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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:48
MILO
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You know, doing what I do, it's a real privilege.
I'm incredibly fortunate.
I mean, I know I've worked hard. I have a great audience.
I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to do what I do in the world, to have this kind of positive effect on the world.
And most times I really like what I do.
I gotta be honest, this is not one of those times.
But I said when I started this, and I've kept that commitment every day, I'm going to tell the truth as clearly and as directly as I can, at least as I see it.
And I'm not going to play favorites.
I have the same standards.
And so in dealing with what's going on with Milo Yiannopoulos, it's tough.
I mean, I hate having to say all of this.
On the one hand, I sympathize.
On the other hand, I'm angry.
I see a victim, genuine victim.
But there's... Victim also possesses adult responsibility.
I'm torn between my genuine admiration for an intellectual provocateur and, let's just say, some real reservations about some of his statements.
Milo Yiannopoulos stood tall for free speech and against the puritanical language fascism of political correctness.
As a good-looking, ridiculously articulate gay man, he could have found a comfortable place to nestle in leftist clichés and would have been welcomed by the establishment with open arms.
Instead, he turned his considerable charm, talents, humor, intellect and hairstyle on the enemies of free thought and free speech.
He helped to provoke and reveal the violence and hatefulness of dangerous and powerful elements within Western society.
And now...
And now Milo stands on a precipice.
A precipice we really, really need to examine in detail.
And I encourage and urge you to stick with me through this.
It's going to be a difficult conversation, but it's very necessary.
Because... I can blindingly fast.
Life comes at you fast.
In the span of 48 hours, Milo Yiannopoulos has fallen from grace in the eyes of many.
Dude lost a quarter of a million dollar book deal.
He's resigned from his influential position at Breitbart.
He's been disinvited from this prestigious keynote speaking engagement he had at CPAC. It's been brutal.
I don't want to make this about me, but you need to know where I'm coming from.
For my entire career, as a public intellectual, I have championed the peaceful protection and treatment of children.
No yelling, no spanking, no abuse.
That is how we get a peaceful world.
There is no other way.
I always speak for the child.
Sometimes I must speak for the child within the man.
And this is one of those times.
The controversy surrounding Milo Yiannopoulos is dense, it's complex, and frankly seems oddly misunderstood by most people who've talked about it from just about every angle they've looked at it.
Okay, quick recap.
For those, if you're just like emerging from hibernation, this is the story.
In 2015 and 2016, Milo made a series of pronouncements about the sexual relations that can occur between adults and children.
And he was primarily referencing his own molestation at the hands of a Catholic priest when Milo was between the ages of 13 and 16.
And in his recent press conference, he revealed that another adult male also molested Milo during the same time period.
He said, touched me inappropriately.
We don't know to what degree, to what depth, although there are some hints.
Okay. First of all, obvious to say, but needs to be said anyway.
I sympathize enormously with the victimization that Milo had inflicted upon him as a helpless child.
A lot of people, they don't Don't really get this.
Like, you need to know this about this sort of abuse.
It's not just about the abuser.
It's like everyone and everything.
You say, why were you chosen?
Because you won't tell.
Why won't you tell?
Because you are alienated from parents, from siblings, from teachers, from family.
You won't tell because you are isolated.
Predators prey on distance.
Right? So it's not just about the predation.
It's everything that leads up to it.
It's the gap. It's the distance.
Because looking back, you say, why was I not protected from this predator or predators?
Didn't anyone around me notice a change in me?
Child abuse from outside the family reveals and in fact requires The weakness within the family in the first place.
Also, does it need to be said, I think it does.
I hate that it does, but I think it does.
Here we go. You ready?
You cannot consent to a sexual relationship when you are 13 years old.
Particularly with an adult.
Particularly when that adult has power over you.
Your brain is still like a decade away from physical maturity.
You're not an independent human being.
You're wrestling with puberty and identity and sexual feelings and upcoming adulthood.
You're not free.
So you're not free to choose.
The relevance of this will show up in a sec.
But look, even if... In his confusion, a child throws himself at an adult.
It is the adult's job, and it really should not be a very difficult job to say, no, this is inappropriate, and you need to get some help.
So, what are the criticisms of Milo?
We'll get to the specifics in a second, but the general criticisms...
Milo portrayed his own molestation as a child in glowingly positive terms.
That he praised his abuser and portrayed at least one pedophile in a highly positive light.
Milo then seems to have extrapolated this position, this positive relationship to young gay boys in general with older men.
So we'll get to the details of this in a moment, but...
Let's have a look at the big picture.
Milo had this crazy meteoric rise to the total stratosphere of alternative media and, more recently, a solid entrance into the mainstream media.
Right? He was on the Bill Mars show.
He had this highly lucrative book deal.
He's invited to be the keynote speaker at the CPAC conference, that kind of stuff.
Big time, big entrance, making his way.
And he's a conservative. And he's pro-Trump.
This provoked a backlash from the establishment.
Not just the left, but the Uniparty, right?
Some of the Republicans as well.
Now, the establishment doubtless hopes to crush his career.
This stuff didn't just come out of nowhere.
Also, Milo, for many years, had an association with Breitbart, the website.
And Now, Breitbart was formerly headed by Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon is now serving as a chief advisor in President Donald Trump's administration, right?
So, hop's given a jump.
So, let's just say Milo was a fairly juicy target.
Now, people are saying...
It was a media hit piece. Sure, sure it was a media hit piece.
I get that. But saying that it was a media hit piece does not answer the actual criticisms of Milo and what he said.
Much of the material that's being used to fuel this controversy, this attack, has been on the internet for well over a year.
And some people say, well, why now?
Why now? Well, because Milo represents an escalating threat to the establishment, to the media as a whole, and to entrenched uniparty political interests.
Now, it is true, and it has been endlessly repeated that the leftist media, the establishment media, the legacy media, can be enormously hypocritical in this area, as it is in most areas.
The famous film director Roman Polanski once drugged and anally raped a 14-year-old girl, and later he got a standing ovation at the Academy Awards, which, by the way, Meryl Streak enthusiastically participated in before she took a strong dislike to President Donald Trump, because, you know, she's got all these standards.
Lena Dunham falsely accused a conservative man of rape, admitted to molesting her own sister, and has had a show running on Showtime for five years.
And she campaigned for Hillary Clinton.
Oh, and one of Barack Obama's daughters interned under Lena Dunham.
These are people who actually did stuff.
Milo just talked about stuff.
Also, when 1,400 white girls were raped, tortured and brutalized for like two decades by Muslim men of Pakistani origin in Rotherham, England, the lefty press, pretty silent about it.
The state-funded BBC had little to say for decades about Jimmy Savile, a serial rapist of adults and children high up in the BBC. Milo strongly spoke out about and against both of these affairs.
So, the mainstream media not been massively concerned with child molestation.
It might be a fair thing to say that.
Star Trek actor George Takai has spoken positively about being molested as a 13-year-old boy by an 18- or 19-year-old summer camp counselor, describing his sexual assault in glowing terms and laughing about it in a way that really can only be described as extremely interstellarly creepy.
Nobody on the left will care about George Takai and his positive descriptions of pedophilia.
George Takai will face zero repercussions.
George Takai is virulently anti-Trump.
Milo, of course, strongly pro-Trump.
There just might be some kind of connection there.
Speaking of Bill Maher, here is liberal comedian Bill Maher from 2007.
Quote, Mary Kay Laterno, the teacher from Seattle, who is in jail because she is in love.
That's how I view it.
I admit that it's unorthodox.
She is 35.
The boy is 14.
He was younger when they started.
They're having a family. And they're keeping the mother in jail because she won't conform to what society feels should be the perfect American family.
Raped? Come on.
She forced? How do you know?
And how can you? How can a woman rape a man?
Ashley Bill? Not so funny story.
Women rape men all the time.
And you know what?
That's normalizing pedophilia, Bill.
He was 13.
And did the media ever try to destroy Bill Maher's career?
Come on! He gave a million bucks to Obama!
I guess that buys quite a lot of protection.
Does the left care about children?
For God's sakes, they wanted Hillary Clinton as president.
Look at Syria, look at Libya, bodies of kids all over the place.
Hey, thanks, Madam Secretary!
Okay, but all this hypocrisy, yes, it's there.
It still does not answer the criticisms.
If you criticize the left for overlooking pedophilia, you can't then turn around and ignore it on the right.
Better than Lena Dunham is not an argument.
Also, some of Milo's more shocking pronouncements were taken out of context, and there did seem to be some deceptive editing involved.
But again, this does not answer all of the criticisms.
So, let's get to the meat of the matter.
What did Milo actually say that triggered this intense controversy?
The statements in question...
Come from two main sources.
The Drunken Peasants podcast and Milo's appearance on a Joe Rogan show.
This is from the Drunken Peasants podcast.
And Milo said...
The age of consent law is probably about right.
That's probably roughly the right age.
I think it's probably about okay, but there are certain people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age.
I certainly consider myself to be one of them.
People who are sexually active younger.
I think it particularly happens in the gay world, by the way.
In many cases, actually, those relationships with older men...
This is one reason I hate the left, this stupid one-size-fits-all policing of culture.
And then people speak over each other, Milo goes on to say, this sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys, you know, understanding that many of us have.
The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships.
You know, people are messy and complex, in the homosexual world particularly.
Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming-of-age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can't speak to their parents.
Some of those relationships are the most...
And somebody interrupts and says, it sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me, says the man.
Milo says, and you know what?
I'm grateful for Father Michael.
I wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him.
Of course, that's a reference to oral sex.
Now, other people talk.
It's like, oh my god, I can't handle it.
One man says the next thing in line is going to be pedophilia, says another man.
And Milo says, you're misunderstanding what pedophilia means.
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.
Pedophilia is attraction to people who don't have functioning sex organs yet, who have not gone through puberty, who are too young to be able—and this is unclear and cut off by the others—that's not what we are talking about.
You don't understand what pedophilia is if you are saying, I'm defending it, because I'm certainly not.
So here you can see the beginning of a problem.
It's not pedophilia if the victim is 13 years old.
It's still illegal though, of course, and It's referred to as pedophilia by just about everyone.
And, you know, good luck getting that term redefined.
It's not going to work, right?
So, age of consent laws.
It's an abstract argument.
Just about fine. There are people who can consent who are much younger.
Milo counts himself as one of those people.
And it's not pedophilia if the person has...
It's post-pubescent.
It's functioning sex organs and so on.
So, this is a challenge.
So another man said, you are advocating for cross-generational relationships here.
Can we be honest about that?
Milo says, yeah, I don't mind admitting that.
I think particularly in the gay world and outside the Catholic Church, if that's where some of you want to go with this, I think, in the gay world, some of the most important, enriching, and incredibly life-affirming, important, shaping relationships, very often, between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys.
They can even save those young boys from desolation, from suicide.
And people talk over each other, and Milo says, providing their consensual.
End quote. So here again, we can begin to see what the problem is.
Sure, Milo is affirming age of consent laws, but also affirming personal exceptions to those laws.
Milo himself says that he was capable of giving informed consent to a sexual relationship when he was much younger than the age of consent, which in England is 16.
In his press conference, after the scandal broke, Milo confirmed that he lost his virginity at the age of 13.
So, one defense is to say that when Milo was talking about these, quote, most important, enriching, and incredibly life-affirming, important, shaping relationships, very often between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys, when Milo's talking about that.
He's referring to a relationship, which he reports started when he was 17, which was with a 29-year-old man, which says it lasted for a decade or so.
However, referring to young boys does not support this interpretation.
Young boys does not support this interpretation that he's talking about himself when he was 17 with a 29-year-old man.
I don't accept that interpretation.
I'm going to continue my analysis on the basis of not accepting it.
You can take this as my opinion, and of course it is not absolute fact, but there's a strong case for it.
Milo talks about these wonderfully positive relationships in the direct context of his molestation by a priest that started when he was 13 years old and continued for three years.
So this does not, again in my opinion, refer to the relationship that started when he was 17.
He's talking about, I think, direct evidence that he's talking about a relationship that started when he was 13 that is wonderful and positive and so on.
Now, in his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, Milo had the following exchanges.
So Joe Rogan said that he, Joe, went to Catholic school for a year, but got lucky because he was not sexually abused.
Milo responds by saying, What do you mean got lucky?
You're unlucky.
You didn't get that taste of...
No.
It's like I said earlier.
If not for Father Michael, I would have given far less good head.
So here... Milo directly refers to being sexually abused by a priest at the age of 13 as being lucky.
Joe Rogan was just not lucky enough to have that experience.
I mean, can you imagine saying this to your own 13-year-old son or daughter?
If they came home reporting that they'd been raped by an adult authority figure, would you say, lucky you?
Of course not.
God, no. Even if it was just molestation rather than our...
Now, Milo also says, and please, you've got to listen carefully to this.
It's barely reported on, but it's so, so important.
Milo and Joe are talking about Bryan Singer, who's a director.
Milo says, you know, I lived in Hollywood a while ago, briefly, and I went...
To other people who I won't name of a similar stature in Hollywood.
And I went to their boat parties and their house parties.
And some of the things that I've seen have beggared belief.
I don't want to be indiscreet about specific people because I think it's going to be, yeah, dangerous.
But I can tell you the truth without dropping anybody in it.
I mean, some of the boys there were very young.
Very young.
And when... I don't remember...
No, no, I don't...
No, eight years ago. I don't remember whether I ever met Bryan Singer.
Or if I even knew who he was then.
But I knew people of similar stature, as I say.
And there were some very young boys around at that time.
There was a lot of drugs and a lot of...
A lot of twinks taking drugs and having unsafe sex with older men.
And some of these boys were very young.
Okay, so let's zoom out for a second.
There are three issues here.
We've got to separate and understand all three.
So first of all, there is the relationship which Milo has referenced in defense of his statements and positive relationships with older men.
This relationship occurred when Milo was 17 with this 29-year-old man.
And again, in England at least, this is a legal relationship.
It does not fall into the category of molestation or pedophilia or anything like that.
Now Milo describes this relationship as being a form of mentorship, wherein an older gay man supports a younger gay man, emotionally and perhaps financially, who is having difficulties at home, helps him with identity and all that kind of stuff.
Now, personally I find this relationship problematic, to put it nicely.
I don't think that older men sort of preying upon confused, alienated and dysfunctional youths is particularly positive.
However, That has nothing to do with pedophilia.
Now, if this had been the only relationship that Milo had justified, there wouldn't be much controversy at all.
That's issue number one. The second issue is the molestation inflicted on the 13-year-old Milo by a Catholic priest and one other older man.
Now, this clearly falls into the category of sexual abuse, although...
Milo claims that he pursued sex with the priest, and that the priest was hot, and Milo has made numerous jokes about improving his oral skills under the tutelage of the older clergyman.
Milo also reports that he, quote, lost his virginity, end quote, at the age of 13.
And that seems like a bit of an odd way to put it.
If it happened in the context of abuse.
Like, if you're the victim of childhood sexual abuse, you no more lose your virginity than the victim of a violent mugging lost his wallet.
It was taken.
So these are the first two issues.
The 17-year-old Milo and the two sexual abusers who preyed on him when he was 13 until the age of 16.
Now... When Milo talks about the sexual mentoring that occurs between older men and younger boys he often refers to the relationship he entered into when he was 17 which he says lasted for a decade.
He does not explicitly tie the beneficial mentoring idea to the sexual abuse he suffered from the ages of 13 to 16.
Now If Milo refers to child molestation as some form of beneficial mentoring, yeah, this could have the effect of normalizing pedophilia or, at the very least, minimizing its negative impact.
It's hard to avoid the basic fact that if you praise a particular pedophile, you cannot exactly condemn pedophilia in principle.
To take a parallel example, you cannot condemn racism in principle if you praise the violent and destructive racism of a particular racist.
Thus, the criticism of normalizing pedophilia refers to the abuse Milo suffered at the hands of the priest and the other man when he was 13 to 16.
In the past, Milo described his sexual abuse by the priest not only as non-abusive, but in glowingly positive terms.
You know, the priest helped him with his singing, his fellatio skills, and so on.
And then there's all this abstract stuff about mentoring and it being great.
So praising a priest who molested you, saying that you gave full consent, and that it was a positive experience, and that you as a child were in fact the sexual predator...
I think that is what the criticism is really revolving around.
You know, complaining that straight people don't understand how gay people refer to a 17-year-old boy as a boy, it doesn't really answer this criticism at all.
And, of course, just for the record, neither does reminding people that the word pedophilia technically refers to a sexual attraction to prepubescent children.
For most people, this is kind of a distinction without a difference.
So, Saying that when you're 13 and you're molested for three years, that that is a positive and wonderful mentoring experience, and a strong case can be made that this is what Milo was referring to, is toxic.
Toxic, toxic. I mean, it not only justifies, but in fact praises the abuse, the sexual abuse of children.
And, you know, this is exactly what child molesters want to hear.
So they can say to themselves that the child they raped wanted it and loved it, loved them and treasured the abuse.
It's mentoring. Now, just imagine, if you're a child being groomed by a sexual predator, imagine this.
Okay, you face a fork in the road.
And here is Milo saying how special, how wonderful, how amazing an experience being molested is.
Do you see whose needs Milo's words could be serving?
Now part of Milo's defense is that as a journalist, Milo has outed three pedophiles and criticized media outlets for giving platforms to self-admitted pedophiles, although sympathetic to pedophilia.
Now this certainly helps make the case that he is not pro-pedophilia on principle.
However, the majority of people are upset that he praises specific pedophilia in his own personal narrative.
And, you know, as an attractive, charismatic public figure openly discussing how wonderful child molestation was for him and can be in general, that, I think, is the real problem.
It's one thing to say, like in an abstract argument, that age of consent laws are appropriate.
It's quite another to glowingly claim that a 13-year-old child can be a sexual predator capable of giving his full consent to a sexual relationship with an adult priest.
This kind of fragmentation of thought and personality, I believe, can be an echo of this kind of abuse.
Okay, so far we've talked about two issues, right?
The relationship Milo had with the older man when he was 17, and the molestation he experienced at the hands of the priest and another man when Milo was 13 to 16 years of age.
So, now let's have a look at the third issue, which was not addressed in Milo's Facebook post about this or his press conference.
On The Joe Rogan Show, Milo described being at parties years before where, quote, very young boys, end quote, were being preyed upon and molested by older men.
Milo reports that these very young boys were, quote, taking drugs and having unsafe sex with older men.
So again, there's this weird phrasing.
Taking drugs and having unsafe sex with older men?
No, no, no, no. No, no.
It's more accurate to say that little children were being drugged and raped by older men.
You see the difference?
Milo talks about going to house parties and boat parties, plural.
Multiple parties with sex crimes being committed against children.
Now, Perhaps back then Milo moved in social circles where this was not anything remarkably out of the ordinary, but, you know, most people don't.
And will, to some degree at least, kind of judge people by the company that they keep.
I mean, I've been to a lot of parties in my day, never seen anything like that.
And after describing these horrifying child rape orgy parties, Milo did not then describe running to the police or returning to these parties with hidden recording equipment, James O'Keefe style, or naming names, or anything like that.
And he is not naming names now!
Why not?
For the love of all that's holy, there's a Catholic priest out there who molested Milo.
Milo said the priest was hot, so not old, I assume.
Was he 29?
16 years older than Milo?
So now this priest, this molesting priest, is still in his 40s.
Is he still molesting children?
What about this other man, the other man who molested Milo when he was 13 to 16?
Was he a teacher? Was he a coach?
Is he still molesting children?
And what about these parties?
These house and boat child rape parties.
Who ran them?
Can Milo find these poor child victims?
The ones who were getting drugged and raped?
I mean, I know he says he wants to move on and be more of an entertainer and start his own network, but God alive, there are broken souls out there that Milo ran into less than a decade ago.
Find them. Get their stories.
Pursue whatever remedies are available to them.
Help them! For God's sakes!
No one else can.
I strongly doubt that anyone else at these parties has the conscience to save these boys.
Apologies? Yeah, okay.
They're not unimportant.
But actions matter.
And in this case, I think only Milo can take it.
And what was he apologizing for in the press conference?
Sloppy phrasing? Not knowing that straight people don't know that boy means someone above the age of consent in the gay community?
I'm not sure.
I'd actually like to be more sure with specifics what he was apologizing for.
So what's really going on?
Thank you.
I don't know. With certainty, obviously.
But there are some clues.
Pedophiles sometimes go through this process of grooming their victims, applying them with attention and gifts and affection, sometimes other substances.
This can often promote bonding, and that's designed to insulate the abusers from retaliation by their victims.
Particularly if a child has a difficult environment at home, affection and attention from an adult can be quite literally seductive.
That may be one of the reasons why he has this positive set of memories.
Now, processing the pain and anger of being molested as a child can be difficult.
It can be destabilizing, expensive, time-consuming.
And one tactic pursued by people wishing to avoid the pain of child abuse is to pretend it wasn't abuse, that it was discipline or strictness or that the victim somehow deserved the abuse or it was love or mentoring or something like that.
This defensiveness can sometimes give rise to an abuser-worshipping Stockholm Syndrome.
You know, where the victim of the abuse views himself as initiating the abuse or as being responsible for the abuse as being the abuser.
I mean, I've heard this many times.
People saying that they provoked their parents' rage.
That it was really their own fault for being beaten as a child and offering up sympathy.
Oh, how difficult it must have been for their parents to raise them But if you're a public figure, and in particular if you speak about ethics and virtue and integrity and so on, it is really, really important to understand the effects that your statements can have on others.
If you go around praising a priest who molested you, if you portray the experience in wonderfully positive terms, this has an effect on other people's perception of sexual predation and molestation.
If you're a pedophile and you see a former victim praising being molested, it becomes a whole lot easier to pretend you're not evil.
And if you are a victim of child molestation, and you see a good-looking, healthy, successful, and charismatic public figure praising the man who molested him, perhaps you feel that you should be more grateful that You should try to be more positive about being victimized as a child.
I mean, the person you are watching seems to have had a great time with his abuser.
He got lucky and is very successful.
So maybe the fault is yours for not being enthusiastic enough about having been molested.
Trying to deal with an unfathomably evil situation is really difficult.
The temptation can be enormous to pretend to have risen above it all and to make what happened to you cool and edgy and hip and to be insouciant and daring and shocking by portraying your 13-year-old self as a sexual predator preying upon a poor old priest who didn't even know what hit him.
Tempting. But some temptations should be resisted.
I can't read the mind of the world, of course, but I really think this is what people are actually reacting to.
It's not about what Milo did when he was 17.
It's not even specifically about what was done to Milo when he was 13, which every reasonable person would have bottomless sympathy for.
No, it's... If I had to say, I think it's about what Milo did recently, as an adult.
When he portrayed child molestation as a fun, hip, cool, positive experience, got lucky.
Now, I can't imagine what kind of pain produces that kind of reaction.
But if somebody responds to abuse by suggesting that abuse is a positive experience, I would tell him this.
You're dealing with it in the wrong way.
It's well known that victims of childhood sexual abuse often act out promiscuously and abuse substances as adults.
I've actually done a whole series on this with expert interviews and charts and data and facts.
You can find that at bombinthebrain.com.
Milo's description of his last years from his teens to his late 20s kind of fits this pattern almost to a T. It is also well known that people whose fundamental identity is viciously violated as children often create like this false, glittering, seductive public persona as adults.
Sometimes this is called the false self, which will gain them some initial success but often provokes their downfall.
So, two days after these revelations surfaced, Milo held a press conference.
He opened it by saying, I am a gay man and a child abuse victim.
Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they should not have.
One of these men was a priest.
My relationship with my abusers is complicated by the fact that, at the time, I did not perceive what was happening to me as abusive.
I can look back now and see that it was.
I still don't view myself as a victim, but I am one.
Looking back, I could see the effects it had on me.
In the years after what happened, I fell into alcohol and nihilistic partying that lasted well into my late 20s.
He said, I've reviewed the tapes that appeared last night in their proper, full context, and I don't believe they say what is being reported.
Nonetheless, I do say some things on the tapes that I do not mean and which do not reflect my views.
I don't know what this means.
I mean, the words you say do not reflect your views, but then whose views do they reflect?
The abusers, probably.
Milo then says, quote, I shouldn't have used the word boy, which gay men often do, to describe young men of consenting age, instead of young men.
That was an error. I was talking about my own relationship when I was 17 with a man who was 29.
The age of consent in the UK is 16.
So, this is a little bit of the switch that I was talking about earlier, where he does talk very positively about his molestation by the priest, but then he says, no, no, no, I was talking about my relationship when I was 17.
And in this phrase, it's interesting, like, I think Milo is being kind of disingenuous, in my opinion, because he says, well, you know, I've referred to them as boys, as boy.
But he actually admits the crucial word, young.
On the Drunken Peasants podcast, Milo clearly said, quote, relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are.
Not boys, young boys.
Omitting this detail is, I think, pretty crucial and kind of telling, I think.
Milo continues.
He says, but I am sorry to other abuse victims if my own personal way of dealing with what happened to me has hurt you.
You know, personally, I don't like the I'm sorry if you were upset by what I said kind of a pseudo-apology.
See, Mahalo did not have his own personal way of dealing with his molestation.
No, it wasn't his own personal one.
He publicly, very publicly, and repeatedly described his sexual abuse in glowing and relentlessly positive terms.
That's not a private way to deal with things.
That's a public way to praise them.
And it is kind of an implicit criticism of those who have failed to achieve such unstable pseudo-Zen positivity.
Milo again. He says, No one can tell me or anyone else who has lived through these experiences how they should best deal with those emotions.
Okay. First of all, in this very press conference, Milo told abuse victims how they should best deal with their emotions.
We'll get to that in a second.
And secondly, by repeatedly talking about the wonderfully positive effects of child molestation, Milo was actually telling people how they should best deal with their emotions.
Which was to view their abuser as wonderful.
It's quite a quick turnaround in 48 hours.
Thirdly, for heaven's sakes, there are in fact better ways to deal with your emotions than promiscuity, than nihilism, than alcoholism, than relentless partying, than praising your abuser.
This is not pure relativism.
It's not whatever you feel like you should do.
At the press conference, Milo also said, quote, I just want anybody in my position.
I lost my virginity at 13.
The things that happened to me happened between 13 and 16.
It's not the worst thing that's ever going to happen to you.
And I know that some people will find that...
In and of itself an outrageous statement, but it simply isn't the worst thing that will ever happen to you.
Going bankrupt is worse.
All kinds of other things that may happen to you in your life could be worse.
So don't allow it to define you.
And don't allow it to shape your decision-making, because then they win.
Now, I understand.
I understand you don't want to let abusers define your identity.
But praising your abusers does exactly that.
So, you know, listen to Milo, but be very, very careful.
Taking emotional self-knowledge advice from a man who seems to have completely reversed his position on the potential benefits of being molested in about 48 hours and is still kind of obscuring the issue by talking about him at 17 rather than him at 13.
And, oh come on, bankruptcy is worse than...
Being molested? I don't know what to say about that.
I don't. Okay.
All that having been said, in all this tragedy, it's heartbreaking.
In all this mess, there still does exist a genuine nugget of hope.
While the statute of limitations for prosecuting these past crimes, maybe it's lapsed, I don't know.
There may be other remedies for what happened to these parties and for what happened to Milo.
You can still name names.
You can still find victims.
you can still protect the children of the future from the predators of the past.
I think it's very important, if you've been abused, if you've been victimized, you speak the simple, clear truth about your victimization.
Like no defensiveness, no justification, no evasiveness, without all this shiny empty distractions of the false self.
If you do that, if you speak clearly about what happened to you, this can be a very powerful moment in the world.
The world is not often Kind to children.
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