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Editor's Note: The following is from a talk given by Milo Yiannopoulos in Palm Beach, Florida at David Horowitz's annual Restoration Weekend Nov. 15–18. The author offers candid insights into the clerical sex abuse crisis and the problem of active homosexual clergy, and discusses his own abuse as a teen at the hands of a priest. Publication of this article is not an endorsement of the author's personal lifestyle nor an agreement with same-sex marriage. We encourage readers to pray for Yiannopoulos.

*******

By Milo Yiannopoulos

Let’s get straight to business. When I came up with the idea of reinvigorating the whole "free speech on campus" thing in 2016, I had no idea it would spawn a generational conservative movement like it has. I was just having a few scotches with the Breitbart editors, trying to come up with a theme for my college tour. But it worked out really well! All I had to do was tell a few off-color jokes about feminists ... and Berkeley burned itself to the ground. Oh, and we elected Daddy. You're welcome, America.

But it's time to move on. At Restoration Weekend for the past few years, you've heard a lot about free speech, immigration, radical Islam and Donald Trump. But I'm here today to talk to you about an institution you might have forgotten about, since we've all been so wrapped up in the misdeeds of the media, the craziness on campus and Democrats trying to steal elections down here in Florida.

I'm talking about the Catholic Church, which is the subject of my new book, Diabolical. Yes, I will be signing it afterwards for you, upon receipt of two appropriately gushing compliments. If you want it personalized, that will cost you three gushing compliments. And if you think the cover's enough to give you a fit of the vapors, just wait until you read the damn thing.

I'm a Catholic of Jewish extraction, as many of you know, which ought to mean I'm racked with guilt about absolutely everything, but also really funny about it. I'm afraid only the latter is true. Even the things I ought to feel guilty about, like bribing the front desk to swap my room with another speaker's luxury oceanfront suite, really don't bother me at all. All I have to do when they come up with the amenity baskets and free champagne and ask for Mr. Dershowitz is say, "Thanks!"

Speaking of stealing from other Jews, it's true that I don't have much daily connection with my Jewish heritage, but I do look up to the great Jewish heroes of history, especially when they remind me of something I like about myself. For instance, like Netanyahu, I'm awesome. Like Kafka, I have a healthy sense of the absurd. Like Anne Frank, I hid in the closet until sweaty men in uniform removed me by force.

Like Henry Kissinger, I'm constantly being lied about. Like Houdini, I seem to be able to get myself out of anything. Like Freud, I have an unsettling ability to look inside people and discern their secret motivations. And, like King Solomon, I'd happily cut a baby in half if it meant I could keep my dinner reservation.

Truthfully, I'm the product of both my Jewish heritage and my Catholic upbringing. From my Judaism I got my love of argument and contrariness. That's what makes Jews such fun to talk to — we're always happy to have a good row whether we believe what we're saying or not. It's like that old joke, you put two Jews on a desert island, and in a month there would be three synagogues. Merely having Jewish blood is a form of argument in itself. It seems to annoy everyone without even trying, which I love, obviously.

Joy is Christianity's great contribution to our culture.

From Christianity, I got joy. Joy is Christianity's great contribution to our culture. That's not to say Jews can't be funny — just look at how they vote! But it's Chesterton's laughter and war that keeps me going, and keeps a smile on my face. And the bad guys do just hate seeing me keep popping up in their rear view mirrors with a permanently sunny disposition.

Christianity also gave me confidence in my — how should I put it — very direct way of speaking. I'm often accused of being too gauche, or crude, or foul-mouthed. Hard to believe, I know. These people have evidently never familiarized themselves with how people spoke in the Middle Ages when Christianity was still in the ascendant, and they really got into the idea of the incarnation — God's taking on human flesh. That included our propensity to fart and laugh. You remember Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose. Only National Review and Weekly Standard editors have sided with the librarian who wanted to poison everyone for daring to laugh.

Christian authors often address the simple and everyday as a way of lifting the mind to understanding how God took on the frailty and reality and ridicule of being human. In classical terms, this meant speaking in the low style of sermo humilis, which Christian authors like Augustine used to give dignity to the individual soul. In the Western tradition, quotidian details from daily life, deployed by a skillful novelist, tell you more than pages of circumlocution. That's how Christianity so often works — from the mundane to the transcendent. That's what I try to do in my speeches, too. Start with some four-letter-words and cruel observations about overweight feminist harpies, but finish with something moving and enlightening about human relationships.

My style is what has made me effective with young people. I am not going to give it up. Sometimes it's worth reminding ourselves that there's nothing wrong with plain speaking. Republicans seem committed to making their journalism unreadable and their conversations boring because they are wedded to bizarre ideas of propriety and niceness. So yes, I might say **** at some point. Get over it. Because God has.

In the years since my era-defining college tour, as I've reflected on the horrors engulfing Western civilization, I've been drawn closer to my Catholic faith. I've realized that it isn't freedom of speech, capitalism, the rule of law or the English language, brilliant though they all are, that are going to save the West from socialism, feminism, vegetarianism, transgenderism and Islam. It's Christianity — or, as the Catholic novelist Walker Percy called, "The Jewish-Christian Thing."

Unfortunately, the modern Catholic Church is embarrassingly and reflexively left-wing.

Unfortunately, the modern Catholic Church is embarrassingly and reflexively left-wing. It's in sync with other left-wing institutions like the universities, in which women are flourishing, outpacing men, but at which only women's concerns are regarded as worth airtime and investment. The problem is especially bad in black churches, which are filled with misandrist women and which have nothing of value to say to disaffected young black men tempted into criminality and spiritual impoverishment.

And it is being torn apart by child abuse cover-up scandals that seem to have no end. In my new book, I explain how the leftward tilt of the Church is related to the child abuse crisis cover-ups and ongoing abusive behavior from priests at every level of the Church hierarchy. That's why a clerical purge is needed. Not just because of the crimes and the cover-ups. Not because gays can't ever be good priests. But because the faithful need much better generals to lead the next generation of warriors into battle. And not just any purge! We need a clerical purge at such a scale and intensity it makes the Night of the Long Knives look like seasonal layoffs at Banana Republic.

Now, unlike the Left, which loves pederasty and celebrates pederasts, I happen to think these priestly abuses are horrifying. As some of you know, I was on the receiving end of priestly advances myself in the 1990s. In February 2017 both Left and Right-leaning media teamed up to eject me from public life because I'd spoken a little loosely and incautiously about my own experiences in the 1990s. Disgustingly, they tried to tell people I was an apologist for child abuse. They failed, and I am still here, and I am not going anywhere. Ironically, by the way, my reporting as a journalist over the years has helped land three child predators in court, and two of those in jail. Want to bet whether any of my detractors have put that many points on the board against child abuse?

But I do have one thing in common with the people destroying the Church with their repugnant sexual urges and their horrific treatment of victims after the fact, and I'll share it with you today, although it may shock some of you. The truth is, I am gay. No really! I am. No need to look so surprised, sir. And the cover-up of historical sexual abuse from within the Catholic Church is a gay crime, performed by gay men in service of other gay men, concerning assaults overwhelmingly performed by men on postpubescent boys and a debased culture of gay orgies in what ought to be educational establishments.

The cover-up of historical sexual abuse from within the Catholic Church is a gay crime, performed by gay men in service of other gay men.

But it's not only a gay crime: it's a predominantly left-wing gay crime, with the perpetrators more likely than not to be, in one journalist's words, "hippy-dippy, loosey-goosey innovators with the liturgy, heterodox on family matters, and very bad managers of diocesan resources, especially the schools." The same people trying to water down Church teaching on contraception and marriage are the ones raping kids, or covering up for priests who do. Every time a truly horrific story emerges, it always seems to be attached to a bishop who is known to be gay, and possessed of impeccable left-wing credentials.

The press has been basically silent about Pope Francis' complicity in the current abuse scandal, perhaps because journalists genuinely don't know what all the fuss is about. After all, so many of their own idols are pederasts. The most reliable way to know whether someone supports child rape or not is ask them if they vote Democrat. No act of depredation or abuse of the young is too horrible, so long as you have the right politics. As in Hollywood, so in the Church.

And no matter how awful your sins, if you're a Lefty, the press will cover for you, turning abusers into victims and survivors into villains. San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the U.S., groomed and seduced young boys but was turned by the Left into a civil rights hero. Harry Hay, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs are all taught in literature courses. All three were blatant and proud pederasts. Lolita and Death in Venice are both considered great art.

The old boys of the Left covered endlessly for Sir John Gielgud. R. Kelly's exile lasted minutes. Roman Polanski was given the red carpet treatment on his way back into the tent. And that's before we get to the decades of la-la-la-I'm-not-listening it took to keep Kevin Spacey's cocaine-fueled indiscretions with young men out of the press, or to hush up Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn's obsession with sexualized images of children and his creepy blog, on which he has bragged about beating up his midget girlfriend.

The press gleefully assaulted me when I dared to make a few jokes about my own experiences and speak frankly about a few facts of gay life. It couldn't be, could it, that they don't care at all about the victims of child sex abuse, and instead use this emotionally charged subject merely to destroy their political opponents? It couldn't be that pederasty is only bad when it's not a liberal, and then it's so bad that merely joking about something that happened to you personally is enough to get you machine-gunned half to death? I won't believe it!

I know you’ve all just eaten, so I won’t go into details, but it's amazing to me the amount of physical pain gay men willingly endure during sex without making much more than a moan, versus how fragile and frenzied they become when someone uses the wrong words. The only time you hear them call out in pain is when someone uses the wrong transgender pronoun. I suppose the same argument applies to feminists. They act as though childbirth is nothing but mean words on the internet represent some kind of apocalypse.

The media's protection of Pope Francis worked for a while, most notably in the early, myth-building period of his papacy. As recently as November 2017, the Washington Post was still running headlines such as "How Pope Francis Can Cleanse the Far-Right Rot From the Catholic Church." That aged well! Catholic news services have expressed surprise on the rare occasion a mainstream outlet has covered alleged wrongdoing by Francis without smothering the reporting in defensive language or vague gesturing toward a conservative conspiracy.

True to form, everything journalists have done in reporting this crisis has been to protect the reputation of a pope perceived as a leftist, and to protect the delicate feelings of the gay lobby, which hates it when gay people are talked about honestly in public as the promiscuous, low-income, drug-taking, reckless, and unhappy people we (statistically) are.

True to form, everything journalists have done in reporting this crisis has been to protect the reputation of a pope perceived as a leftist, and to protect the delicate feelings of the gay lobby.

You can imagine the panic at The New York Times, can't you, when an international child sex scandal erupts and it looks like all the bad guys are left-wing gays whose Google result pages show a bunch of speeches about climate change and embracing migrants. Whatever can be published to distract attention from the perpetrators is hastily cobbled together for the morning edition. Take a Times headline from August 2018, which appeared in print as "Francis Takes High Road as Conservatives Pounce, Taking Criticisms Public." Online, the Times headlined the story "Vatican Power Struggle Bursts Into Open As Conservatives Pounce." Here's how the story begins:

Since the start of his papacy, Francis has infuriated Catholic traditionalists as he tries to nurture a more welcoming church and shift it away from culture war issues, whether abortion or homosexuality. "Who am I to judge?" the pope famously said, when asked about gay priests. Just how angry his political and doctrinal enemies are became clear this weekend, when a caustic letter published by the Vatican’s former top diplomat in the United States blamed a "homosexual current" in the Vatican hierarchy for sexual abuse.

No mention of the pope covering for abusive priests. Elsewhere the same day, Reuters published a story with the headline, "Defenders rally around Pope, fear conservatives escalating war."

In matters of theology and the complex arena of Church politics, journalists do what they do in any situation where the facts are just too exhausting and time-consuming to uncover. First, temporarily pretend to give a **** about the subject matter — in this case, the welfare of kids — so you can affect a holier-than-thou tone. Then, side with the guy the conservatives hate, regardless of the facts, which in this case means siding with Pope Francis, even though he's clearly the bad guy in the story.

In the long run, though, no amount of soft-pedaling from the Times is going to obscure the fact that the corrupt, socialist, homosexual mafia in charge of the Holy See is a disease which, left untreated, will destroy the Catholic Church. Maybe that's the plan. But the rest of us aren't going to stand by and watch it happen. I'm certainly not, which is why I've written this book.

Read Part II.

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