Who Is Milo Yiannopoulos?
Milo Yiannopoulos is a British writer and editor, currently living in the US.
He was born in Greece to a Greek father and British mother, he grew up in Kent in the south of England.
In July 2016, Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter for what the social media company referred to as “inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others”.
It came after the writer took aim at Leslie Jones, a black actress in an all-female Ghostbusters reboot, and she received a barrage of abuse from other Twitter users.
Milo Yiannopoulos has also been widely criticized for comments he has made about transgender people, Muslims, Black Lives Matter activism, feminists and gay people, even though he is openly gay.
Image source Flickr
He co-founded online tech magazine The Kernel in 2011 and sold it in 2014, after running up large debts and encountering legal battles with writers who sued for unpaid earnings.
In 2015, Milo Yiannopoulos was appointed as a senior editor at Breitbart News, a right-wing website that has been criticized for racist and misogynist content.
He has written columns titled “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”
When Hillary Clinton read those headlines out disdainfully at one of her rallies last year, he considered it a win.
This week, footage of a year-old podcast was unearthed, where Milo Yiannopoulos appears to condone paedophilia.
He said relationships between “younger boys” and older men could be a “coming-of-age relationship … in which those older men help those younger boys discover who they are”.
Milo Yiannopoulos has denied the allegations on his Facebook page, blaming the way the clips were edited and his own “sloppy phrasing” for any indication he supported paedophilia.
“It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst,” Milo Yiannopoulos said.
Breitbart News has close ties to the Trump administration. The website’s chief executive, Steve Bannon, first headed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and was later appointed as his chief strategist in the White House.
Milo Yiannopoulos is an avid supporter of President Trump, whom he calls “daddy”.
His regular public speaking engagements often lead to protests on university campuses.
Milo Yiannopoulos went to Simon Langton Boys Grammar School in Canterbury, and dropped out of undergraduate courses at the University of Manchester and the University of Cambridge.
However, he came to prominence by playing a key role in an online troll war, known as Gamergate, about misogyny in the video game world.
Milo Yiannopoulos built up a following by being a “troll king”, according to tech magazine Wired.
His YouTube channel now has more than 500,000 subscribers.
Milo Yiannopoulos is regularly associated with the alt-right, a disparate nationalistic group, which is outspoken against so-called political correctness and feminism. It includes neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites.
He says he does not consider himself part of the alt-right, although he has called it “energizing and exciting”.
During an appearance on TV show Real Time on February 17, he joked about not being able to fit in as he is a “gay Jew who never shuts up about his black boyfriend”.
Milo Yiannopoulos had a Jewish maternal grandmother.
On the same show, hosted by Bill Maher, he equated feminism with a disease (again) and said transgender people was a disorder comparable to sociopathy.
Milo Yiannopoulos’ autobiography, Dangerous, had been due for publication next month.
When the book deal with publisher Simon & Schuster was announced in December 2016, it caused an outcry among his critics, who accused the company of promoting and funding hate speech.
On February 20, Simon and Schuster announced it was cancelling the publication of the book, after more than 100 of the publisher’s other authors had protested against it.
Milo Yiannopoulos reportedly received a $250,000 advance for the book.
In protest at the deal, the Chicago Review of Books had already announced it would not review any Simon & Schuster books in 2017.