Former White House strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly lost multiple speaking engagements after he was supposed to be a keynote speaker at a conference about sex robots.
The Athenian Parrhesia Free-Speech Forum announced on Tuesday that Bannon would no longer give the keynote speech at the December 11 event at the University of Montana, the Montana Kimin, a student newspaper, reported.
"Postponement: Due to the unavailability of Mr. Stephen Bannon this event is postponed until further notice. We apologize for the inconvenience," stated the email that was sent to event attendees, according to the Montana Kimin.
This is the third event Bannon has canceled at the university following his announcement that he would be a keynote speaker at a joint conference on sex robots this month, according to the Montana Kimin. The former Breitbart News chairman was supposed to give the keynote speech at the ACE Advances in Computer Technology and Entertainment Conference, which was originally scheduled for December 10 to 14 at the university, KECI reported. The event was a joint conference with the International Congress on Love and Sex With Robots, according to the news station.
The organizer and the director of the Imagineering Institute in Malaysia, Adrian Cheok, said it had canceled the conference in November because researchers were withdrawing from the conference, KECI reported. This was partly because Bannon was the keynote speaker and because the conference was a joint conference about sex with robots.
In a statement on the International Congress on Love and Sex With Robots website, David Levy, the scheduled conference host, apologized to the speakers and attendees. Levy said the next conference would be held in Las Vegas in 2020.
"The congress had been due to take place at the University of Montana in Missoula, alongside the 2018 Advances in Computing Entertainment Conference (ACE)," the statement read. "When it was announced that one of the keynote talks at ACE was to be given by Steve Bannon on the subject of employment opportunities for minorities in the computing entertainment industry, there were so many protests against Mr. Bannon participating in the ACE conference that it became necessary to cancel the 2018 ACE conference."
University of Montana spokesperson Paula Short told KECI that university event services had received an email on Tuesday night stating that Bannon would no longer speak at the event on December 11.
In September, Bannon slammed The New Yorker for disinviting him from the New Yorker Festival due to growing backlash. Bannon called New Yorker editor David Remnick "gutless" in a statement to CNBC.
"After being contacted several months ago and with seven weeks of continual requests for this event, I accepted [The New Yorker's] invitation with no thought of an honorarium," Bannon previously told CNBC. "The reason for my acceptance was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation. In what I would call a defining moment, [New Yorker Editor] David Remnick showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob."
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