Milo Yiannapoulos: Political Left Creating Violent Environment On Campus
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Right wing provocateur and author of the new book, Dangerous, Milo Yiannopoulos, appeared on The Rich Zeoli Show on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, to discuss the opposition he has faced on college campuses, blaming left-wing activists for causing rioting and property damage.
"They have created this environment. They have encouraged their own students to act out with violence in response to ideas. They then turn around and use their own behavior and the consequence of their own actions as an excuse for not having me on campus. They probably think they're being very clever in getting away with all of this but we're not going to let them do it for much longer. I'm hosting a Berkeley free speech week, which is going to be a week-long festival for conservative and libertarian free speech at UC Berkeley to show them that, you know what, you live in a country with the First Amendment, so you don't get to choose who comes to campus. Other people get to choose who comes to campus and if you don't like it, just don't show up. One thing you can't do is smash the place up every time a speaker comes who you think you may not like."
He said the left is hypocritical in their outrage, when, in fact, they are the source of most the violence.
"The left is threatening to beat people up and kill everyone. This perpetuated by Kathy Griffin holding severed heads of the President. It's perpetuated by 'punch a Nazi,' and then, at the same time, the left is describing everyone to the right of Jane Fonda as a Nazi. It's the left smashing up towns. It's the left, at the inauguration, slashing police horses with nails hammered into sticks. It is the left causing $100,000 worth of damage to UC Berkeley and $500,000 of damage to down town Berkeley because a gay guy who cracks fat jokes is in town. It is the left who cannot control themselves. I don't think it's a plausible position any longer to suggest right-wing hatefulness and bigotry is the biggest problem facing American politics. It's very clear which side of the political divide responds to speech and ideas with violence."
Yiannopoulos, who is suing publisher Simon and Schuster after they canceled his book deal earlier this year after statements he made about sexual abuse and set up his own publishing company for Dangerous, stated the theme of book focuses on who he as the real threat to freedom of speech.
"There's feminism, Black Lives Matter, the media, academia, Hollywood, all the different bits of American public life, of course, Silicon Valley, that I think represent a threat to people's free expression, their ability to say, do and be whatever they want, particularly, if they're libertarian or conservative. It tells you how I came from Europe, imagining that America was going to be this land of freedom and free expression and discovering that, actually, some of the restrictions on people's expression and speech in America, the social consequences for speaking your mind, are more awful than anywhere else I've ever visited in my life, which is very horrifying to me."
