Free Republic

The British, gay provocateur and former Breitbart editor is everything that traditionalists hate: bold, politically incorrect, unapologetic, and often offensive. He uses his unconventional style to spread conservatism, offend “snowflakes” and promote free speech. Milo is so controversial, many mainstream conservatives have completely written him off, for fear of tarnishing the GOP brand. While it may be tempting to disassociate with Milo, the Republican Party must listen up and learn a few lessons from the controversial Brit — especially if it wants to expand its base among young voters, who now make up the nation’s largest voting bloc. *** The...

First, post-1960s social conservatism — the bigger-than-the-religious-right tent that once included a lot of moderately religious fellow travelers — has collapsed back to its zealous core. On practically every issue save abortion, liberals won the culture war decisively, and religious conservatives awoke to find themselves strangers in their own country, dismissed as bigots from liberalism’s pulpits and stuck on the wrong side of 40-60 or 30-70 public-opinion splits. But social liberalism’s sweeping victory produced new forms of backlash — less traditionalist and more populist, less religious and more rowdy, not sacred but profane. These forms of resistance take aim at...

In the mid-1970s, America was introduced to “Stockholm Syndrome” when 19 year old Berkeley student and heiress Patty Hearst was transformed from kidnap victim to domestic terrorist by identifying with her captors. Stockholm Syndrome is trauma-induced mental enslavement to the person or group causing the trauma, and Hearst has ever since been its poster child. Her identity hijacked, she joined her Simbionese Liberation Army kidnappers and eventually went to jail for crimes she committed voluntarily in that false persona. In the unfolding spectacle of the Milo Yiannopoulos pederasty scandal, America is being introduced to a far more potent and common...

When Out magazine assigned me an interview with the Breitbart.com rabble-rouser Milo Yiannopoulos, I knew it would be controversial. In the gay and liberal communities in particular, he is a provocative and loathed figure, and I knew featuring him in such a liberal publication would get negative attention. He has been repeatedly kicked off Twitter for, among other things, reportedly inciting racist, sexist bullying of “Ghostbusters” actress Leslie Jones. Before interviewing Yiannopoulos, I thought he was a nasty attention-whore, but I wanted to do a neutral piece on him that simply put the facts out there. After the story posted...