OWN CORRESPONDENT
Yiannopoulos was a virtual unknown until he started campaigning for Donald Trump pre-elections and publicly standing up to the anti-Trumpers.
He is an enigma who thrives on ultra-right rhetoric. He is openly gay, makes spurious claims to some Jewish blood on his maternal grandmother’s side and calls Trump “Daddy”.
His father is half Greek, half Irish, while his mother is British. Although he loves referring to his “Jewish side”, he calls himself a “practising Catholic”. Yiannopoulos’ claims of Jewish ancestry has put him at odds with neo-Nazi adherents in the alt-right.
Some call him a “shock jock” who thrives on sensation and the limelight. His “claim to fame” is – or was – closely linked to the notorious right wing website and his former boss Steve Bannon’s – close link with Trump, first as an election adviser as chief political strategist and since Trump’s election, filling a major role in national security policy at the White House.
Many commentators, such as well-known American columnist James Kirchick – who is Jewish – are viciously scathing of Yiannopoulos and his “credentials”. Kirchick, headlined an article on Yiannopoulos last June: “Donald Trump’s little boy is a gay half-Jew with jungle fever” with the subhead: “The sad story of Milo Yiannopoulos: The Trump troll with Daddy issues”.
As a self-proclaimed “cultural libertarian” and “free speech fundamentalist”, he is a vocal critic of feminism, Islam, social justice, political correctness, and other movements and ideologies he deems authoritarian or belonging to the “regressive left”.
He considers himself a reporter of and “occasional fellow traveller” with the alt-right movement. The “alt-right” is the largely Internet-based, populist movement that has surged to prominence on the heels of Trump’s success.
In July 2016, he was permanently banned from Twitter for “inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others”.
But comments in a two-year-old video clip in which he said that sexual relationships between 13-year-old boys and adult men and women “very often” are “perfectly consensual” and positive experiences for the boys, was a tipping point, with the irony of commentators on the left, centre and right in unison condemning the remarks.
Yiannopoulos has strenuously denied that he is advocating paedophilia, but he was forced to resign from Breitbart News where he headed Breitbart Tech; a speaking tour was cancelled and a lucrative book deal was scuppered.
In a previous Breitbart article, Yiannopoulos and a co-author described the alt-right movement as “dangerously bright”. Tablet, the American Jewish general interest daily online magazine, noted that many of these intellectual backers write for publications it describes as racist and anti-Semitic, like VDARE and American Renaissance.
The Breitbart article was criticised by opponents of the right-wing for excusing the extremist elements of the alt-right, and also by neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer who claim that racism and anti-Semitism are pillars of the movement.
As Yiannopoulos has said: “Trust me, alt-right hardliners don’t like me any more than they like the Republican establishment or Hillary (Clinton): I’m a degenerate, race-mixing gay Jew, and they don’t let me forget it!”
He joked to The New York Times: “I call myself a Trump-sexual. I have a very antiwhite bedroom policy, but Trump is kind of like the exception to that rule.”
Yiannopoulos states: “I don’t care about politics, I only talk about politics because of Trump.”
Writes Kirchick last year when Trump was still a presidential candidate: “What seems to excite Yiannopoulos about Trump is what seems to excite most of the tycoon’s voters: a brash, take-no-prisoners attitude. When I recently asked Yiannopoulos to name the Trump policies he favours, he replied with a very revealing answer. Trump supporters don’t care about the man’s policies, he said. ‘They want to burn everything down.’
