Matt Schlapp: ‘Fumble’ to Invite Milo Yiannopoulos to CPAC

American Conservative Union (ACU) chairman Matt Schlapp admitted his organization “fumbled” when it initially invited controversial journalist Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) during an interview Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

CPAC, a large gathering of conservatives hosted annually by the ACU, rescinded its invitation to the already controversial provocateur Monday after clips surfaced of Yiannopoulos condoning some forms of pedophilia. Although Schlapp said that he initially wanted to give the controversial Breitbart News editor “a chance,” he said that Yiannopoulos’ comments featured in the clips were the final straw.

“And, you know, you can imagine a lot of time and thought goes into deciding who speaks on these topics. And clearly, this is one where we fumbled, where his comments on what you referred to as child sexual abuse, put him outside consideration.”

“And, you know, you can imagine a lot of time and thought goes into deciding who speaks on these topics. And clearly, this is one where we fumbled, where his comments on what you referred to as child sexual abuse, put him outside consideration,” Schlapp told Ingraham.

When Yiannopoulos was first invited to deliver a major speech at the conference, CPAC received significant backlash from many conservatives, due to the Breitbart editor’s history of controversy, his vulgarity and his flagrant flaunting of his various sexual exploits. Nevertheless, prior to the clips’ release, Schlapp said that CPAC was willing to give Yiannopoulos a chance — especially considering the violent and highly publicized backlash the provocateur received before UC Berkeley cancelled his speech Feb. 1.

“You know, I told him that I’m the kind of person who likes to give someone a chance, and I was going to consider giving him a chance,” Schlapp said. “And we did invite him, and you get a chance. And if you break that chance, you don’t get to come back.”

Schlapp noted that he had sat down with Yiannopoulos and “tried to talk to him” about his myriad of pre-existing controversies when CPAC initially considered inviting him to speak.

“And we talked to him about what would be appropriate and what would not be appropriate,” Schlapp said. “He was going to speak on the narrow topic of shutting down the ability to have free speech on campus. And people said, ‘Well, why was he appropriate to speak on that?’ Because I think of what happened in light of Berkeley — he is a voice in that particular movement.”

“And the ability to have people, even though we don’t agree with everything they say, and he is rather flamboyant … but he is somebody who is spending a lot of his time talking on college campuses. And a lot of time these liberal wards on the campus have shut him down,” Schlapp added in CPAC’s defense. “So on that narrow topic, I do think he’s somebody who’s trying to take on the guys and he is a leading voice.”

But the comments on pedophilia proved too much for CPAC and threatened to tarnish the longstanding conservative identity of the event.

“We celebrate the gadfly at the expense of what, I mean, at the expense of our traditional understanding of right and wrong, or not even that — of decorum and modesty?” Ingraham said. “I hate that ‘teachable moment’ phrase, but maybe it’s kind of a teachable moment that the more conservatives elevate or give, I guess, air time to people who are not all that chalk-full of ideas but are really good self-promotors, might not be helping conservatism. That’s all I can say.”

Yiannopoulos’ comments were made while defending relationships between older men and “younger boys.”

“In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship — those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents,” Yiannopoulos had said.

In its statement rescinding Yiannopoulos’ invitation, CPAC said that it could not tolerate the “offensive” video “condoning pedophilia.”

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Simon & Schuster, which was preparing to publish Yiannopoulos’ upcoming book “Dangerous,” also announced Monday that it had cancelled on Yiannopoulos.

“They canceled my book,” Yiannopoulos wrote on Facebook. “I’ve gone through worse. This will not defeat me.”

Yiannopoulos also resigned his position as senior editor at Breitbart News Tuesday afternoon. Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow said Tuesday on the Breitbart radio show on Sirius XM that Yiannopoulos’ words “appeared to show him justifying sex between an adult and a minor” were “indefensible,” “troubling,” “upsetting” and “appalling.”

“He seemed to be speaking from personal experience as a gay man; he also revealed he’s a victim of child abuse himself. He himself told me he’s never had inappropriate contact with a minor since he was an adult. … it’s all very upsetting and something we take very seriously at Breitbart,” Marlow said. “We’ve been going through things and trying to figure out the best way to handle this, but the bottom line is the comments on the video are not defensible, and I think most people [agree] with that.”

Marlow did, however, take a shot at “the forces on the left” and “the Republican establishment” and “Never-Trump movement” who, he claimed, delivered a “coordinated hit” against Yiannopoulos.

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“The problem is the video is a real video with horrible things on it,” Marlow said, adding, “There seems to be growing evidence this was all coordinated to wait for a peak moment when Milo was red hot … and they sat on this story and hold it for maximum political damage, which is really sort of sickening, which they would keep this from the public if they had it until they tried to wait until they could do the most damage to his career and to Breitbart.”

CPAC may have needed to learn a difficult lesson, conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan told Ingraham in a separate interview Tuesday.

Buchanan, who served as a former senior adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, noted that CPAC seems to have found itself embroiled in the modern dilemma of where the “lines” are to be drawn regarding “what is tolerable and moral and acceptable speech,” as well as “who draws those lines?”

“I would not have invited him,” Buchanan said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” “But let me say this: There is an element of humor here, and it’s CPAC is going to show up the terrible speech codes being imposed on campuses that don’t let Milo speak, and then they don’t let Milo speak.”