By Steve Berman

CPAC has committed suicide: Milo Yiannopoulos has reportedly been selected as a keynote speaker at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference.

First, note that this was first picked up by The Hollywood Reporter, which sails the rich seas of showbiz publicists and gossip.

Yiannopoulos told The Hollywood Reporter his CPAC presentation will focus on his “experiences in America battling feminists, Black Lives Matter, the media, professors and the entertainment industry.”

Milo wouldn’t bring this news to National Review, or The Weekly Standard, or (God forbid) the New York Times. That’s because those organizations would react with a mixture of disbelief, laughter and physical nausea. He went straight to the center of his heart, which is self-promotion and fame.

This is what CPAC has come to. It’s no longer a force for political change or philosophical leadership in what “conservative” means. It’s now raw entertainment.

Let’s look at the man these so-called “conservatives” have selected to represent their cause.

For your reading ~~pleasure~~ dyspepsia, here’s the passage John McCormack tweeted from the Daily Wire.

There’s plenty to dislike about Milo Yiannopoulos’ poisonous brand — he says Jews run the media*; earlier this month he characterized a Jewish BuzzFeed writer as a “a typical example of a sort of thick-as-pig shit media Jew”; he justifies anti-Semitic memes as playful trollery and pats racist sites like American Renaissance on the head; he describes himself as a “chronicler of, and occasional fellow traveler with the alt-right” while simultaneously recognizing that their “dangerously bright” intellectuals believe that “culture is inseparable from race”; back in his days going under the name Milo Wagner, he reportedly posed with his hand atop a Hitler biography, posted a Hitler meme about killing 6 million Jews, and wore an Iron Cross; last week he berated a Muslim woman in the audience of one of his speeches for wearing a hijab in the United States; his alt-right followers routinely spammed my Twitter account with anti-Semitic propaganda he tut-tutted before his banning (the amount of anti-Semitism in my feed dropped by at least 70 percent after his ban, which I opposed); he personally Tweeted a picture of a black baby at me on the day of my son’s birth, because according to the alt-right I’m a “cuck” who wants to see the races mixed; he sees the Constitution as a hackneyed remnant of the past, to be replaced by a new right he leads; there’s plenty more — but rioting against him only means more people buy into his schtick and allows him to shed his persona for a clean-cut conservative character on Tucker Carlson.*

There’s more dirty laundry in Yiannopoulos’ short public life than someone worthy like Newt Gingrich accumulated in his whole life. Milo is simply a fake, a poseur, a self-aggrandizing ass.

This is the petard upon which CPAC, which until now has been a respected forum for conservatives, has hoisted itself.

https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/833066142054891521

I agree with my colleague Josh Hammer on this. It’s a disgrace. It’s abhorrent and shameful. But it’s also how an organization commits suicide. Goodbye, CPAC. You’re dead to me.