On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Breitbart Editor Milo Yiannopoulos stated, “The media has created this environment in which it’s okay to say almost anything about somebody who is right of Jane Fonda. … And it’s a way of legitimizing, in some cases, as happened last night, violent responses.”
Milo said, “I’m not any of the things that these posters characterize me as in an effort to legitimize the violence. But, even if I were, I don’t think it would matter, for the reasons you say.”
He described the events in Berkeley the night before as, “[S]uddenly, there were explosions outside. There were firecrackers and rocks being hurled at the building. The police were having things hurled at them. And we — I was evacuated to the fifth floor, like by the fire escape. It was all very exciting. And then, suddenly, I was being taken out of the building. I was informed that I was being evacuated, because there were hundreds of protesters outside, blowing things up, hurling things of the police. The police weren’t — didn’t seem to me to be doing very much aside hiding inside the building. The ground floor had been stormed. So, we had to rush down to the parking lot, find one car, and our exit was blocked. So, we run — we ran to another car We finally got in one. And I was bundled in, put in a bulletproof vest, and whisked away, and that is the price you pay for being a libertarian or a conservative on American college campuses.”
He added that he had been called the “usual slurs that they wheel out in a sort of effort to legitimize violence against you. You know, they want to call you the worst possible name. It’s like the punch a Nazi thing, right? Well, I could imagine a reasonable person being taken someway along the argument of like, it’s okay to punch Nazis. But the problem is that the left calls everyone Nazis. So, basically, they can punch [anybody].”
Milo further said, “[T]he real people that I want to hear from are the guys who are on CNN, who are legitimizing ordinary conservatives being called white supremacists, anti-Semites, racists, sexists, when they’re not. There’s inevitable, obvious consequence to this. … The media has created this environment in which it’s okay to say almost anything about somebody who is right of Jane Fonda. If you have slightly conservative, or even libertarian points of view, especially if you are persuasive and charismatic and funny and effective, like we both are, you will get called the most appalling things. And it’s a way of legitimizing, in some cases, as happened last night, violent responses.”
Milo added to the discussion of campuses by stating, “I feel actually more optimistic about this than probably most conservatives, because I’ve been on more college campuses than I think anybody else in America for the last 12 months as part of my tour, and I have seen a change in atmosphere. I’ve seen conservatives becoming more emboldened and happier. I have seen also, huge numbers of alumni changing their positions on whether or not they’re going to support their old schools. I mean, Missouri, when they kind of pandered to race-baiters, they discovered they lost 30, $40 million in alumni donations. And enrollment went on so much they had to close two dorms. … This is going to start happening all over America. And my view is, the American higher education market, and it is a market, is going to fix this, because schools are going to have to pick. Either they go the direction of the University of Chicago, and they say, ‘You know what, don’t apply here if you want to safe spaces and trigger warnings. This is a place you come to be challenged. This is a place you come to expose yourself to people you think that you’re going to hate. And see if it changes your point of view.’ Or they’re going to go to the direction of the University of Missouri. And only one type of those institutions is going to be financially viable in the long term.”
He added that totalitarians hate the sound of laughter “because they can’t control it,” and this is why the left tries to dictate what kinds of humor are acceptable.
He later said, “I’ve discovered, not just in journalism, but also in the entertainment industry, and particularly, and most importantly in academia…on American college campuses I have experienced restrictions on the freedom of speech, groupthink, and penalties, social and institutional penalties, and financial penalties for free expression like nothing I ever experienced in Europe.”
Milo concluded, “There’s a reason why there’s this extraordinary bifurcation between liberals and conservatives in this country, it is because the establishment, the media, academic, and entertainment establishment has made certain sorts of political opinion – respectable, reasonable, mainstream opinion – impossible to express in public.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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