Milo Yiannopoulos is presently in the UK, doubtless mobilizing hometown forces to pursue his outside dream of being Donald Trump’s press secretary, which he first revealed to Heat Street.
Never one to take exception to a spot of self-promotion, the Breitbart Tech Editor conducted a spiky interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News.
Interviewer Cathy Newman pressed him for his views on the alt-right movement, which Milo has been at the vanguard of leading, and which has come under fire for perceived extremism following the appointment of Steve Bannon as Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist.
Milo started the interview saying the usual platitudes about the alt-right — only to change course and object to Newman describing him as “one of their cheerleaders.” The provocateur took exception to being described this way replying: “No, the media is desperate to crown me the queen of it [the alt-right movement]. … All I’ve ever done as a reporter is give them a fair hearing, give them a fair crack of the whip in the press. For that crime I have been called all sorts of awful names.”
He added: “We’re fellow travelers on some issues. But I’m very pro-Iraq, I’m very pro-Israel. There are all sorts of points of difference, I think.”
These remarks come as a surprise since Milo was the co-author of Breitbart’s “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” which is the set text for the movement.
The article cited the white supremacist website AlternativeRight.com and wrote of anti-Semitic memes: “Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish ‘Shlomo Shekelburg’ to ‘Remove Kebab,’ an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide.” The meme figure of ‘Shlomo Shekelburg” is an anti-Semitic racist meme.
Could Milo’s reservations about the alt-right partly be linked to the embarrassing coverage generated from the attention paid to some of the outrageous headlines of Milo’s Breitbart articles that accompanied Bannon’s controversial appointment this week?
Or could Milo, not known for being the most selfless of individuals, be set to cut ties with the alt-right now they are facing increased scrutiny over their extremism?
Time will tell.
