Speaking on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM, Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos told listeners that he would not be intimidated by the antics of progressive radicals on campus, who recently disrupted his event at Rutgers University with fake blood and war chants.
Speaking to Breitbart executive chairman Steven K. Bannon, Yiannopoulos said: “We’ve arrived at a situation where merely calling for academic freedom, and free intellectual inquiry, and the open exchange of ideas is characterised by the progressive left as hateful…. as bigoted and reactionary and sexist and homophobic, you name it.”
Yiannopoulos went on to describe the extraordinary scenes at Rutgers:
Half the room started chanting Black Lives Matter – and I don’t know why they’re even protesting me, I barely speak about black lives matter – and then suddently, this huge wave of “TRUMP, TRUMP, TRUMP” comes from the other side of the room, it’s like an internet comments section come to life. There’s a sense of uncritical mantras being repeated by the feminists and black lives matter protesters.
I was talking about intellectual freedom, about academic inquiry, and the appropriate response from feminists was to stand up say “this man preaches hate” and smear themselves with fake blood. This is an extraordinarily theatrical response – and sure, as a gay man I appreciate the melodrama of it – but this is an extraordinarily theatrical and extreme response to a very modest suggestion.
Yiannopoulos also explained how the “barmy” ideas of students were also appearing in new media: “What’s happening with millennials is that they’re graduating from university, but they’re not snapping out of their university politics. So they’re going to places like BuzzFeed and Gawker and Vox and Mix, and they continue to have the same batty, barmy student union politics that they had when they were 20.”
Yiannopoulos also speculate as to why progressive radicals are targeting him in particular: “The progressive left has a classic, age-old strategy of playing the man and not the ball. If they don’t like your ideas, they’ll seek to delegitimise you as a speaker, they’ll call you names to make you untouchable so that other people don’t associate with you, this is textbook [Saul] Allinsky stuff.”
I write about and advocate for equality, for fairness, for meritocratic approaches to education, and that’s not what the progressive left believes anymore. They don’t believe in equality of the sexes, they believe in female chauvinism. They don’t believe in equality of races, they believe in divisive racial politics that gives black people their own segregated dorms on campus. Meritocracy, in many corners of the progressive internet is a dirty word, because they believe that meritocracy has built-in within it this mysterious patriarchal force of bias that keeps women and ethnic minorities down. Of course it’s nonsense, it’s a fiction dreamed up by the campus radicals of the 60s and 70s who now have tenure at universities.
When asked by Bannon if the antics of progressive at Rutgers would discourage him from doing more events, Yiannopooulos responded with a firm “no.”
That stuff just spurs me on to do more. The more that they yell to drown out reasonable, opposing points of view, the more I’m persuaded that I’m right, that we are right in fighting for freedom of speech, free academic inquiry, fighting for peoples’ rights to express conservative points of view on campus, which these days can be politically dangerous and socially disadvantageous. But when you see the way they behave, the sort of hysteria and intolerance and shouting down, it just emboldens me further, and particularly when I have a queue stretching around the block for autographs and selfies afterwards, it’s just incredible, so the answer to your question is definitely not.
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