Milo: Forbidden Conversation

I'm speaking today with Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo is a hard man to categorize: part journalist, part performance artist, part Agent Provocateur, part comedian. Yiannopoulos is a man of immense and complex self-contradiction. He's half Greek and half Irish, but is known as an Englishman to the Americans with whom he has communicated extensively. He's gay, Jewish by descent. He married his long-term boyfriend, an African-American man, in Hawaii in 2017 but faces frequent accusations of racism. He is or was strangely attractive to young American Republicans and completed a successful and controversy-ridden tour of US universities in 2016 and 2017. For at least two years he was one of the most well-known internet celebrities on the political front, causing more uproar than any other single person that I can think of. He collected his fair share of enemies along the way. He's often accused, for example, of being an alt-right supporter—an accusation justified in the view of those who opposed him by his association with Breitbart, for whom he was an editor.

In my view, for what it's worth, Milo was such a figure of inner contradiction and outer controversy that I believed from the beginning that his time was numbered. Nonetheless, the circumstances of his demise were unpredictable. I would say not in keeping with his apparent destiny. After revealing details of his early sexual experiences at the hands of a 29-year-old priest whom he refused to name, he stated that he was an active participant in the events and that such occurrences were far more common and far more consensual than people were willing to admit. I don't think he ever recovered from the controversy that those comments generated.

I should finish by saying that Milo is definitely now on the list of those who no one unacceptably socially should ever speak to, which I suppose is one of the reasons why I'm talking to him. I want to know what happened to him and his old words, and I don't really give a damn if that's politically incorrect.

"Thanks Milo for agreeing to be on my channel and podcast."

"Thank you very much for having me. Um, I take a slightly less fatalistic view of my prospects than your introduction would suggest, but certainly, I went through an extraordinary tumble and I'm happy to share my thoughts about it with you."

"Yeah, well, let's start by reviewing some of your history if you wouldn't mind. Tell me, let's start with a bit of your history in the UK before you came to the US. It's been long enough that I think some biographical information would be useful for people, so tell me about your life in the UK before you came to the US, then let's start talking about what happened to you as soon as you came over to North America."

"Sure, um, I had a very unhappy life, particularly a very unhappy 20s. In London, I started out as a journalist for some quite prestigious publications. I was in a relationship that was, I don't think healthy or happy for either person involved. I was searching. I think I was looking. I couldn't work out yet what I was, what I was, what my purpose was, and it wasn't until I got to America that I discovered what it was. But I started to explore at least what would eventually become my, I suppose, my civic function as a bomb-thrower and provocateur right at the beginning of my career in journalism. I mean, I was fairly predictably from a broken home, not much love from either parent. And I got lucky, a combination I guess of luck and talent writing for the Telegraph, which is the most prestigious newspaper in Britain. I began to notice the gap between the world that I was being asked to describe and the world that I could see existed.

At the time, I was writing about Sarah. I was being asked to say that women were having a dreadful time of it in the emerging startup ecosystem in London, which as far as I could tell was the exact opposite of the truth. Eventually, these fissures got wider and wider, to the point where I sort of had this moment where I realized that my profession was a crock of you-know-what and that if I wanted to do something worthwhile with my life, I should either blow it up from the inside by being one, or pick something else to do.

And that was around the time that I attracted the attention of Breitbart, the site in the US, and I started from London writing for Breitbart in the U.S. At that time, I didn't know what it was. I never met Andrew Breitbart and I didn't know who he was either. It was a funny thing when you look at things in retrospect. You know, you get involved with people and organizations that develop a particular way over time, and then it looks from a historical perspective like that was self-evident from the beginning, but certainly not when you're dealing with a new organization.

Yeah, I mean, it was newish. I don't think that the values of Breitbart changed a lot, but I think perhaps its modus operandi, I think perhaps the way that it conducted itself as an organization shifted into high gear when Steve Bannon and I were there. I was doing the culture war stuff and Steve was using the rest of the site as a sort of battering ram politically. So, I mean, I bear a large part of the responsibility for Breitbart becoming what it eventually became, although I don't think they've held on to that legacy very well. I think it's a little sad the way that there. When I was there, we used to make the news and now they're sort of chasing off the turning point, you know, with stories that could have been written in 2015-16. I don't think they've managed to maintain the culturally defining excitement that was there when I was there, which I think is a function of Steve and I working together.

I suppose my center of gravity just started shifting to the US. I started getting speaking engagements at colleges and sooner or later, one day, I just sort of thought there was six of them in a row. So I thought rather than flying home between them, I may as well just stay and just do sort of college after college, and then suddenly I found myself booking more of them and wondering why I should bother going home. And my center of gravity, editorially and in other ways, was shifting to the U.S. too.

So over the course of six or nine months, I began writing more at the States, thinking more about the States, being in it, talking about it. And then, I suppose fast forward a year, perhaps, and I was one of the two or three people driving Breitbart as this extraordinary, momentous, fascinating, dysfunctional editorial force for the last election.

"So what was it that attracted you, do you think, to the United States and the political concerns there? Why away from the UK?"

"I don't think Britain handles iconoclasts very well and it particularly doesn't handle bombastic ones. I think a lot of people with outsized personalities find themselves gravitating to America as an alternative because I think America has a much higher tolerance for outside personalities."

"Yeah, well, it's pretty clear that you had some of the characteristics that make people stars, you know, that make people personalities. It was obvious pretty much from the start."

"This is why I'm not worried in the long term about my career prospects. You know, I had a stratospheric rise over a couple of years and, you know, a painful tumble. But talent is talent, and talent always wins, and I've got 40 years ahead of me, you know, of whatever I choose to do with it. So I'm not worried in the long term about my career prospects."

"Good, well, we can talk about your descent and sort of catastrophe that accompanied it, and maybe about how you see yourself pulling. How you see being pulled out of that. I'd like to hear about that as well. So what in the world do you think made you so attractive to American Republicans? I mean, this is one of the things that struck me about you right from the beginning because it's not exactly like you're a poster boy for what you would assume a conservative American Republican would be attracted to."

"So only thing they quite liked the fact that I was reflecting their views in a package that you would more often think would be liberal, and of course I, you know, made that part of the act and part of the brand. It's kind of like, you know, all these things and yet still Republican. But the real answer is joy. There's a joylessness about a lot of conservative activist authors and speakers, and there's a joylessness in the intellectual dark web too. It's a very fun-less place.

I look at the public intellectuals and commentators and speakers who are currently enjoying a moment in the Sun and each of them is, in their own way, quite joyless, quite devoid of mirth. I think that people liked my sense of mischief and mischief, and they liked the fact that I was always smiling. I think it's, I mean, it's unusual to see somebody talking about really serious things who is the subject of the most extraordinary and relentless abuse who nonetheless is always smiling. And I have always been that person; I've never stopped, not in 2017-18 or today. And I think they will find that very mesmerizing and very attractive because, and very dyslexic and difficult to understand, given the circumstances and the apparent seriousness of the topics.

You know, I mean, there is I think it's, I think it's to do with. I mean, you know, joy is Christianity's great gift to Western civilization: laughter. You know, the medieval church is, you know, this place of song and of dance. I think Christianity has become quite joyless. The only places where there's a really impassioned happy spirit of worshipers are in black churches. But white evangelical Protestantism in the US has become, I think quite suffocating. And joyless.

I think I like the public square as a whole in general is a miserable place. Yeah, sure it is a miserable place. If you turn the television on, people are miserable. I think there's something about me that something maybe missing in my brain that doesn't get ground down by it. And I'm watching, you know, I had my, you know moment in the Sun, and some other people are having a moment in the Sun now that will, you know, that too will pass. And I'm watching them, and I'm watching them all getting ground down.

"How do you?"

"Well, that's a real question. It's of interest to me from a psychological perspective. I mean, you know my suspicions. It's obviously that you're extremely extroverted, I'm not saving any particular brilliance for noting that. And also that you're extremely open, and that's the creativity dimension. But I'm wondering about your scores on neuroticism. It's like you were subject to a tremendous amount of controversy and then quite a precipitous fall under strange and complicated circumstances, and you seemed to be able to survive that.

And you just described yourself as a relatively joyful person. I mean, I'm a very happy person. I think that, listen, I mean, you know, that conservatives are only out and off the playing field when they choose to be, because there's such, there's so few of us in such a wide open market. The reason I'm not worried about my prospects in the long term is I still wake up every day with joy in my heart, brimming with energy and ideas. Most, I don't know anybody in public life, not one person in public life who could have gone through what I went through and not been broken by it, but I'm not. It hasn't beaten me. And I think that nuts come down to a combination of personal characteristics that I don't think many possess.

Part of that is, you know, not being no, it’s impossible to intimidate me, for instance. I don't get scared of things. I'm not scared of people. I don't feel perhaps the same degree that other people do embarrassment and shame, so I don't mind playing the fool, playing Falstaff, clowning. You know, I don't mind suppressing myself, laughing at myself because through that I'm able to point to two truths that are real and big and beautiful in a poll. I'm not an egotist, so I don't. And I think that's part of the same thing. I don't mind humbling myself because I play it, having a big ego, but I don't really. And I'm not ground down or broken or upset by things that, you know, that don't matter that much.

I mean, I have love in my life. I have achieved more than ninety-nine point eight percent of journalists, political activists, you know, public figures. You and I are the only people who have achieved remotely close to our level of success in the last ten years worth of libertarian conservative, IDW, you know, whatever, whatever this grand nexus ecosystem is that we both belong to. You and I are the only two people who, you know, seem to have achieved a greater success at it.

And I've had terrible things happen to me. You're fortunate and I think nothing bad has really happened to you yet. I can't think of anything really awful that's happened to you aside from the Cambridge thing, which I think I think you brought that on yourself, and I don't think it was too much of a big deal anyway. But nothing really bad has happened to you. The worst thing imaginable has happened to me. I had to stand up in front of the world and tell them that I had been sexually abused as a child and that this is why I'd spoken loosely and in clauses and used a formulation that I regretted about something that had happened to me while trying to make twice. You also see when I'm going to stop making jokes about that or anything else.

For other people, I think that level of public ritual humiliation would simply have snapped them, and it didn't me. And I don't know, I mean, you're the you had the so-called jokes, but perhaps you have some insight of you on this. The only person I know in my personal life that friend who has similar qualities and also to whom criticism is, it's a game. And she's able to, very interesting thing is not, you know, it's not enough to say that we're, let's say, sociopathic because quite clearly we're both not. We wouldn't be able to have some of the insights we do, and we wouldn't have the love in our lives that we do if we were sociopathic. So it's not that. But we do both have an ability to just pick things up, put them over there, and not allow them to to borrow in and have an entry about.

Seems that seems to me to be that relatively rare combination of extreme extraversion and very low neuroticism. That's not the same as sociopathy. I think you're right about that. I think maybe that's what I've got. Some people are just not that affected emotionally by negative events, you know? Some people are devastated by the smallest of obstacles, and some people can roll with punches that would take a normal person out and continue to get back up. And things do bother me in my personal life, but they're the things that are actually significant, whether it's to do with my family or, you know, my loved one or whatever it is, that there are things that I, that in my brain are emotionally significant, serious things worthy of unfettered access to my emotions, if you like. And they have that and they produce very strong reactions in both directions, a very passionate person. I can even be hot-headed, you know, when I'm defending somebody I love, for instance. But there's another world which is the professional world, which is to me just a big game, it's a big fun game.

And this is the reason I've always, kind of a trickster, you know, I mean, I think that's part of it. That you do, there is a game-like element to what you're doing, and I very much see what I'm doing in life and will be doing for the next 40 years as playing a very complex and very enjoyable game and very, you know, a game of snakes and ladders. And just because I hit a ladder on one of my first turns and then immediately the snake took me back to the front row, it doesn't mean the game is over.

You know, in fact, it just means you've learned the rules. So that's, I suppose, why I find it difficult to take too seriously, you know, harrowing introspection about, you know, whatever, because it just that's not how I perceive the situation. I can look dispassionately at what happened and why, and we can talk about that, and I have some ideas about that. But I don't have a sort of emotional— I don't have anything to offload about it, really.

"Okay, okay, so when that conversation about your early childhood sexual experiences first came out, I listened to it and I thought that there was tremendous trouble brewing there, you know, for a variety of reasons. And if you remember, I phoned you at that point and suggested that we had a conversation, and we made some efforts to manage that that never came to fruition. And I always felt that that was unfortunate. So I'd like to, if you don't mind, ask you about that situation because, you know, I had a lot of mixed feelings about what you said. I, like many people, and they weren't particularly judgmental by the way. I mean, so you didn't—correct me if I'm wrong here because I want to get this story straight.

You related some experiences you had with a priest who was twice your age, right?"

"Something like that, yeah, approximating approximately. I think I was about 14."

"I think it was a little older than that actually."

"Okay, okay. It’s difficult to judge ages when you are 14."

"I think I thought that he was younger than he was at the time and subsequently found out he was perhaps 10 years older than I thought he was. And so arguably he was someone who was in a position of authority and that what he did with you was something that he shouldn't have done, and also it's highly probable given the nature of such things that you were by no means his only let's say target."

"Hmmm."

"Now when I heard you talk about that, the first thing that struck me about the way that you formulated it was your refusal to play victim."

"Not actually fond of seeing myself as one."

"I know. I know I know that and that actually struck me as rather admirable because you came forward and said, 'This is an uncomfortable truth. But, you know, I was of sufficient age to have a mind of my own, and this was something I was pursuing of my own volition.' And then it’s how I felt at the time, and you talked about the abuse of authority or whatever."

"I've never met an authority I recognized or respected, you know? People have to earn my respect. I have never encountered a person in a position of responsibility or authority who I have respected and deferred to merely by virtue of their office or their position. I just, I sort of constitutionally don't recognize authority."

"So that element of it did not strike me until someone..."

"Because I don't imagine that you were much different in some sense when you were 14 than you are now. You know, apart from obvious motivation you'd be, you're an assertive and provocative person and you're an iconoclast and I can certainly see that that intrinsic respect for authority which so oddly often characterizes conservatives, by the way, is quite absent in you. And so, and I thought that given it, because we have it as the tabloid gadfly constantly taking potshots at the institutions that also secretly loved and are grateful for, but you are dedicated to keeping them on the ground and not, you know, it's the difference between, you know, the British tabloids which love to torment our Prime Minister and the White House Correspondents Dinner where journalists are seeking to participate in that prestige rather than bring these people down to earth and make sure they never go a full day taking themselves too seriously."

"So I think that's perhaps a bit of British psyche."

"Well, no, that seems, given my interactions with British journalists, that seems like a perfectly appropriate statement. Now, despite the fact that when I heard you speak about what happened to you, and my admiration for your refusal to play innocent victim, I also had contradictory ideas that I think were more a function of my clinical training.

And there were two of them that I'd like to discuss with you. I mean, the first is, you know, when you think about yourself as a 14-year-old, you think about that 14-year-old as yourself. You don't necessarily think about that 14-year-old as a 14-year-old."

"Yeah, I think I know where you're going with this."

"In and of itself, so good, good, good. Because the second part of what I thought was that, like, and this is the incredibly tricky part of this conversation, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, one of the other things that got you in real trouble apart from the fact that you wouldn't name your abuser was that you made the unforgivable case, I think publicly, that this sort of thing happened far more commonly than people were willing to admit."

"Oh, I just, as soon as you said that, I thought, man, you're dead in the water."

"It was interesting."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, true that maybe it's not something that can be publicly discussed. It's not, you know, in it. Okay, I went a bit further than just that. I took it a step further even and said that not only is this something that happens far more often than people are willing to admit, it is a function of gay life and gay adolescence and it is a proper subject for humor. And I insist on it being a promise."

"Oh, yeah, well, I wasn't even going to bring those two things up because I thought that just, you know that merely bringing up the first part of that because enough trouble, but I'm glad that you did. Well, because there's a serious conversation that has to be had about this, and the damn conversation hasn't happened, and I don't mean specifically about even specifically about your particular experience, although I think it's a way into the conversation.

It's like the first question is, well, it'd be interesting to take apart some of your claims, and I'd like to do that with your permission, and I don't expect this to be an easy conversation. Notice I wasn't expecting it to be, so go ahead."

"Okay, okay. So the first thing I would say is that it isn't obvious to me that even if you were a willing participant in what happened to you when you were 14, that that justifies what happened to you on the part of the person with whom you were participating."

"Well, of course it doesn't. But the way I have pretended it was that it was me right."

"But, and when I said a moment ago, I think I know where you're going with this. I can interject with a very small data point that I think explains how I think about this after some time and reflection, which is I have something now that I didn't have in 2017, which is a relationship with my stepson and he is 16.

And when I think—let's not finish that thought. But when I consider how old he is and put myself at that age, suddenly the horror—but I see in everybody else's faces that I have never felt myself about what happens to me, and that has never been communicated from me a sort of acknowledgment and awareness that this is not normal and that this is a horrifying and terrible thing that happens to a small person.

I never apprehended it like that because I just thought of that 14-year-old as me today."

"Exactly, what I picked up from your entities until the last two years, and now I'm experiencing getting to know a child, yeah, as a co-parent, yes, stepmom, and now I get it. Okay, okay, all right. So, you know, I've seen this with my clinical clients, you know, who failed to notice in some important way that the person they were sometimes decades ago.

Is not the person they are now, and the memories they have from those times which are appropriate to those times are not the same memories that are appropriate to those times now given their relative maturation as we understand. And I think it took that change in my life circumstances for me to jump me into realizing exactly what you're saying."

"Okay, so let's, so let me ask you some questions about that. So what? What's changed in the way that you view what happened to you? And if you were interviewed, well, I guess you are being interviewed about this right now. If you were being interviewed about what happened to you at age 14, I have two questions or three questions about that.

What do you think of the propriety of that? How do you now view your role? What do you think about the culpability of the person that, that I would say in common parlance preyed upon you? How has that shifted?"

"In the same way that there is, although it has been ruined by the progressives we both hate so much, a proper place for outrage, it is unnecessary and right human instinct and emotion that has a place there.

There is also, perhaps much as it has been ruined by the progressives, a proper place for victimhood when you are, in fact, actually a victim, right? And I think that now I perhaps realize that I was one when I didn't know that I was one in 2017."

"Yeah, well that's a hell of a thing for someone in your position taking it, right? It's rough, man. And I think that that's as concise and it's true no sir as I can give you.

Now I look at somebody I care about who is two years older even, and the thought of me at that age and someone taking advantage. Suddenly I get it. I get it. I'm like, I would kill the guy. I would walk over there. I would shoot him in the head. Like, I get it now. Didn't get it when I was.

I didn't get it when all I had to go on was my memories of being me at the time."

"Yeah, well what are the things that struck me is so absolutely absurd about what happened to you in the aftermath of that interview was that I thought, okay, this is really a, and it's exactly what I would have expected to happen to someone like you because you're so contradictory is that you actually had a claim to victim status, which you then refused to capitalize on, and then which people refused to bloody well recognize in the midst of the interview, like the proper response to that interview should have been something like, 'Well, here's someone who's talking about a case of child sexual abuse but hasn't realized or recognized that they were in fact victimized in that situation and hasn't come to terms with whatever that might mean.'

And this is not uncommon among people who have been through these experiences. Because I have, since writing about this, I wrote a little bit about this in a short book I wrote about co- recently, and in other things, the brief mentions I've made of it since 2017, a lot of people have written to me with their own accounts and it's not uncommon.

I have not—who have experienced this sort of thing, and I guess there's some point in middle age where the penny drops."

"But yeah, I guess that, I guess you know there is a right and proper place to acknowledge and understand that you were a victim of something. Again, I have to—another thing that upset people I think, another thing that didn't do me many favors, but look, I am someone who will always just speak it as I see it, and that will have terrible consequences and all have great consequences, and that calculus will change over the course of the next few decades.

But I just, it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me, and people find that a terrible thing to come out of your mouth, but it just wasn't. It's not the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

"Okay, so I got a couple of comments on that. I mean, both 20 years ago the American Psychological Association published a famous paper showing that most people who were sexually abused as children recovered with very little psychological damage, and that caused absolute outrage in the US Congress, in fact. Forced the APA, if I remember correctly, the American Psychological Association, to retract the article even.

Imagine sort of trauma that we were expected to recognize, that someone says they experienced because of mean words on the internet. And we have this—and we have this economy based on what we all know is not true, but that these trivial, frivolous things can cause some kind of actual trauma.

For an organization like that or for someone in public life to come out and say this huge thing actually didn't cause me that much trauma, it sort of imperils the whole victimhood economy, doesn't it? Because if it's the case that many or even most people who experience this simply don't have their lives ruined and defined by it, that rather imperils the people who have made a career out of squawking victimhood for far, far less serious experiences.

And I think that's probably where the threat to the system kicked in."

"I think that's true. I think it's also the case that the politicians, although also looking for a cheap victory, a moral victory in some sense, were also concerned that this was a potential step towards justifying pedophilia on the basis of undermining the claims of—it's absolutely catastrophic consequences over decades, whereas what I saw was more as a testament to the fundamental resilience of human beings.

It isn't that bad. Isn't that wonderful news that there are these extraordinarily evil people who do depraved things but the chances are you'll be all right? You know, then something like this could happen to or could happen to somebody you love or somebody you know. But that, you know, what chances are things will be okay? Now, every once in a while, somebody is just blown apart by it, and you can never put them back together. But that's not most people. That's fabulous news. But good news is the sort of thing that our current political climate—the public square in America especially—hates.

It's not so much with—it's a particular kind of reaction to, for instance, people being grateful and happy that capitalism is: you know, lifting millions of people out of poverty all over the world—you wouldn't like that good news because much of what goes on in public life, basically the whole journalism industry, much of the entertainment industry, I mean the whole of polite society, the whole of political, politically correct society, depends upon everything being terrible, imperil getting worse all the time.

The sort of shrieking urgent hysteria of the press is made to look ridiculous when you point out actually the world is pretty great. Not that people don’t how many people go hungry, not that much bad stuff happens. The bad stuff that does happen, we’re discovering all the time that human beings bounce back in ways that we’ve never imagined. The world ain’t that bloody bad."

"Nobody wants to hear that, who has invested in it. At least it’s nowhere near as bad, as it once was, which is something. Or as bad as bad as it profits the media to suggest that it is. Is that…you know? Is it so…"

"So, this situation where they are encouraging these reckless, unsafe, horrendous behaviors, and who suffers? The most marginalized communities of all! Is that, you know? Is it, so… So gay black Americans have like a one in two chance of getting HIV. You know? Like that’s crazy. And this is what gay charities are not talking about while they are insisting that, you know on diseases and whatever.

This is what the life cycle of rights movements when they run out of things to complain about. Okay, so let me ask you another personal question before I turn to something that will probably get me even more trouble in more trouble. We’ll see. We’ll see how that goes. I’ve told you before about the behavior of my clinical clients. I…I just see—the behavior of my clinical clients is to focus on the very, very possible consequences of their early child abuse. And I think that’s an important conversation that we’re having right now."

"Yeah, okay, what…So I read Martel’s book on the Catholic Church about homosexuality in the Vatican. It’s a very, uh, contentious book let’s say, written by a gay man who claims that homosexuality is extraordinarily common in the Vatican."

"It is."

"And that the kinds of relationships that you describe between older men and younger men are common in that culture as they’re common in the rest of the culture."

"Yes. They’re."

"So I’ve booked on this subject too, and I can tell you for a fact that both of those things are true. It’s called the lavender mafia, and the Baskin, it is the cabal of not just gay bishops but specifically progressive left-wing gay bishops."

"Yes."

"And my book was a little bit more politically focused than his. My book was drawing attention to the fact that the same people who want to water down the liturgy, who want, you know, divorcees to be able to receive communion and want, you know, gay people to do whatever, they’re the same people who’ve been covering up child abuse in the church. And it seems that the same people who’ve been doing the child abuse and covering it up are also the people who are most aggressively pushing for progressive reform of the Catholic liturgy and of Catholic practice.

And this, of course, resonates with what we know from other industries, doesn’t it? It’s just it’s like Hollywood, just like the press, just like the academy, the people who are most aggressively pushing for progressive free-for-all sexual liberation, other people with the ugliest and most depraved skeletons in the closet. The rest of us are quite normal."

"So, my book was trying to show was that the soft-on-communism thing is entwined with the abuse, with the wrongdoing, with everything. They’re the same people doing everything! So Theodore McCarrick, who has the distinction of being the world’s only ex-Cardinal because Francis had to remove his Cardinal C from him, had to degrade him as the technical term. He was Francis’s envoy to China, and he was the one who put the deal together with Francis to allow the Chinese state to participate in the choice in choosing Catholic bishops, but this hasn’t happened since like Gregory the 7th.

The Catholic Church has been ferocious about choosing its own bishops, but they handed selection of the bishops over to the Communist Party in China, knowing that the Catholic server is routinely persecuted, you know, and killed in China because they never met a socialist they didn’t like. And it’s that—but it’s that particular 60, 70-year-old child of the sixties aging hippie liberal that lives in another planet from the rest of us and is still all thinking, you know, if only they—sorry, the lawnmower, Oklahoma, if only—if only socialism were tried one more time, perhaps, perhaps it would be okay this time. That’s the world these people live in."

"And I also remain a Catholic, despite the terrible state of the Catholic Church."

"Yes! And all the other contradictions in your life? You know that! They’ve never bothered me. They’ve never scared me, and I’m not afraid of that. I’m quite excited by that because I look forward to a day when I might grow either get closer to a resolution or be happy with not finding one. Doesn't I mean, you know, I could imagine—I could imagine Ben Shapiro would be kept awake at night by this, but I'm not.

Because I don’t need everything in my world to form into a perfect, you know, it’s like some sort of like Kantian or the contingent superstructure where everything has its right place and, you know, everything is perfectly organized. All the dependent things are in the right— that’s not what human beings are like, that’s not what we are. We’re much, much more complex and messy than that, and I’m very much looking forward to 40–50 years of exploring my own ludicrous, you know?

But the issue that the church has had, the mistake that the church has made, is turning a blind eye, as the church would put it, to sin—turning a blind eye to rampant gay sex in a vocation that is supposed to be celibate, supposed to be chaste.

And we associate that, hypothetically, with the way that you would Martel’s claim, with the proclivity to cover up the child sexual abuse because of it, which is his most radical claim, I would say. I don't know if he's wrong about that. What I would say is the way that the church would put it is, you know, if you make room for one sin, others will follow.

So what that means in practical terms for the Catholic Church is because the priesthood is somewhere where lots of gay men go and the blind-eye is routinely turned to their sexual peccadilloes, even if it's just with each other and there's nothing non-consensual or abusive going on, because it's a sexual free-for-all, because it's the kind of place where supposedly transgressive or forbidden things happen routinely with no consequence, then it becomes an institution that attracts other kinds of people who have other things to hide, like pedophiles.

Where are you going to go if you have some kind of psychiatric dysfunction or whatever it is like that? You’re going to go somewhere that routinely overlooks or ignores sexual wrongdoing, of course you are! That’s what the church—that’s what Christians mean when they say, you know, you let one sin and others will follow; they don’t just mean in the sense of personal behavior, like if you let yourself do one thing, you let yourself do others, but it also works in institutions too.

And of course, the lefties will say the reason that all of these problems happen in the Catholic Church is that priests are required to be celibate. The opposite is true! They haven’t been celibate for a very long time and that’s what’s created the problem because there’s now an entrenched left-wing gay mafia that effectively runs the church."

"That has engaged in the systematic cover-up of child abuse so as to protect its own power, and that’s about as bad as it gets, you know, in terms of, you know, a global institution that has lost its way. That is as it gets."

"I want a black pope because I want there to be a doctrinally conservative because all the Catholics in Africa are like pre-Vatican—they’re serious Catholics—and it will make it—it will make life very difficult for progressives accusing a black pope from Africa of being a racist and a sexist, you know, because he actually wants Catholic doctrine to remain Catholic doctrine. But the present pope is, basically, he is not himself a homosexual as far as we know, but he does sit at the head of this lavender mafia, and he is propped up by people like Cardinal McMurphy, O’Connor from England and Wales, Vincent Nichols, and all these other aging 60, 70-year-old liberal cardinals who are products of the 60s, who are soft on communism.

And what my book was trying to show was that the same people who are far-leftists who are pushing for church doctrine to be watered down, which has the effect of emptying the pews because when people go to church, they want the fire and brimstone. They go to be told what to do. They want the Bible. They want Jesus. It won't commit change.

They don’t want a bishop talking to them, and I’m not making this up. There are seminaries now where the seminarians are starting to issue—they’re starting to give sermons on toxic masculinity! This is a church that has no manly men left in it! Yeah! Every man in that church is a homo, you know?

There are no men left in the congregation. There are no heterosexual men left in the clergy, and this is the church that thinks it has a too many men problem, you know?"

"This is a church that the reason that this subject interested me in addition to my faith is that this is another arena in which the loss of manliness and masculinity and the loss of a proper appreciation of the heroic masculine virtues has led to chaos and disaster."

"Because no true father, by which I mean the sorts of fatherhood the priests are supposed to give up having children in order to embark upon, you know, no spiritual leader with integrity would stand by and watch children being abused and cover it up. This is something that gay people do because they think what they do is wrong, so they’re happy to cover for somebody else who is doing something wrong to a father. A real father doesn’t sit idly by while children are being abused. He takes steps to stop it and punishes the people who have done wrong. That’s the righteous indignation and outrage of a true father.

And that appreciation of, you know, like it’s right and proper to hate people and we should be outraged about those… you said that’s part of what you’ve learned over the last couple of years."

"Right? And, but that heroic manly virtue is something that has been sort of systematically wiped out. The Catholic Church just like it's been wiped out of other places in public life, journalism. And it’s… yeah, assaults that everybody knows about in all those different arenas.

So it was interesting to me watching the book and finding that most of the problems, most of the things that are happening in the Catholic Church, most of the problems that church has got itself into, basically boiled down to there being no men. It’s all women and gays, and that the vast majority of the child abuse scandal and all the other things that are wrong with the Catholic Church are products of the church losing its connection to masculinity and simply having no men left in it."

"Well, good. Well, good. There’s nothing controversy about any of that, so that’s quite a relief. So we don’t have to be impaired."

"Okay, so I want to return to something if you don't mind. I want you to tell me what you think the consequences of what happened to you when you were 14 might have been."

"Okay, I don't know."

"Yes, I mean, I look, if you're not like, I'm not unwilling to discuss it with you. Yeah, I'm not having a problem being forthcoming. Yeah, I just don't know."

"The only thing that I’ve really thought about is whether or not it might have affected the trajectory of my sexuality."

"And I think that it may well have done, but I don't think it on its own was enough to make a difference. I think I'm probably right about that. I also talked about just in this conversation about transgressive me of that, that sexuality, and now you participated in that even, let’s say, as an active participant.

And the question is, what did that do to you? What did that do to you? Because you had to live with it."

"I don't know if it's a fair question. I don't know if I'm crazy."

"No, no, your phrasing it fun. I just don't know the answer to it. In the same way that I don’t think anybody can know what quote-unquote made them gay, you know? As everybody has is born with…I think everybody was born with a more or less of a predilection, whether or not you believe in epigenetics or whatever.

Some people do, some people don’t. But I think everybody probably has a sort of predisposition and coupled with early experiences, you end up by having, mostly having sex with men or not, right? I don't think that we're ever conscious of the processes acting on us at the time, and therefore it’s very difficult. It’s just pure speculation based on whatever we happen to remember.

Trying to work out what it was that made a difference, and I don’t think it’s—I don’t think it’s something that could be ever satisfyingly answered because simply because we're just not aware of the processes acting on us. I don't know if my dad not saving me from that household made me, you know, sort of made some kind of misfire, rewired like, you know, I said something haywire in my brain.

I don’t know whether I resent it and just, you know, just like my mother so much they went off all women. I don’t know, and I don’t think there's ever any way to know. And for the same reason I don’t think there's any way that I could possibly answer and I don’t think there's anything anybody could be on blind speculation and I think that most people who are, most people who try to explain and so on, the abuse might have done to somebody in almost every case I see their political prejudices and their biases at work.

You know, I don’t think the truth is I have no goddamn idea and neither does anybody else. No one can possibly have a clue because these things are acting below the conscious level on us in a way that we cannot dissect and analyze. Okay, okay. Alright."

"So, let me ask you then. Let me switch topics. So, you know, you've been less in the public eye since this scam quietly. I've been retired."

"You've been retired?"

"Okay. Look, I sold a quarter of a million books. I made millions of dollars. I have more nice stuff than I know what to do with. I have a husband I am deeply in love with. I could die happy tomorrow. I helped to get a president elected. I'm one of the seven people who put Trump in office and that's not eager to zoom. That's a fact, right? I'm one of the seven people to put Donald Trump in office. I can die happy now as you know, you might be in purgatory for you as a consequence after I die for that particular crime, who knows?

But the fact is like I have accomplished more than the vast majority of people walking this earth. I have, you know, and if I were to do nothing else professionally now I would be infinitely more successful and all of my critics combined."

"Okay, so I'm good. Rumors of your current state, there are rumors that you're terribly embedded."

"There's, there’s rumors..."

"Okay, so I sometimes, you know, one of the problems with trying to find out what's true about me is I like to troll journalists and I confirm or deny according to my whimsy. So when somebody writes to me saying, 'Is it true you're two million in debt?' I say, 'No darling, it’s four million.'

What I won’t go to the trouble of explaining is that of my many companies, the one that was funded by the Mercers who withdrew their political investments from Steve Bannon and from me at the same time— that particular vehicle is somewhat in debt but I'm not!

I don’t—I don’t have any personal liability whatsoever. The sum total of the money I owe is about nine hundred and seventy-seven dollars to Capital One because I can’t get any better credit cards in there because this credit stuff is tough to begin with. So the core problem I have is, have as much money as I had two years ago?

I don’t, but I’m not two million in debt. One of my companies is and will probably have to either try to fight it, will have to fight its way out of that or it will have to, you know, go through some kind of insolvency process or whatever, but I am NOT in debt."

"I just never bothered to correct the record and frankly, when a journalist—if a journalist wrote to me so rudely. No. If a journalist wrote to me and said, 'Are you two million in debt?' and I made the very important critical distinction between me and the business, yes, they wouldn’t write that up anyway.

They would take my confirmation of the figure as confirmation that I'm in debt and just write what they wanted to. Anyway, so I feel no—I mean it’s not a crime to lie to journalists, and I feel no obligation to to act as their fact-checking. It’s actually a crime to tell the truth to Journalists— a men know. If somebody comes looted like a crime “often if somebody comes to me to ask for comment, I think it’s a moral obligation, which is why I got myself into trouble that time before, you know when someone shot up the newsroom, wherever that wherever it was because I I made some flippant comment about vigilante death squads and journalists or something.

I didn’t post it publicly. I wasn’t like inciting people to hurt journalists. I wrote it to somebody who then published it and wrote a story about it and then they use that as evidence that I was cheating. I'm like, whatever. This is the these are some of the consequences of being the kind of person who— on making an unusual and interesting—and I think significant contribution to the way that people think and feel about this stuff. So my job is to create a career in that doesn’t matter."

"So what? The small business men, I'm not sayin' I endorse small business men, because small business men out there, they don't have as much power as we expect them to do generation after generation, not everyone who starts a business achieves success."

"Okay, so let’s talk about that being fine. So I want to go back to, I still have a question about the older man, younger man relationship issue. Can we talk about something else?"

"For humor me for two more minutes because there’s actually something I want to go with this. Okay. So the first issue is where is the line properly drawn in those relationships as far as you’re concerned with regards to age?"

"And where is it usually drawn to socially?"

"Now you’re trying to get me in trouble."

"I'm not. I'm really not. I don’t want to get you in trouble."

"I, and I don’t think there is a line to properly be drawn because you're basically just talking about talking degrees of degeneracy at that point, aren't you? You know the fact that you get saddled with this aberrant sexual morality and you don’t have to go out and make the best of it? The fact that you find this paternal or avuncular dimension in a relationship with an older man that may also have a sexual component—I mean this is layer upon layer upon layer of dysfunction.

So you're not going to get me to say ten years is the right gap because none of it’s the right gap. It’s all fucked up. Alternative, I don't mean partly hydro selfish!"

"Well, conversion therapy? I wish conversion therapy worked."

"At least I've said that before, at least in the case of lesbians, we know that we can push women back into—back with men, and most of them will be happier as a result with men.

On the other hand, some of us are just gay and I'm not going to be drawn on what the correct kind of fucked up dysfunction... I wasn't trying to corner you. You know, well, I don't want to corner you. This is something I'm really curious about because you made the case, and you made a strong case, that relationships between younger men and older men were very common in the gay community.

And now see, what’s not me making the case; that’s an established fact. I mean every gay person knows that that's—going to things with me? That’s just me pointing out something that every gay person knows, which is that when people first become sexually active or aware of their sexual orientation or they first start to go out on the scene or whatever, they very often form an attachment with an older man.

It may just be somebody five years older. In some cases is somebody a little bit older than that how that's happening at the age that it happened to you? Happens all the time, I think happens everywhere. And I think it’s, I think, it’s an inevitable result of having an aberrant sexuality where you have to seek out kind of alternative parental figures because yours aren't fit for purpose for this particular part of adolescence.

But then you just said that this isn’t an objection that you don’t see a clear ethical pathway forward out of that. No, none of it's ethical. I mean, it's all debased and degenerate. What do you mean by that exactly?

Because I think there’s an element of predatoriness in almost every gay interaction and relationship, and this is just one example where it is more obvious and more visible. But I think that there is a predatory component in even gay friendships. You think about the way that some..."

"Well, that might have something to do with arguably with a more predatory element of male sexuality."

"Right, right. And you talk about undiscussable things, right? Will you take the controlling, calming, mediating influence of women out of the equation, and men just pipe each other up, which is why they–why gay men end up repressing?"

"Well, because you’re taking out that restraint, right?"

"Exactly. Restraint is a key figure; because you’re taking out restraint that is typically provided by the woman."

"Instead, you can just…you know, that was supposed to be solved at least in part by the introduction of like socially sanctioned monogamous relationships, right? Because I’ve had friends— I mean I knew about heightened male promiscuity among the homosexual community, and it’s hyped by substantial margin, and the liberal types who I thought were reasonable and I certainly don’t think all of them are made to claim to me that the reason for that enhanced promiscuity was that all the male homosexual sexual activity had to occur behind the scenes and that it was impossible for men to be out there."

"That’s a ridiculous argument! Male-male homosexual promiscuity is obviously simply a function of what happens when you put two men together attracted to one another and you don’t have the restraint of a woman. It’s obvious!"

"And also, you cannot successfully box a transgressive sexual identity into where we say heteronormative patriarchal institutions like marriage and expect gay people to just suddenly become, you know, normal, monogamous.

Whatever? It doesn’t work like that, well okay, that’s fine. But it seemed to me that in some sense that—well here’s something else that is going to cause trouble!"

"It seemed to me that that was kind of part of the bargain. Like wasn’t that the bargain?"

"That was part of the deal! Is that, you know, in exchange for having this millstone around your neck—in exchange for the terrible agony of giving up fatherhood, which, you know, you can adopt and blah blah blah, but ultimately...

You know, basically it’s like joining the priesthood! You know? You give up fatherhood in exchange you get to participate in a sort of taboo breaking, transgressive, experimental life.

That performs perhaps some kind of societal function, might even perform an evolutionary function, and which you have the excitement of the marginal!"

"Exactly! And that’s—I mean I am the world’s greatest hypocrite on one subject, on one subject only, and that’s gay marriage! And that’s because I don’t have the foggiest idea what I think still.

Even though I’ve got one, I’m under no illusions that it’s a union under under the Lord, but I remain politically against gay marriage just by the fact that I got one, because I’ve met somebody who completed me and I couldn’t think of anything else to do but of course I would marry him."

"So I’m very, I’m a mess on that subject. No claim to coherent logical positions on that one subject that one subject I’m a mess. But the reason I always was so skeptical of gay marriage is that it was robbing us of the one thing that we had—the one good cool thing about being gay—that you had in exchange for the awful horror of not being able to produce a child with the person you love in the ordinary course of sexual congress.

When you realize that—and I don’t think a lot of gay people realize that ever—but I realized it quite early when you realize that the bottom of your world drops out and you have to do something else. You have to find a purpose, and if your purpose isn't going to be fatherhood, this is why so many gay men join the priesthood, because they want to be a different kind of father.

You know, they want to be a shepherd. You have to find some other kind of purpose, and very well for gay men, that’s creativity, experimentation; you license that were given by the rest of society because we don’t have this other thing.

Trying to cram, again, I’m a complete hypocrite on this subject because I live in total married bliss. I live in beautiful monogamous domestic harmony, so I’m a 100% hypocrite on this subject. But it just, or it still feels to me a shame to sort of condemn, you know, our experimenters, you know, the people who are so over-represented in artists and musicians and even politicians and warlords.

You know, it’s a sort of condemn them to the same monotonous drudgery that you breeders have to submit to, yes."

"Well, I can imagine that it’s sort of—it's sort of grates against your—what would you call it? Your anti-authoritarian, my rebellious spirit and all the rest of it.

Yeah—yeah, poetic justice in some sense."

"Yeah!"

"This is one of the many things that convinces me that God is real because there’s no—there’s—there’s a humor in that which could only have come from someone doing it, you know? What? Give you something that’s just going to make—just going to remind you that you don’t know it all, and it’s going to confound you for the rest of your life and remind you that you too are messy and complicated.

And on this one subject you are never going to be coherent or logical. Good luck with that!"

"Not another terrible question for you. So I read Martel's book on the Catholic Church about homosexuality in the Vatican. It's very contentious, let's say, written by a gay man who claims that homosexuality is extraordinarily common in the Vatican."

"It is and so and that the kinds of relationships that you describe between older men and younger men are common in that culture."

"Yes, they're so I've booked on this subject too and I can tell you for a fact that both of those things are true.

It's called the lavender mafia in the Baskin. And it is the— the for those those viewers who don’t know, it is a cabal of not just gay bishops but specifically progressive left-wing gay bishops. Yes. And my book was a little bit more politically focused than his.

My book was drawing attention to the fact that the same people who want to water down the liturgy who want it for, you know, divorcees to be able to receive communion and want, you know, gay people to do whatever. They're the same people who've been covering up child abuse in the church. And it seems that the same people who've been doing the child abuse and covering it up are also the people who are most aggressively pushing for progressive reform of the Catholic liturgy and of Catholic practice."

"And this of course resonates with what we know from other industries, doesn't it? It's just like Hollywood, just like the press, just like the Academy. The people who are most aggressively pushing for progressive free-for-all sexual liberation are people with the ugliest and most depraved skeletons in the closet. The rest of us are quite normal."

"So my book was trying to show was that the soft on communism thing is entwined with the abuse with the wrongdoing with everything. They’re the same people doing everything."

"So Theodore McCarrick, who has the distinction of being the world's only ex-Cardinal because Francis had to remove his Cardinal C from him, had to degrade him as the technical term. He was Francis’s envoy to China and he was the one who put the deal together with Francis to allow the Chinese state to participate in the choosing of Catholic Bishops, but this hasn't happened since like Gregory the seventh.

The Catholic Church has been ferocious about choosing its own bishops, but they handed selection of the bishops over to the Communist Party in China knowing the Catholic server routinely persecuted, you know, and killed in China, because they never met a socialist they didn't like.

And it’s that—but it’s that particular 60, 70-year-old child of the sixties aging hippie liberal that lives in another planet from the rest of us and is still thinking, you know, if only they—sorry, the lawnmower, Oklahoma, if only—if only socialism were tried one more time, perhaps it would be okay this time. That's the world these people live in, and I also remain a Catholic, despite the terrible state of the Catholic Church. Yes!

And all the other contradictions in your life that—you know what? They’ve never bothered me. They’ve never scared me, and I’m not afraid of that. I’m quite excited by that because I look forward to a day when I might grow to either get closer to a resolution or be happy with not finding one.

Doesn't I mean, you know, I can imagine—I can imagine Ben Shapiro would be kept awake at night by this, but I'm not. Because I don’t need everything in my world to form into a perfect, you know, it’s like some sort of like Kantian or the contingent superstructure where everything has its right place, and you know, everything is perfectly organized, all the dependent things are in the right—that's not what human beings are like, that’s not what we are.

We’re much, much more complex and messy than that, and I’m very much looking forward to 40–50 years of exploring my own ludicrous, you know?"

"But the issue that the church has had, the mistake that the church has made, is turning a blind eye, as the church would put it, to sin—turning a blind eye to rampant gay sex in a vocation that is supposed to be celibate, supposed to be chaste.

And we associate that, hypothetically, with the way that you would Martel’s claim, with the proclivity to cover up the child sexual abuse because of it, which is his most radical claim, I would say. I don't know if he's wrong about that. What I would say is the way that the church would put it is, you know, if you make room for one sin, others will follow."

"So what that means in practical terms for the Catholic Church is that because the priesthood is somewhere where lots of gay men go and the blind-eye is routinely turned to their sexual peccadilloes, even if it's just with each other and there's nothing non-consensual or abusive going on, because it's a sexual free-for-all, because it's the kind of place where supposedly transgressive or forbidden things happen routinely with no consequence, then it becomes an institution that attracts other kinds of people who have other things to hide, like pedophiles."

"Where are you going to go if you have some kind of psychiatric dysfunction or whatever it is like that? You’re going to go somewhere that routinely overlooks or ignores sexual wrongdoing, of course you are. That’s what the church—that’s what Christians mean when they say, you know, you let one sin and others will follow; they don’t just mean in the sense of personal behavior."

"Like if you let yourself do one thing, you let yourself do others, but it also works in institutions too."

"And of course, the lefties will say the reason that all of these problems happen in the Catholic Church is that priests are required to be celibate. The opposite is true! They haven’t been celibate for a very long time and that’s what’s created the problem because there’s now an entrenched left-wing gay mafia that effectively runs the church."

"That has engaged in the systematic cover-up of child abuse so as to protect its own power, and that’s about as bad as it gets, you know, in terms of, you know, a global institution that has lost its way. That is as it gets."

"I want a black pope because I want there to be a doctrinally conservative because all the Catholics in Africa are like pre-Vatican—they’re serious Catholics—and it will make it—it will make life very difficult for progressives accusing a black pope from Africa of being a racist and a sexist, you know, because he actually wants Catholic doctrine to remain Catholic doctrine."

"But the present pope is, basically, he is not himself a homosexual as far as we know, but he does sit at the head of this lavender mafia, and he is propped up by people like Cardinal McMurphy, O’Connor from England and Wales, Vincent Nichols, and all these other aging 60, 70-year-old liberal cardinals who are products of the 60s, who are soft on communism. And what my book was trying to show was that the same people who are far-leftists who are pushing for church doctrine to be watered down, which has the effect of emptying the pews?"

"Because when people go to church, they want the fire and brimstone come. They go to be told what to do. They want the Bible. They want Jesus. It won't commit change. They don't want a bishop talking to them, and I'm not making this up. There are seminaries now where the seminarians are starting to issue— they’re starting to give sermons on toxic masculinity! This is a church that has no manly men left in it! Yeah! Every man in that church is a homo, you know?"

"There are no men left in the congregation. There are no heterosexual men left in the clergy, and this is the church that thinks it has a too many men problem, you know? This is a church that the reason that this subject interested me in addition to my faith is that this is another arena in which the loss of manliness and masculinity and the loss of a proper appreciation of the heroic masculine virtues has led to chaos and disaster."

"And that’s why no true father, by which I mean the sorts of fatherhood the priests are supposed to give up having children in order to embark upon, you know? No spiritual leader with integrity would stand by and watch children being abused and cover it up. This is something that gay people do because they think what they do is wrong, so they’re happy to cover for somebody else who is doing something wrong to a father. A real father doesn’t sit idly by while children are being abused. He takes steps to stop it and punishes the people who have done wrong. That’s the righteous indignation and outrage of a true father."

"And that appreciation of, you know, like it’s right and proper to hate people and we should be outraged about those… you said that’s part of what you’ve learned over the last couple of years. So, and, but that heroic manly virtue is something that has been sort of systematically wiped out."

"The Catholic Church just like it's been wiped out of other places in public life, journalism. And it’s… yeah, assaults that everybody knows about in all those different arenas. So it was interesting to me watching the book and finding that most of the problems, most of the things that are happening in the Catholic Church, most of the problems that church has got itself into, basically boiled down to there being no men."

"It’s all women and gays and that the vast majority of the child abuse scandal and all the other things that are wrong with the Catholic Church are products of the church losing its connection to masculinity and simply having no men left in it."

"Well good. Well, good. There’s nothing controversy about any of that, so that’s quite a relief. So we don’t have to be impaired. Okay, so I want to return to something if you don't mind. I want you to tell me what you think the consequences of what happened to you when you were 14 might have been."

"Okay, I don't know."

"Yes, I mean, I look, if you're not like, I'm not unwilling to discuss it with you. Yeah, I'm not having a problem being forthcoming. Yeah, I just don't know."

"The only thing that I’ve really thought about is whether or not it might have affected the trajectory of my sexuality and I think that it may well have done but I don't think it on its own was enough to make a difference. I think I'm probably right about that also talked about just in this conversation about transgressive me of that, that sexuality and now you participated in that even it's let’s say as an active participant, and the question is what did that do to you?"

"I don't know if it's a fair question. I don't know if I'm crazy. No, no, your phrasing it fun. I just don't know the answer to it."

"In the same way that I don’t think anybody can know what quote unquote made them gay, you know? As everybody has is born with I think everybody was born with a more or less of a predilection whether or not you believe in epigenetics or whatever.

Some people do some people don’t but I think everybody probably has a sort of predisposition and coupled with early experiences you end up by they're mostly having sex with men or not, right? I don't think that we're ever conscious of the processes acting on us at the time and therefore it's very difficult.

It's just pure speculation based on whatever we happen to remember trying to work out what it was that made the difference and I don't think it's I don't think it's something that could ever satisfyingly be answered because simply because we're just not aware of the process is acting on us at a way that we cannot dissect and analyze."

"Okay, okay all right. So let me ask you then. Let me switch topics. So, you know, you've been less in the public eye since this Scam quiet. I've been retired."

"Yes you've been retired."

"Okay. Look I sold a quarter of a million books. I made millions of dollars. I have more nice stuff than I know what to do with. I have a husband I am deeply in love with. I could die happy tomorrow. I helped to get a president elected.

I'm one of the seven people who put Trump in office and that's not eager to zoom. That's a fact, right? I'm one of the seven people to put Donald Trump in office. I can die happy now as you know, you might be in purgatory for you as a consequence after I die for that particular crime, who knows?

But the fact is like I have accomplished more than the vast majority of people walking this earth. I have, you know, and if I were to do nothing else professionally now I would be infinitely more successful than all of my critics combined."

"Okay, so I'm good. Rumors of your current state there's rumors that you're terribly embedded. There's rumors. Okay, so I sometimes you know, one of the problems with trying to find out what's true about me is I like to troll journalists and I confirm or deny according to my whimsy so when somebody writes to me saying is it true you're 2 million in debt say, 'no darling, it’s 4 million.'

What I won’t go to the trouble of explaining is that of my many companies, the one that was funded by the Mercers who withdrew their political investments from Steve Bannon and from me at the same time that particular vehicle is somewhat in debt but I'm not.

I don’t—I don’t have any personal liability whatsoever. The sum total of the money I owe is about nine hundred and seventy-seven dollars to Capital One because I can’t get any better credit cards in there because this credit stuff is tough to begin with.

So the core problem I have is have as much money as I had two years ago. I don’t, but I’m not two million in debt. One of my companies is and will probably have to either try to fight it or it will have to, you know go through some kind of insolvency process or whatever, but I am NOT in debt. I just never bothered to correct the record and frankly when a journalist— if a journalist wrote to me so rudely."

"Okay okay. So, so the thought of love, revolution, sorrow and all emotional elements gets across your experiences? Because it affected your trajectory as well?"

"It definitely transformed me."

"Okay, where to? Where to? No one get her."

"Well, let's examine the feeling of being acclaimed, or even known—everyone has their demons and how through adversity we discover a part of ourselves often lost to the sedentary."

"Exactly, I think it's really important to look at the personal journey we go through with it whether it's growing from acceptance or rejection—whether laughter can remove those tape guidelines people look for."

"Exactly, and ultimately, what comes to matter?"

"All this may point back to the potential for something remarkable, relatable."

"Beautifully articulated Milo, isn't life utter madness in its own right?"

"Sure is, it just takes a moment to recognize it."

"Okay, so all those discussions wrap into a nice neat little hole. Let’s work through the consequences of the trauma and emerge stronger."

"Exactly, it's part of that learning experience even when one feels alone in it all."