"Milo was put on this planet to teach conservatives that fear is the enemy of freedom, and that mockery and flippancy are Kryptonite to the left."

Editor’s Note: Friday evening, July 14, the David Horowitz Freedom Center hosted a book launch for Dangerous, the debut political manifesto by flamboyant conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos. Although self-published after Milo’s book deal was rescinded by a cowardly Simon & Schuster in the face of pressure from the left, Dangerous now stands at an astounding #4 on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction. That puts it just ahead of a _memoir by t_he far-less fabulous, far-left senator Al Franken.

Milo was introduced to a very enthusiastic, packed house at the Luxe Hotel in Los Angeles by Freedom Center founder David Horowitz. After an affectionate hug between the two political provocateurs, _Milo began by confessing that David was one of his heroes and joked that he would aspire to be like him, “but I’m too lazy.” Milo then went on to deliver a speech_, interrupted frequently by applause, that was as serious and inspiring as it was irreverent and entertaining.

Last November at the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend, Milo was awarded the organization’s annual Annie Taylor Award for Courage. Milo will also be appearing at this November’s Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, Florida (details here).

The transcript of Horowitz’s introduction is below:

Good evening. An introduction to the phenomenon known as Milo Yiannopoulos, must begin with a brief tour of the cultural landscape he entered and helped to transform. Otherwise, there is no way to understand the earthquake that followed – an upheaval inextricably linked to the man he impishly refers to as “Daddy,” Donald Trump.

For fifty years, the political left – the anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-American left - has been winning the culture war, while the political right – the free market, free people, patriotic right has been losing it. The fortunes of this war took a dramatic turn when Donald Trump threw his hat into the political ring in 2015, and when – in front of 17 million Americans on national TV – he called Rosie O’Donnell a fat slob and a pig, and then before 50 million Americans said to Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: “You are a liar and a crook.”

No other Republican would have dared to utter such words publicly because Hillary and Rosie are females, and Republicans, being properly bred and well-mannered, understand they must be deferential to women, even if those women happen to be pigs and crooks. If Republicans spoke the blunt truth in the prevailing political climate, they would be cast out of polite society and become unpersons. Most importantly, their expulsion would be at the hands of the entire culture – left and right - from Donna Brazille and Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush. They would be universally condemned in the collective culture as sexists, which is the gender-version of “racists,” “homophobes” and other traducers of the marginalized and the oppressed.

Prior to the advent of Trump, the effect of this politically correct gender cowardice on the right was to unleash some of the most vicious tongues in our national life – belonging of course to Hillary, Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Rosie - and to shield the wielders of verbal poison from retribution and reproach. The political result of this Republican self-censorship has been all the defeats on healthcare, borders and budgets that Republicans have inflicted on themselves - despite their control of Congress. They inflicted defeat on themselves because they were afraid that if they did not surrender they would be called racists, sexists, and homophobes, and dumped into the basket of deplorables.

For fifty years the left has depended on its ability to exploit what is in effect America’s national myth - the romance of the underdog who overcomes adversity - in the service of its destructive agendas. In the left’s version of this myth the underdog is recast as a victim of social injustice, while political opponents of the left are condemned as oppressors.

As a messianic movement, the left also plagiarizes religious themes, specifically the Christian paradigm. Social Justice is the promised heaven where the last shall be first, where every valley shall be exalted and every mountain brought low. And every non-believer shall be damned.

Every leftist political advance during America’s fifty-year decline has been achieved through the use of human shields, allegedly representing the underdogs and victims – blacks, women, gays, illegal aliens, misunderstood jihadists and so on. The left’s overwhelming advantage in the culture war has been achieved through a litany of moral indictments – racist, sexist anti-gay, everyone who opposes us go away.

These moral indictments are codified and enforced by the progressive party line, otherwise known as “political correctness,” which is a totalitarian idea invented by history’s greatest mass murderer, Mao Zedong. Its success has caused it to be internalized by the left’s political opponents, crippling their responses. This is why Republicans - and conservatives generally – are unable to fight fire with fire if the aggressor is female or black or gay, or pretends to be a defender of the same. As Hannah Arendt observed, and as Milo quotes her in his new book, “The aim of a totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream from culture. But this almost understates the equation. The culture war –the war against political correctness, against the totalitarian party line – is the political war. Without defeating political correctness, the political war cannot be won. Until the advent of Trump, there was no Republican political figure able to do this.

But before Donald Trump there was Milo Yiannopoulos, who was not a political figure and who would have been thrown out of the Republican Party if he had been one. Milo was a cultural justice warrior who already possessed the keys to defeating the totalitarian left. As much an original as Trump himself, and as politically sharp, Milo exploded into the nation’s consciousness with a tour of the fortresses of political correctness, America’s benighted college campuses. Deploying a theatrical verbal jiu-jitsu, he stripped the self-righteous of their carefully constructed fig leaves and left them stuttering and screaming (literally) in his flamboyant wake. In the course of what he called his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” Milo became a political rock star, creating a youth battalion that poured into the streets to swell the ranks of Trump’s presidential army.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a warrior the likes of whom no Republican Party or conservative movement has ever seen. As a gay man, and a flamboyant one, he is in his own person a weapon against the left’s preposterous claim to speak on behalf of the so-called marginalized and oppressed. Not that being gay has protected Milo from vicious personal attacks, intended to destroy him. Being gay threw his enemies off balance so he could deliver many coups de gras. But rank hypocrisy or belief in their own b.s. has never proved an obstacle to leftwing malevolence. Few individuals have ever been subjected to the kind of personal abuse that Milo has had to suffer in his service to the cause. But Milo - for all his fey limp-wristedness - is an incredibly strong and brave man. There are few political figures who have displayed the kind of courage that Milo has regularly shown on the field of battle.

Milo has two incomparable assets – the creative force of his imagination and, paradoxically, his intellectual seriousness. Both are on display in his new book Dangerous, which we are here to launch in Los Angeles tonight. Dangerous is the Communist Manifesto of the Counter-Revolution. Savagely clear-eyed and compelling in its arguments, profound in its understanding of the political left, and impossible to put down because of its irreverent humor, Dangerous is a combat manual for cultural justice warriors - a guide to the defense of individual liberty and the return to common sense.

Milo’s prescription for the battle is this: be fearless, and flip the equation. Troll them into exposing their private parts. Take their bullets, dig them out, and shoot them back. On the left, as Milo reminds us, feelings trump facts, especially hurt feelings. Milo’s riposte – immortalized in a YouTube clip of his encounter with a whining feminist: “Fuck your feelings.”

Milo’s goal, as he tells readers, is “to teach you how to cause the same sort of mayhem I do in defense of the most important right you have in America: the right to do, think, say and be whatever the hell you want. In short order, I have assimilated to the American ways of unapologetic free speech, and of putting facts, fun and fabulousness ahead of feelings.”

Milo Yiannopoulos was put on this planet to teach conservatives that fear is the enemy of freedom, and that mockery and flippancy, are Kryptonite to the left. Laughter strips them of their moral high ground, and leaves their hypocrisy to fry in the sun of the blunt truth. As Milo himself puts it: ‘I’m no hypocrite. I tell the truth, always. That’s my whole fucking problem…. I am the left’s worst nightmare.” Yes you are. It is my great honor and privilege to present the incomparable Milo Yiannopoulos