CNN anchor Jake Tapper is ripping the Conservative Political Action Conference’s decision to invite far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at the annual meeting.
In a series of tweets Sunday night, Tapper slammed the invite after a video surfaced of the Breitbart editor appearing to defend pedophilia.
Tapper said he initially wanted to avoid discussing the revelation, but was urged to speak out by an unnamed friend, who Tapper said is a victim of sexual abuse.
In the video, Yiannopoulos, who is gay, discusses how relationships with older men can be beneficial for young homosexuals who may not have support at home, and later mentions his own sexual abuse as a teenager.
“We get hung up on this sort of child abuse stuff to the point where we are heavily policing consensual adults,” Yiannopoulos says in the video.
“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,” he continues.
One of the podcast’s hosts then tells Yiannopoulos that his comment “sounds like Catholic priest molestation.”
“I’m grateful for Father Michael,” Yiannopoulos says in response. “I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him.”
The clip is part of a nearly three-hour interview aired on a January 2016 episode of the popular “Drunken Peasants” podcast, and has been on the video streaming service YouTube for over a year. It re-surfaced on Sunday when a conservative blog tweeted it amid news that Yiannopoulos was set to speak at CPAC.
Soon after the video was reposted, a board member of the American Conservative Union, the organization that plans the high-profile conference, tweeted that the board of directors was never consulted on the decision to have Yiannopoulos speak at the event.
Yiannopoulos has defended his comments, saying he has never and would never defend child abusers.
He said he was joking on the podcast when he discussed oral sex, saying it was no different than the gallows humor that might be used by those suffering from AIDS.
He said he should not have used the word “boy,” which he said gays often use when referring to consenting adults. “I understand that heterosexual people might not know that, so it was a sloppy choice of words that I regret,” he wrote on Facebook.
“This rush to judgment from establishment conservatives who hate Trump as much as they hate me, before I have had any chance to provide context or a response, is one of the big reasons gays vote Democrat,” he wrote.