Milo Yiannopoulos disinvited from CPac after making comments on child abuse

The American Conservative Union has rescinded its invitation to Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at the group’s annual CPac conference, after footage emerged in which the rightwing provocateur discusses sex between “younger boys” and older men.

In an internet livestream, Yiannopoulos, a news editor at Breitbart who was permanently banned from Twitter in July 2016 for instigating abuse of the Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones, says “you can get quite hung up on this child abuse thing”.

He goes on to suggest that sex between “younger boys” and older men could be a “coming-of-age relationship … in which those older men help those younger boys discover who they are”.

He also details a relationship he had with a Catholic priest when he was a teenager.

After the release of the video prompted outrage among conservatives on Twitter, Yiannopoulos used a Facebook post to deny supporting paedophilia and claimed the video had been “selectively edited”.

“I did say that there are relationships between younger men and older men that can help a young gay man escape from a lack of support or understanding at home. That’s perfectly true and every gay man knows it. But I was not talking about anything illegal and I was not referring to prepubescent boys.

“I was talking about my own relationship when I was 17 with a man who was 29. The age of consent in the UK is 16. If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an internet livestream with a crime I was the victim of that’s my prerogative. It’s no different to gallows humour from Aids sufferers.”

Yiannopoulos wrote that “no subject should be off limits for discussion and particularly for humour”.

But Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union, which bills itself as the US’s “premier conservative voice”, said that Yiannopoulous’s Facebook statement was “insufficient”.

“It is up to him to answer the tough questions and we urge him to immediately further address these disturbing comments,” Schlapp said in a statement.

“We continue to believe that CPAC is a constructive forum for controversies and disagreements among conservatives, however there is no disagreement among our attendees on the evils of sexual abuse of children.”

In a separate post, Yiannopoulos wrote: “There’s a video going around that purports to show me saying antisemitic things (nope) and advocating for pedophilia (big nope). The shocking thing? It’s Republicans doing it. Sad to see establishment types collapse into the same tactics as social justice warriors.”

Yiannopoulos has been a longtime advocate for Donald Trump, whom he calls “daddy”. Schlapphad initially defended concerns about booking Yiannopoulos to speak before the video emerged.

However, conservatives used Twitter to denounce Yiannopoulos not just for the comments he made in the video but also his history of condoning antisemitism and other extreme positions that have been endorsed by the so-called alt-right.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Yiannopoulos’s CPac speech would have focused on his “experiences in America battling feminists, Black Lives Matter, the media, professors and the entertainment industry”.

Prior to Yiannopoulos’s appearance and Trump’s electoral victory, CPac had attracted controversy for its efforts to woo social conservatives and prohibit conservatives with more progressive views on LGBT rights. In 2015, it excluded the Log Cabin Republicans, a pro-LGBT conservative lobby group.

Democrats had criticised Nevada’s Republican attorney general for planning to share a stage with Yiannopolous at CPac.

In a statement, Nevada Democratic chair Roberta Lange said of Adam Laxalt, who is considered a likely candidate for governor in 2018: “In light of these revolting comments from one of the conference’s most prominent speakers, attorney general Laxalt needs to immediately announce his withdrawal from CPac … If Mr Laxalt decides to share the stage ... he will damage the credibility of his office and our state in the fight against abuse.”