Via the Associated Press...
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been disinvited to this year's Conservative Political Action Conference after his attempt to clarify past comments on relationships between boys and older men fell flat with organizers.
Hours later, his publisher cancelled his book "Dangerous," which had been scheduled to come out in June.
The American Conservative Union founded and hosts CPAC, which is being held Wednesday through Saturday outside Washington. In a tweet on Monday, ACU chairman Matt Schlapp said that "due to the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia, the American Conservative Union has decided to rescind the invitation of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak."
After the polarizing Breitbart News editor was invited, his invitation sparked a backlash. The conservative Reagan Battalion blog tweeted video clips Sunday in which Yiannopoulos discussed Jews, sexual consent, statutory rape, child abuse and homosexuality.
In one clip, Yiannopoulos defends sexual relationships between men and boys as young as 13 years old. He also speaks approvingly of his own sexual relationship with a 29-year-old priest when he was 17.
"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 said.
Later Monday, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint announced that "after careful consideration" they had pulled Yiannopoulos' book, for which pre-orders placed it high on Amazon.com's best-seller lists. The subject of intense controversy from the start, "Dangerous" was originally scheduled to come out in March. But Yiannopoulos pushed back the release to June so he could write about the protests during his recent campus tour, including a cancelled appearance at the University of California, Berkeley.
For more on this story, visit AP.org.