Milo Yiannopoulos

Yiannopoulos in 2013, before his current Trump-obsessed hair phase.

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“”I have come to believe, in the course of our bizarro unfriendship, that Milo believes in almost nothing concrete — not even in free speech. The same is reportedly true of Trump, of people like Ann Coulter, of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: They are pure antagonists unencumbered by any conviction apart from their personal entitlement to raw power and stacks of cash.

—Laurie Penny

Milo Yiannopoulos (aliases Milo Wagner or Milo Andreas Wagner, born Milo Hanrahan) (1984–) is a former writer for alt-right-affiliated website Breitbart, where he laundered the overtly racist ideas of actual white nationalists as "safer" pieces attacking liberals and their "political correctness" culture. He is also a professional victim, a self-described professional troll, a Gamergate figurehead, alt-right provocateur, men's rights activist, homosexual, transphobe, literal advocate of pederasty, fat-shamer, and former 15-minute celebrity.

Yiannopoulos formerly fronted the failed British tech blog The Kernel. As a "journalist" for Breitbart, his intern's blog posts almost exclusively consisted of self-aggrandizement, rank hypocrisy, watered-down ghost-written contributions of overt white nationalists, straw-men, and the regurgitation of dated anti-feminist memes from 4chan and 8chan. In fairness, he had a brief burst of fame before that, for making creepy spreadsheets. Nowadays, Yiannopoulos spends the majority of his time seeking out controversy and begging for money.

Surprising absolutely no one, Yiannopoulos endorsed Donald Trump for president, who he refers to as "Daddy". He gained enough notoriety to book an invitation to Real Time with Bill Maher and was slotted to speak at CPAC, before word surfaced of his old interviews with Joe Rogan in 2015 and the Drunken Peasants in 2016. The ensuing controversy over his comments defending pederasty forced him to resign as senior editor of Breitbart.

Take Milo as the negative effect of the "Colbert Bump"; Instead of gaining popularity after a TV celebrity gave him a shout out, Milo lost his popularity after people started realizing how much of an empty suit he really is.

Personal life and views

“”I’ve been following Yiannopoulos’ tour for months, and I can absolutely confirm that he means almost nothing he says, that he will say almost anything for attention, and that none of that matters to those who face violence and trauma as a result. Yiannopoulos has cashed in hard on the cowardice of American conservatives, exploited their complete allergy to irony.

—Laurie Penny, Pacific Standard

Yiannopoulos is, surprisingly, a real person. Said person is mostly a shell for his political gambits.

Education

“”If you’re as talented, intelligent and handsome as I am, you don’t need a degree to succeed. I hate to brag, but, if I died in a heinous accident, someone would probably write it up. Like, people have heard of me. It would be news.

—Milo Yiannopoulos: Arrogant pissbag or hilarious jokemeister? We report, you decide.

Yiannopoulos attended the University of Manchester and dropped out without graduating. He then attended Wolfson College, Cambridge and again dropped out without graduating. His field of studies was English literature. In short, he's a liberal-arts-major college-dropout journalist who thinks he's entitled to spread his own opinion.

Religion

Yiannopoulos is a practising Catholic; he has said that his mother or maternal grandmother is Jewish, which has put him at odds with neo-Nazi elements of the alt-right (along with the fact that he also has a Afro-American husband John McKinley Campbell).

Homosexuality

A "dangerous faggot".

“”Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart London has done more to put homosexual camp in the service of right-wing authoritarianism than any man has since the fellows at Hugo Boss sewed all those nifty SS uniforms.

—Kevin Williamson, National Review

Yiannopoulos is openly gay, and appears to believe that his own homosexuality, or at least his physical reciprocation of it, is a choice and little more than a manifestation of adolescent rebellion (he's 40 years old) and a general dislike of non-subservient women. For a brief period, Yiannopoulos, perceiving the homosexual community as too progressive and no longer "counterculture", decided to become heterosexual, because sexuality is a choice. His tenure as heterosexual appears to have lasted approximately 6 seconds, after which he chose to get a free shield from criticism about homophobia be gay again.

Yiannopoulos also genuinely seems to hate gays, hate his own gayness, and hate the gay rights movement:

• "Gays have been told for 30 years that they were 'born this way'. That's a lie. 'Born this way' was invented by the gay lobby as a run-around of the religious right. The religious right was saying that homosexuality was a sinful lifestyle choice, and then the gay lobby invented the 'gay gene'. They said 'we're born this way'... it really has no basis in science at all. The most we can say is that it is a mixture of nature and nurture and it may have some epigenetic component. Nobody really knows."
• "But the thought that I might influence my child towards a lifestyle choice guaranteed to bring them pain and unhappiness – however remote that chance may be – is horrifying to me. That’s why, quite simply, I wouldn’t bring a child up in a gay household and, if by some chance I were to end up having a child with a woman, I would seek to insulate that child from inappropriate situations and influences until they were old enough to understand the principles, ramifications and, yes, the mechanics surrounding such an enormous decision. [....] [C]eteris paribus, no one would choose to have a gay child rather than a straight one. It would be like wishing that they were born disabled – not just because homosexuality is aberrant, but because that child will suffer unnecessarily. Again, you’d have to be mad. Or evil. [....] Is being homosexual 'wrong'? Something somewhere inside of me says Yes."
• "I would love to be cured. Who wouldn't want to be cured? Of course, I want to be cured. I've tried to pray the gay away... I think for a variety of reasons, most gay people if they were honest, would not choose to have been born homosexual. I'd love to experiment with some of these therapies, not because I think they'll work."
• "Most of the reason I went gay is so I didn’t have to deal with nutty broads. Imagine how much worse they’re going to get when the passive aggressive manipulation tactics stop working because the guy can get himself off with a thinner, hotter robot anytime he wants to. They’re going to go mental." (Sure, Milo, but robots can't cook. Dja think about that?)
• In September 2015, Yiannopoulos guest-starred on Joe Rogan's YouTube show. The kinda-pedophile-defense quotes are documented below, in "Downfall".
• "Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber, It’s Time to Get Back in the Closet": "The endless celebration and mollycoddling of homosexuals in the media has transformed the genteel, camp rightsists of the 1950s into brash, glitter-drenched Pride queens. If for no other reasons than manners and aesthetics, we ought to think about shoving the next generation back into Narnia."

As James Kirchick of Tablet Magazine puts it:

With his homosexual minstrelsy in service of America's first nakedly authoritarian presidential candidate and the extreme right-wing political movement that backs him, Yiannopoulos inspires comparison to "Diamond and Silk," a pair of black women YouTube stars and fellow Trump supporters who speak in an exaggeratedly African American street vernacular to express support for a presidential candidate who pointedly refused to disavow the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke two days before the Louisiana Republican primary. All essentially perform stereotypical characters (the bitchy queen, the loud black woman) before audiences that, needless to say, are probably not well-represented among donors to the NAACP or Human Rights Campaign ... Yiannopoulos' gay blackface combines the mincing camp of Quentin Crisp with the reactionary politics of Jörg Haider and is the sort of thing that might have been mildly amusing on a pre-AIDS-era episode of Hollywood Squares.

To put it mildly, Yiannopoulos' statements about the causes of homosexuality are not based in science. There are strong reasons to believe that homosexuality is biological in origin and thus not a choice for the vast majority of gays.

Transphobia

“”I don’t let feelings control my life. I’m more disciplined than other people. I have a dark, ADD, Asp-y brain. I'm totally autistic or sociopathic. I guess I'm both.

—Milo Yiannopoulos, who clearly understands the complexities of neuroscience and sexuality (but may have hit the nail on the head with "sociopathic")

Yiannopoulos makes sure to spend his time hating on transgender people, too:

• In 2015, Yiannopoulos signed and advocated an online petition titled "Drop the T" that advocated separating transgender people from the greater LGBT community, because once your group makes some advances, why not slam the door behind you?
• In an October 2016 speech at the University of Delaware, Yiannopoulos said: "Never feel bad for mocking a transgender person. It is our job to point out their absurdity, to not make the problem worse by pretending they are normal. Much like fat-shaming, if our mockery drives them to get the help they need, we may save their life."

  In that same speech, he added a bit of ableism and pseudoscience as well: "...many trannies, or those that make up their own new gender, are not actually retarded. But they are deeply mentally damaged, and they are failed by a liberal establishment obsessed with making them feel good about themselves."

• Yiannopoulos posted a one-star review on the Facebook page of DePaul University in May 2016 after protesters disrupted his talk on campus. It ended: "no one is trans, it's a brain disease."

As usual, Yiannopoulos' statements about transgender people don't line up with scientific consensus that being transgender is not, in fact, a mental disorder. Many transphobes equalize transgender to being a mental illness itself due to the existence of the disorder: Gender Dysphoria. But science says no:

Gender nonconformity refers to the extent to which a person’s gender identity, role, or expression differs from the cultural norms prescribed for people of a particular sex (Institute of Medicine, 2011). Gender dysphoria refers to discomfort or distress that is caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and that person’s sex assigned at birth (and the associated gender role and/or primary and secondary sex characteristics) (Fisk, 1974; Knudson, De Cuypere, & Bockting, 2010b). Only some gender nonconforming people experience gender dysphoria at some point in their lives.

Various conspiracy theories

Look, we're not saying that Milo is a Nazi. We're just asking questions, see?

On his Facebook page and website, Yiannopoulos has promoted conspiracy theories and various other unfounded claims:

• In November 2016, Yiannopoulos posted a video that suggested without supporting evidence that Bill Clinton prematurely celebrated Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when the video more likely is from backstage after the presidential debate on September 26, 2016.
• After the death of Fidel Castro, Yiannopoulos promoted a conspiracy theory alleging that he was the father of Canadian prime minster Justin Trudeau. Classy.
• Yiannopoulos promoted an unfounded claim by VoteFraud.org that nearly three million unauthorized immigrants voted in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
• On the day before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, being the great tech journalist he is, Yiannopoulos posted on Facebook regarding the Hillary Clinton email controversy: "How did the FBI go through 650,000 emails in 691,200 seconds?" Actual tech experts have the answer.
• In January 2017, shortly after the Women's Marches worldwide, Yiannopoulos posted a video on his Facebook page containing a caption: "Planned Parenthood is about sterilizing black people."

Professional career

The Kernel, or it pays to pay your employees

Until 2011, Yiannopoulos worked for The Telegraph as a tech writer, despite having little to no knowledge of technology. In November 2011, he was kicked out and decided to launch his own technology website named The Kernel, in order to "fix European technology journalism" (given that it's Milo, the problem he's fixing is "the left").

In 2012, Yiannopoulos decided that paying his contributors was unnecessary. Former contributor Jason Hesse won a summary judgment from an employment tribunal against The Kernel's parent company Sentinel Media. Yiannopoulos threatened another contributor seeking payment with blackmail the release of embarrassing details and photographs. The Kernel itself closed in March 2013 after Yiannopoulos admitted the company could not cover costs, mere days after claiming otherwise. It took the purchasing of The Kernel's assets by venture capital group BERLIN42 in 2013 for Yiannopoulos to finally pay his debts. Since then, The Kernel is now a subsite of the Daily Dot, and runs anti-Gamergate articles.

Breitbart Tech

“”Without Milo, it probably would have just fizzled out, in all honesty.

—Alex Baldwin, Gamergater, and former moderator of KotakuInAction

After the failure of The Kernel, Yiannopoulos moved to Breitbart as their tech editor. Given Yiannopoulos's history of professional failure and general ignorance of technology and gaming culture (along with Breitbart's own sterling reputation for ethical journalism), he was clearly the right man to head the site's technology and gaming section. Surely, journalism of only the highest intellectual calibre and ethical standards could come of such a pairing.

Reportedly, Yiannopoulos did not in fact write most of the words under his byline, said words being the output of forty-four interns, paid and unpaid ("A lot of these guys are young 4chan guys"), researching and drafting for him. He reassures us that "ghostwriting is too great a word" and that this practice is "completely standard". So that's all right, then.

Professional outrage generator

See the main article on this topic: Proll

“”He is a gay Jewish catholic foreign gamer who prefers black men. This qualifies him to say anything he wants about any of these groups without the same kind of scrutiny a straight white male gets. I'm sure he's also a bunch of other things that we don't know about too.

—/u/Memescroller explaining Milo's abuse of identity politics

Now, all Yiannopoulos has to do is get people mad, and the money comes flowing in.

Courting Gamergate

Seeing a new avenue of gullibility to exploit, Yiannopoulos was an early supporter of Gamergate, criticizing what he saw as the politicization of video game culture by "an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers". This was despite his previously held views on gamers as "pungent beta male bollock-scratchers and twelve-year-olds" and "a bit sad". In addition (and again, prior to his transparently opportunistic involvement with Gamergate), Yiannopoulos appears to have placed some of the blame for the Isla Vista murder spree on video games and gaming culture.

Despite his initial claims that Breitbart's tech vertical would be non-partisan (albeit pro-GamerGate), Yiannopoulos dedicated the majority of the area's original content to his own inane banal uninformed ramblings on his three favorite topics: perceived leftist encroachment in popular media, why men are better than women, and himself. The rest of the content primarily consists of YouTube trailers for upcoming video games and wire-service stories re-branded as "by Breitbart News".

Journalistic ethics

Yiannopoulos published an article pertaining to Gamergate (which he openly admitted was culled from 8chan and /r/KotakuInAction) that took seven edits by Breitbart's editorial and legal staff before it could be posted without risking a libel suit. He further established a relationship with Joshua Goldberg, a Gamergater and white-nationalist troll (funny how often that combination seems to occur), who in turn fed Yiannopoulos the original claim that Shaun King was white. After Goldberg was arrested on domestic terrorism charges, Yiannopoulos furiously attempted to scrub all evidence of his links to him and pretended to have no knowledge of him when called on it, to the point of claiming the FBI's arrest of Goldberg that day was part of a conspiracy to smear him as payback for his releasing another hitpiece on a Gamergate victim target a few hours prior. In actuality, Goldberg was arrested and charged several days before Yiannopoulos posted his article.

Shaun King and Black Lives Matter

In 2015, following the rise of Black Lives Matter, Yiannopoulos published a hitpiece claiming BLM activist Shaun King was actually white and passing as black, akin to Rachel Dolezal. This resulted in a wave of harassment and further defamation from the right wing websphere, resulting in King being forced to publicly reveal his family and personal history (short version: he claims to have been the product of an affair between his white mother and a black man other than her husband, though King has also fallen out of favor with several other prominent BLM activists) in an attempt to quell the shitstorm. Yiannopoulos, of course, claimed this vindicated his story, and wrote another piece claiming King did not know his biological father. A month later, he wrote yet another story accusing King of embezzlement, citing several tweets as evidence. Four of those tweets were from his own account.

In his attempts to criticize BLM, Yiannopoulos picks and chooses whichever FBI crime statistics fit his narrative. In May 2016, he published a Breitbart article titled "There Have Been Over 100 Hate Crime Hoaxes In The Past Decade"; even assuming his numbers are correct, when weighed against the thousands of hate crimes reported annually in the U.S., the 100 supposed hoaxes since the mid-2000s are an insignificant minority. Yet, Yiannopoulos did cherry pick without context or nuance FBI stats on race and crime to make a straw man argument that BLM was protesting the scant number of "blacks killed by whites" compared to "blacks killed by blacks".

Wooing the Alt-Right

Milo getting a head start on his meme game.

“”It turns out that a gay man of Jewish descent who can't stop talking about how much he loves having sex with black dudes is not universally loved by homophobic racist anti-Semites.

—We Hunted the Mammoth

With Gamergate's popularity (and presumably his and Breitbart's readership) declining, Yiannopoulos chose to find a new ass to kiss in an attempt to stay relevant, settling on the burgeoning alt-right movement. As such, he (and/or his interns) and colleague Allum Bokhari penned a 5,000 word love-letter primer for the movement where they described the pseudo-intellectual voices behind the movement, the bulk of whom were writers from openly anti-Semitic and racist organisations such as VDARE and American Renaissance, as "dangerously bright".

The Daily Stormer responded by telling them to fuck off, accusing them of completely misrepresenting the movement to better serve their own interests (the horror!), taking particular umbrage with their claims of what the alt-right does being a joke and aren't really racist at all. (So that's all right, then.) Why Yiannopoulos, who is both gay and ethnically Jewish (but raised Roman Catholic), and Bokhari, who is part Pakistani, thought trying to ally themselves with a bunch of Nazis (and tying Breitbart's already sketchy reputation to them) was a good idea in the first place is unclear.

Despite his heritage, Yiannopoulos has embraced many of the neo-Nazi tropes about "Jews run[ning] everything" from the banks to the media, saying that "They're right about all that stuff [...] it's a statistical fact [that] Jews are vastly disproportionately. It's just a fact. It's not anti-Semitic to point out statistics." During his college years, Milo also enjoyed sporting his Iron Cross around town, made jokes about the Holocaust before the alt-right was even a thing, and had a fondness for reading speeches by Adolf Hitler.

Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer, an openly neo-Nazi website from the alt-right, was ostensibly outraged by Milo's neo-nazi tendencies and said, following Milo's suspension from Twitter:

The homosexualist Jew Milo Yianiannaopopolous has made a career of co-opting edginess, first infiltrating the #Gamergate movement as a means to anally-violate confused video-gaming teenagers in his homeland of Britain, before infiltrating the Neo-Nazi movement and using it as a vehicle to tour the United States and facilitate gay sex with bi-curious college students. [...]

Repeatedly, the dick-loving kike and self-appointed leader of the Neo-Nazi movement has been messed with by Twitter, but now it appears he is permanently banned. This "suspension" comes after he engaged in the trolling campaign against the gorilla-like star of the new feminist Ghostbusters film. This was funny – credit where credit is due. Actually, Milo has done a few funny things, just none to justify his attempt to normalize man-on-man anal sex with Blacks in the Nazi movement. [...]

Probably, on some cosmic level, it is hilarious that large numbers of people are like, "yeah, great, the Nazi movement has a homosexual Jew leader." I am able to glimpse the cosmic hilarity of this at certain moments, but then I immediately return to the reality situation, which is that I hate this.

A Daily Beast article in September 2016 suggested Yiannopoulos had gotten funding from virtual reality tycoon Palmer Luckey.

BUT HIS EMAILS!!

In October 2017, BuzzFeed News published leaked email chains from Yiannopoulos' tenure at Breitbart, showing that he and Bokhari regularly solicited ideas for stories and comments from neo-Nazis. If you've read this far down the article, this revelation should not come as a shock to you at all.

Among the figures Yiannopoulos contacted were Curtis Yarvin, a central figure of the neoreactionary movement; Devin Saucier, editor of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance; Andrew Auernheimer (weev), administrator of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer; and Baked Alaska, an alt-right media personality known for his anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi views. The majority of these people were contacted in order for Milo to write up an apologia for the alt-right called "An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right",^[archive] which aimed to whitewash the white supremacist and neo-Nazi people from the movement, or make their input seem insignificant – the same white supremacists and neo-Nazis Milo was asking for help from! This piece has become a "touchstone" for the alt-right movement's portrayal of itself, and has been cited in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, CNN, and New York Magazine, and has even been channeled by the Donald himself.

Yiannopoulos also was in contact and received suggestions and texts from individuals in "traditionally liberal professions" such as entertainment and media. Mitchell Sunderland from Vice News emailed Yiannopoulos a link to an article by Lindy West of The New York Times and requested: "Please mock this fat feminist." Following BuzzFeed's revelations, Sunderland was fired by Vice for "highly inappropriate and unprofessional conduct".

Milo the crypto-fascist

The report also included a video of Yiannopoulos singing "America the Beautiful" at a karaoke bar, where a crowd of neo-Nazis and white supremacists cheered him with the Nazi salute, including Richard Spencer and Saucier.

It was also revealed that Milo's passwords were "LongKnives1290", a reference to the infamous Nazi purge known as the Night of Long Knives, combined with the year King Edward I expelled Jews from England, and another possibly referencing Kristallnacht.

#JeSuisMilo

Yiannopoulos' Twitter account has been suspended repeatedly in the past for TOS violations. In January of 2016, in an unconscionable act of terrorism business as usual with users who harass and behave like incorrigible adolescents, Twitter removed the "verified" badge from his account name and sent him an email advising this had happened due to his "recent violations of the Twitter Rules".

Soon enough, Yiannopoulos (and all True Friends of Liberty™) began pushing the hashtag #JeSuisMilo, since it's totally not hyperbolic to compare a journalist losing his little blue tick mark to other journalists literally being murdered by terrorists. Because there is no benevolent deity who has a clue, soon it was (according to Breitbart) "the #1 top trending topic in the UK, US, and Canada and it trended globally at the #3 spot for several hours". In an inspiring display of civic virtue, U.S. Patriots immediately rallied and launched a petition at whitehouse.gov imploring that the Kenyan Marxist Muslim President Obama should declare his opposition to Twitter's "war on libertarian and millennial voices". The leader of the world's superpower must demand: "Give Milo back his badge!"

Yiannopoulos warned that this gross violation of his human rights signals that Twitter "is gearing up to purge conservatives". His employer valiantly stood behind him, declaring the loss of his little blue tick mark a declaration of "war on conservative media". Twitter's refusal to specify what got Yiannopoulos' badge taken away is troubling to some. But even given no solid information on this particular incident, it's unlikely that his heart-wrenching persecution is the consequence of merely expressing his generally noxious views rather than the harassment he and his followers engage in. Twitter now considers "indirect threats" as "hateful conduct" and considers inciting harassment (say, pointing followers at another user to harass them) a violation. Given those changes, Yiannopoulos' decertification appears to be at least somewhat related to an exchange where he tweeted, “You deserve to be harassed you social justice loser”, following a user's request for his Twitter followers to cease a campaign of harassment; he was decertified soon after that tweet. Although the tweet was widely believed to be mean, it was actually a joke between friends. The tweet was directed at @ComfortablySmug, a fellow conservative and friend of Yiannopoulos.

Despite Breitbart's prognostication that Twitter would soon "purge" all traces of conservatism from the platform following Yiannopoulos' decertification, there is no indication that such a thing occurred. Yiannopoulos' decertification appears directly related to his behavior and not his political beliefs.

Yiannopoulos took the fight offline, surging forward in his war to regain his blue checkmark. His next target? The White House, crashing a press conference in an effort to get justice. (Yes, that White House. No, we are not joking.) One might wonder why someone who is so offended that he takes his fight over a verified checkmark on Twitter to the White House thinks he has any right to laugh and jeer at so-called "SJWs" for being outraged over pretty much anything else.

Orlando and #FreeMilo

This controversy peaked once more on June 15, 2016, when Yiannopoulos's Twitter account was temporarily suspended following his announcement of a press conference with regards to Islam and homosexuality after the Orlando shooting incident. His account was reinstated within an hour, but not before the hashtags #FreeMilo and #FreeNero (referring to his Twitter handle) trended globally, and conspiracy theories of censorship flooded the alt-right websphere, including Donald Trump subforums on Reddit. As of writing, Twitter has not commented on the suspension.

Where is your checkmark now?

On July 18, 2016, Yiannopoulos encouraged his followers to join in the harassment of actress/comedienne Leslie Jones in an attempt to drive her off Twitter; Jones was one of the stars of the recently released Ghostbusters remake, which had become a major source of contention in alt-right circles due to the fact that it meant the original was no longer available and every copy of it on whatever medium, wherever in the world it was, would be hunted down and destroyed and thus could never be viewed again changed the lead characters' gender from men to women. Jones brought forth public attention to the abusive messages she was receiving, many of which included racist remarks or imagery such as repeatedly comparing her to gorillas and other apes. Ultimately, Jones decided to leave the service.

In the wake of numerous complaints and the media attention that the harassment campaign was generating, on July 19, 2016, Twitter finally decided to permanently suspend Yiannopoulos's account, and released the following statement:

People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others. Over the past 48 hours, in particular, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of accounts violating these policies and have taken enforcement actions against these accounts, ranging from warnings that also require the deletion of Tweets violating our policies to permanent suspension.

We know many people believe we have not done enough to curb this type of behavior on Twitter. We agree. We are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to better allow us to identify and take faster action on abuse as it’s happening and prevent repeat offenders. We have been in the process of reviewing our hateful conduct policy to prohibit additional types of abusive behavior and allow more types of reporting, with the goal of reducing the burden on the person being targeted. We’ll provide more details on those changes in the coming weeks.

Yiannopoulos posted a response on Breitbart calling the suspension "cowardly" and stated, "Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives." Only a few days earlier, Yiannopoulos had called Twitter "cowards" for not banning him. Yiannopoulos's all-encompassing narcissism led him to declare that this would "[net] me more adoring fans" and that "This is the end for Twitter." His banning gained him the support of Louise Mensch, a woman who insisted that Twitter equally censor other users who had tweeted offensive things such as users describing gamers as "subhuman filth", although, of course, Mensch had previously described Milo as a "subhuman pig".

His fans created a Fake Tweet Generator that manufactured, well, fake tweets, and attributed them to Leslie Jones; this is libel, one of the several acts of expression that is not protected under free speech. Milo retweeted two of these fake tweets, thereby contributing to the libel.

On ABC's Nightline in September 2016, reporter Terry Moran confronted Milo in an interview about these antics and more. Of course, ABC's official video of the interview got (as of December 2016) nearly 35,000 dislikes to 5,000 likes on YouTube.

But then, as Yiannopoulos himself said in 2012:

We ban drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others. Isn’t it time we did the same to trolls?

Privilege Grant scam

In 2016, Yiannopoulos registered the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant (originally started as a joke to troll perceived SJWs) as part of a reverse-affirmative action program for young white males, as they claim affirmative action is unfair to white males:

“”American college campuses have changed and demographics once considered disadvantaged are no longer held back by racial, homophobic or sexist bias. Research now suggests that low-income Caucasian males are the most in need of help. Women’s advantage in college graduation is evident at all socioeconomic levels and for most racial and ethnic groups.

Of course, it goes without saying that the claims made by the Privilege Grant website were complete bullshit, but a number of somewhat gullible white men fell for the scam.

The Privilege Grant collected funds by hosting a livestream of a five-hour talk with a number of significant alt-right figures, including Blaire White, Margaret MacLennon, Lauren Southern, and Yiannopoulos himself, most of whom spoke out against the grant once they realized what Yiannopoulos was swindling his white males out of. Reports on how much money was collected through this stream vary, but it generated a substantial amount; Milo told The Daily Beast that overall donations totaled about $100,000 and pledges about another $250,000. The grant also collected funds through the (now defunct) donation page on his personal store.

As of March 2017, Yiannopoulos and Janet Bloomfield have announced the first ten recipients of the $2,500 Privilege Grant. No third-party confirmation yet exists to confirm that the funds have been disbursed to the named recipients.

The Great Swindle

The scandal, first reported by /u/enough__is___enough on /r/EnoughTrumpSpam over at Reddit, is that despite claims that applications would start in spring 2016, as of August 2016, there was no application option on the webpage.

Further digging found out that Caligula Limited, the company to which donations were routed and which was owned by Milo, had been dissolved as a company.

So where did the money go? The former director of the Privilege Grant alludes to the fact that Milo wired the money to his personal account at Silicon Valley Bank. Caligula Limited was active until May 2016 for "grant donations", then, before having the chance to award grant money in the summer, this company was dissolved and the money seems to have dissolved with it (note again that the grant was set up in Feb 2016). In fact, the former director of the Grant has a copy of his wiring instructions – implying that there was a transfer to Milo's personal banking accounts. The participants of the livestream as well as the former director are demanding answers. The grant never materialized, and everyone involved has been left in the dark.

Milo claimed that the allegations made against him – including a claim that he had spent $250,000 on drugs – were "garbage" on Facebook, and dismissed allegations against him as "conspiracy theories". The official Privilege Grant website was forced to issue an official statement for damage control, claiming that Milo was just a little late in the whole actually paying out money malarkey, because he's just soooo popular...

This is very overdue, and I do apologise for this very sincerely. We did pass our deadline I'm sorry to say ... as a result of over-eagerness and just being completely overwhelmed by the volume of interest in it and the various things on my plate.

Profiting off the desire to seek higher education. Like Daddy, like son. Additionally, The Guardian noted that this controversy shadowed the controversy over Trump's fundraising for veterans: "The GOP candidate announced in January he had raised $6m but months later many groups said they had yet to see any money, prompting an outcry and eventual payment by Trump."

Dangerous Faggot Tour

During a series of speeches in front of (mostly Republican) student conventions, an event at DePaul university had to be canceled due to violent student protests. Particular aims of demonstrators include blocking his habit of naming particular students, particularly transgender ones, for harassment. An event at UC Berkeley had to be canceled due to similar protests. In right-wing circles, these student protests were widely decried as riots and infringements of Milo's speech rights.

Real Time with Bill Maher

On February 17, 2017, Milo was featured as a guest on Bill Maher's talk show, unsurprisingly sparking backlash. The interview mostly consisted of Maher defending his "freeze peach" in order to find some common ground between them. Maher was perceived as doting over Yiannopoulos, failing to ask him a single tough question and going so far off the mark as to compare him to "a young, gay, alive Christopher Hitchens." Taking Milo's promotional claims about himself at face value, he then proceeded to mansplain what Milo was about to the unenlightened "regressive left," as though no one affected enough by Milo's actions to be outraged had ever read his professional bio.

During the overtime segment of the show, Milo went on to claim his public humiliation and targeted harassment of a transgender student during one of his university speeches was about "protecting women and children," to which Maher could only respond, "That's not unreasonable." In support of his claim, Milo misleadingly argued that transgender people were "disproportionately involved in violent crimes." This was true only in the sense that they are disproportionately victims of violent crimes. When called out by Larry Wilmore, Milo proceeded to insult Wilmore's intelligence. This obviously did not go over well; Wilmore told Milo to go fuck himself.

The extent of his appearance can be summed up thus: Bill sucking up to Milo as Bill's guests, who had a more functional moral compass, confronted him for the inaccuracy, bigotry, and vitriol of his remarks.

Downfall

In February 2017, Canadian Instagram user @Fuzzball6846 recalled Yiannopoulos' 2015 interview with Joe Rogan and his 2016 interview on Drunken Peasants, where he appeared to defend pedophile Catholic preachers for raping underaged boys. She linked sections of the interviews to conservative Twitter personality @ReaganBattalion; from then on, it was picked and understandably drew outrage by a wide variety of of celebrities and journalists (though his popularity dip took too long given his other disturbing trollish remarks). Memorable moments from Rogan's interview include:

• During the interview, Yiannopoulos claims that "I lost my virginity in an interracial fivesome with a drag queen." "How old were you?" asks Rogan. "Thirteen, maybe fourteen... it was great.”
• Later on, Rogan touches upon child abuse amongst Catholic priests; this prompts Yiannopoulos to discuss a priest from his childhood. "He made you suck his dick for real?" asks Rogan. "He didn't make me, I was enthusiastic about it."
• Yiannopoulos tells us "he was a great priest... he's going to get lynched now." "How old were you at the time?" asks Rogan. "I was in my teens," replies Yiannopoulos, before going on to ask Rogan "You've never seen a fifteen-year-old girl—at any point in your life, however, old you were—you've never seen a fifteen-year-old-girl you thought was hot? When you were twenty-five, when you were thirty, you will have seen girls at fifteen you thought were hot, of course, you did."
• Yiannopoulos then clarifies his experiences: "I was a very mature fourteen-year-old. It wasn't molestation, it was perfectly consensual. When I was fourteen, trust me, I was the predator... I was aggressively seeking out the sexual company of adults."

Memorable moments from the Peasants interview include:

• Q: "Sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me." A: "I'm grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him."
• Yiannopoulos asserted that young boys may "discover who they are" through such relationships, which can "give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable rock where they can't speak to their parents".
• Yiannopoulos further commented that this kind of statutory rape and child abuse happens "a lot" in the LGBT community, a tired and bigoted dog whistle to anti-gay social conservatives.

As a result:

• The American Conservative Union, which booked Yiannopoulos to speak at CPAC, disinvited him. In addition, the ACU went from planning to feature the alt-right's spokesman as their keynote speaker to denouncing the alt-right as a "left-wing fascist" group. (Because Milo and the alt-right are well-known for pushing "Communism in one state".) Thus they disclaimed all responsibility for their part in creating the conditions for people like Milo to rise, blamed it on the left, and continued doing what they do best.
• The publisher Simon & Schuster, which had recently awarded a $250,000 book contract to Yiannopoulos to write the book Dangerous, announced it was canceling the project in February 2017. (This in stark contrast to Yiannopoulos's novel becoming a bestseller overnight after protesters stopped him from speaking at a university.) Yiannopoulos made the mistake of suing Simon & Schuster for $10 million over breach of contract, which led to revelations in court that 1) the book was written by his Oxford-educated ghost writer Allum Bokhari, who was paid $100,000 by Cambridge-educated Yiannopoulos, and 2) the writing was shit. Yiannopoulos self-published the book in July 2017, but now you can download the fun edition for free thanks to the lawsuit.
• The editor-in-chief of Breitbart (not known for shying from Yiannopoulos's controversy) said Yiannopoulos' comments were "appalling" and "absolutely indefensible."
• Yiannopoulos resigned as senior editor of Breitbart Tech. And there was much rejoicing.

Glove, smell hand.

In response, Yiannopoulos claimed that he was a victim and laughter is how he copes, and that he abhors pedophilia and has worked against it. Unfortunately for his narrative, Milo is in this shitstorm because he asserted that his underage sexual experience(s) helped him find his sexuality and that those experiences were, quote, "perfectly consensual". And his claims to have worked against pedophiles were false, since all he had done was write smear stories against feminists for Breitbart in collaboration with members of an actual child porn website.

Yiannopoulos now hawks woo supplements for Alex Jones on his Infowars website and radio show. Oh, and he also said that he “can't wait for vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.” And he pretended to be heartbroken about Mollie Tibbetts' death, only to tell her to "ENJOY HELL" after realizing that she was anti-Trump. He even lashed out at his own fans, and he got roasted by Kathy Griffin. Due to his need for attention not being fed, Yiannopoulos subsequently embarked on a spending spree that even his vast wealth was not enough to sustain. With his Adonis-like physique ruined by his eating and drinking and without two dimes to rub together, Yiannopoulos resorted to begging his followers on Twitter for donations and whining that they weren't supporting him. Pimp-slapped by the invisible hand.

Faced with debts of over US$ 1,000,000, he attempted to restore his finances via crowdfunding but in December 2018 he was banned from crowdfunding site Patreon for associating with hate groups.

After making comments where he called Islam a barbaric religion a day after the Christchurch terrorist attacks, he has been banned from entering Australia.

He has taken to ripping off wholesale ContraPoints by producing videos with silly outfits, characters and sets. (While adding his own flair, namely extremely bad lighting, color grading and compositing.)

In 2019, Facebook banned Yiannopoulos and several other individuals (Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Paul Nehlen, Louis Farrakhan and Laura Loomer) as "dangerous individuals and organizations".

In a recent sighting, a beat reporter saw Yiannopoulos getting kicked out of the overflow room at Roger Stone's sentencing because he was sleeping. He reportedly is working on a book about Stone and his case but evidently didn't come early enough to get a seat in the courtroom.

Poetry book

In 2007, Yiannopoulos self-published a book of "poetry" called Eskimo Papoose. It became obviously clear that much of the content was lifted from various Tori Amos songs (with honourable mentions for whoever writes songs for Mariah Carey and Britney Spears, and the script of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) with no attribution. When confronted with this clear plagiarism, he responded that the collection was made up of other people's words and that it was an example of "sampling" like in music. Right then, that explains it.

We at RationalWiki prefer an alternate explanation: Yiannopoulos padded out the book because his poetry is just shit:

Father He told me to pray
That God would forgive

But would God forgive him
For what he did
In my mouth?

See also

• Wingnut welfare

External links

• Yiannopoulos's unremittingly awful website (taken over by a Chinese spam farm advertising "Plastic Injection Molding")
• Yiannopoulos's unremittingly awful Twitter (which is no longer verified due to rules violations)