is to write about him, pointing to his “racism” and “anti-Semitism,” in proof of which you cite his marriage to a black man (Milo is white) and the fact that he has mentioned that his grandmother was Jewish. You insinuate that he is friends with a man known to hate him. You suggest on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that his public and private comments have put people in danger.

And—when all else fails (because it will)—you lie. I wrote two days ago about the lies contained in the follow-up reporting on Milo’s canceled talk. Yesterday, the Washington Square News made some corrections to both pieces.

To the op-ed written by Ms. Abby Hofstetter, the editors appended this correction:

And whereas the Editorial Board’s own article originally read:

Now it reads:

It would be laughable if it weren’t so disgusting.

“There is no evidence that Yiannopoulos is a pedophile”—as if there might be?! To be crystal clear: there is not so much as a whiff of an allegation of any such thing, let alone “evidence.”

“...such as when he endorsed pedophilia made racist”—but not “within the Catholic church”? Who needs Grammar when making corrections only to compound the lies? Reason and Evidence left the building long ago.

I study the Middle Ages. I am used to fighting lies. Lies about Christianity. Lies about chivalry. Lies about the origins of capitalism and the importance of the towns. Nevertheless, when I started writing about Milo two years ago, I never dreamed that my colleagues in academia would be so incapable of acknowledging the evidence of a primary source as they have been in refusing to take Milo at his own words.

But, of course, that would mean having the academic decency and rigor to track down Milo’s own words.

In their reporting, the student editors at NYU link to an article published in the New York Times on February 20, 2017, reporting on the cancellation of Milo’s book deal with Simon & Schuster and the recision of his invitation to speak at CPAC that year. This article rightly reports that Milo “denied that he had ever condoned child sexual abuse, noting that he was a victim himself,” but then goes on to insist that he condoned it because “13-year olds are children”—which (the authors insinuate) clearly proves that Milo doesn’t mean what he says when he says pedophilia is disgusting.

Ms. Hofstetter linked to an article published in the Guardian on February 22, 2017, reporting on Milo’s resignation from Breitbart. This article linked to Milo’s own statement about the comments that he had made on the videos from which the Reagan Battalion took its clips, which link Ms. Hofstetter does not seem to have taken the time to click. In case she is reading now, I will provide screenshots so that she can see for herself Milo’s statement in full:

The Guardian article likewise referenced Milo’s press conference (without links, but with embedded clip) in which he reiterated his condemnation of pedophilia and pedophiles and apologized for any misunderstanding his use of gallows humor to deal with his own abuse might have caused:

One wonders whether the professors at NYU expect their students to be able to read. Based on the non-corrections published yesterday on their university newspaper website, they clearly do not expect them to verify their evidence with reference to the primary sources.

Even if the students (and professors?) cannot read, surely they can see and hear?

But, of course, that would involve digging somewhat deeper, depending not just on other reporters’ selection of quotations, but going to the actual primary source: the video in which Milo made the comments that his enemies on the establishment Right used in their attempt to destroy his career. (What was it that I called them? Oh, right. Spineless cunts.)

The video is almost three hours long (oh, you didn’t know that?). The Drunken Peasants had been hounding Milo for an hour about all the usual topics—cultural libertarianism and the religious Right, the campus rape myth, SJWs and their takeover of academia, Milo’s hair, the gender wage gap and the dangerous jobs men do, “born this way” as an invention of the gay lobby, evolution and the edginess of gay culture, the disaster that is the NHS, Sweden’s immigration problem, the difference between arguing in anecdotes and arguing with data, mainstream Muslim culture and its attitude toward gays, MGTOWs, Milo’s faith in God—when the conversation turned to his experience growing up as a gay man (go to timestamp 52:30).

The Peasants showed Milo a clip of a video accusing him of being a “hypocrite and pedophile protector,” in which video the narrator (not identified) compared Milo with Nicholas, alias Sarah Nyberg, one of the actual pedophiles whose Milo’s own reporting has exposed. Paul’s Ego (smoking on the right) then pressed Milo on the question of consent—and suggested that it might be blurrier than age of consent laws make it (transcript from Red State):

Note what Milo says: “I think the law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age.” Milo never suggested that the age of consent should be legally different, only that it is possible that there are people who are capable of giving consent younger than others, of which he believed himself to be one. Note, too, what it is that Paul’s Ego admits he is most upset about. Not underage sex as such, but butt fucking between homosexuals: “I don’t know that I was ready at 13 to get f*cked in the *ss by a 28-year-old black drag queen.” Claiming that anything Milo says in this exchange is about “endorsing pedophilia,” particularly on the part of professors and students like those at NYU who claim to be on the side of the LGBT community, is purely confected outrage, not to mention veiled gay bashing by a group of people who claim to be “allies” of the very people whom Paul’s Ego so dismissively describes. The reaction to the conversation with the Drunken Peasants would have been much different if they had been talking about Milo as a young man having sex with a hot, older woman.

Milo then went on to talk about what it is like for many young gay men, coming of age through a relationship with an older man:

Conservatives may not be happy with this argument, that “older men help those young boys [by which, Milo clarified in the press conference and his Facebook status, he meant adolescents, not children] to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable—a sort of rock for when they can’t talk to their parents,” but the editors of The New Yorker seem fine with it. They did, after all, see fit to publish an account of another gay man’s coming of age in precisely this kind of relationship.

Victor Lodato on his “secret sexual life, at fifteen,” The New Yorker, October 30, 2018

Milo has written at length in his new book about his experience with Father Michael. It is inaccurate to say that Father Michael (now roasting in Hell as a suicide) taught Milo to give head; it was he who gave Milo head while plying him with red wine and cookies. Perhaps The New Yorker will run an excerpt.

But the Drunken Peasants still weren’t satisfied.

Paul’s Ego (not a Milophile) repeatedly tried to make Milo say that he was condoning sex with children. Milo told him over and over again that he was wrong, that he was not talking about sex with children who have not gone through puberty. He was talking about sex with post-pubescent teens, particularly gays. And he likewise insisted over and over again that the only way these “cross-generational relationships” (Paul’s Ego’s term) could be beneficial was if they were consensual.

“Provided they’re consensual.”

This point is so important that Milo repeats it: “Provided they’re consensual.”

The whole conversation was about what was the proper age of consent—which children cannot give. 

The Drunken Peasants pride themselves on being edgy and satirical—and, of course, straight. What they were doing in this episode was baiting a gay man about his sex life. Milo was being honest about his own experiences as a gay man, not in order to argue that the age of consent should be any different than it is, but to explain what it was like for him growing up gay.

Having been outed on national television, in a press conference that was broadcast around the globe, as a victim of sexual abuse by his priest, Milo appreciates that not all victims of such predators have been able to shake their experience off. As he explains in Diabolical:

If you’ve been to a posh boarding school, you’ll know that at age fifteen, you will happily take a blow job from anyone. Plenty of rich kids cooped up with other boys for entire semesters allow the gay ones to blow them or jerk them off. That’s how it felt with Fr. Michael. I liked getting off, and he liked doing it, and I didn’t think much more of it, except obviously that I should keep lying to my mom about visiting friends after choir. I’ve since been emailed, after dropping just enough information in public that fellow victims could be sure they had been preyed upon by the same man, and it turns out he did a lot more with other boys, so I got off lightly. (Obviously, my first thought was: Wait, what? Did he think I was ugly or something?) And I’ve learned that some of the boys who spent time with Fr. Michael came out of it a lot more emotionally battered than I did, so I have come to take the whole thing more seriously, and realize that what happened was abusive and wrong.

Because Fr. Michael is now dead—the old cunt hanged himself rather than face trial when one of his other boys went public, and his cowardice in killing himself offends me even more than what he did to me—I never felt any obligation to go public with my story until I was forced to, as you probably recall, in a globally-televised press conference from New York in February 2017. That’s when the establishment right and mainstream media teamed up to take me out, pretending that I was a “supporter of pedophilia” because I’d made a few off-color jokes about Fr. Michael and about clerical abuse in general....  

If I hadn’t been forced to come out like that, I would never have sought out recollections and testimonies from other victims. I thought I was a weirdo for feeling somewhat responsible for what happened, because I recall at that age, in my mid-teens, getting a kick out of sexual attention from older men. I found it flattering. I didn’t have a male role model at home because dad was gone and my mom’s new husband was an ogre. Getting affirmation from a male authority figure—in whatever form it came—felt good. Abusers often seek out kids with weak family ties like I had. I was a sexually precocious teenage boy who wanted to see and do everything.... I had sex with one of my English teachers, too, and no, I don’t want to talk about it.

Milo refuses to think of himself as a victim, even though he understands now that he was. Those of us who love him saw it from the beginning, and we have wept for him at the shame that he has been put through. To see these lies repeated over and over and over again—gleefully on Twitter, sententiously in NYU’s Washington Square News—is beyond frustrating.

It is vomit-inducing.

The students and professors at NYU may believe they are virtuous for reporting as they have on Milo’s “polarizing and disturbing” speech, but it is they who are playing the trolls and provocateurs by repeating things that they know are lies.

And if they do not know these things are lies?

Then they expose themselves as the charlatans and frauds that they are for not seeking out the evidence as they, as journalists, are professionally beholden to do. This is the field that they have chosen to enter, and they have willfully refused to perform the barest hint of the due diligence that their profession demands. And for what? To score cheap points on a political opponent. They do not deserve the title “journalist.” That is reserved for writers like Milo who seek out the facts. Call them rather what they are: scandalmongers, gossips, and scolds.

For the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Milo, go here.