How do you solve an opinionated maniac like Milo Yiannopoulos?
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The conservative flame-thrower has long enjoyed infamy in his native U.K. for his incendiary opinions on feminists and liberals. He is addicted to attention, whether it’s creating the Privilege Grant – a college scholarship available to white men – or declaring his birthday World Patriarchy Day. It’s not surprising Milo is a huge cheerleader for Donald Trump. Both enjoy being outrageous, politically incorrect and giving feminists short shrift.
Now 32-year-old Milo is over here, undertaking a 50-week, 60-date U.S. college tour and going viral on a regular basis, whether it’s publicly wondering if he was de-verified on Twitter for being an outspoken conservative or coming under fire for reputedly employing 44 interns.
Milo is a walking contradiction as well as being a walking headline: a journalist – he is currently tech editor at conservative news website Breitbart – who hates the media; a university dropout who is making waves when he speaks at U.S. colleges; a gay man highly critical of the LGBT establishment.
Having burned his bridges in the U.K. after he was forced to sell his website The Kernel, Milo, who dubs himself “the most fabulous supervillain on the Internet”, is desperate to conquer the States. But who exactly is the person who lies behind the provocation?
Your recent question at the White House press briefing about free speech on the Internet following your Twitter verification check being taken away went viral. Why is this issue such a big deal?
Censoring conservative or libertarian points of view on Twitter has a huge effect on the press and on democracy. It seems to be that those businesses that do not maintain too much free speech start tanking. It’s clearly the case with Twitter and it will become the case with Facebook in a few years. The progressive left has re-characterized criticism and ridicule as abuse and harassment because they don’t like the opinions being expressed. Look at who is suspended and who gets their checkmark taken away.
You’re currently undertaking a U.S. college speaking tour. How long are you in America for?
I’m on tour until November, but I’m probably moving here in late summer.
Why do you support Donald Trump for President?
The Republican Party is no longer fit for purpose. Republican insiders and Washington people have started to talk about their own voters like liberals used to talk about conservative voters, calling them stupid and bigoted. Once a party starts to attack its own base, it has no real political function except as a sort of career perpetuation for a small number of wealthy old people in big cities. That’s not a political party. That’s a cartel. My vision for America is a new libertarian consensus which can only really happen after the Democrat and Republican parties are broken up.
But Trump in so many ways is not a conservative.
Who cares? I don’t care what he believes in. He is an engine of chaos, reminding politicians about the respectable concerns of ordinary people like immigration and trade. I care he is doing spectacular damage to parties that don’t deserve to exist anymore. I don’t care whether Trump is good enough for some individual person’s speculative definition of conservatism.
You’re not concerned that Trump seems so light on policy details?
Who says the president has to be this reforming figure? We’ve had enough of that. Obama has done huge damage in the last two terms. They’re supposed to be figureheads, not coming in inventing vast new branches of government that taxpayers have got to cover. The best president was Calvin Coolidge because he did absolutely nothing! I want Trump to fix the border, fix trade and do absolutely nothing for the rest of his term.
When it comes to your politics, you’re a libertarian?
I believe in libertarianism fanatically from a cultural point of view but wouldn’t class myself as a libertarian on every political issue. Once you start talking about politics, you’ve already lost and I get bored because I don’t really care about politics. My purpose is to piss off the left and to do in culture and academia what Trump does in politics. I want to fix the culture because it’s in the culture where this starts- universities, the entertainment industry and the media.
How can you fix this in practice? You’re a hugely controversial and divisive individual.
I’m doing it by going to the places that this stuff happens. This year I’m going to universities. Next year who knows where I’ll show up? Maybe it will be TV. There haven’t been effective hybrid journalist-comedian-activists on the right before. There have been loads on the left for decades. Right now I want to fix free speech so we can start getting onto issues and talking about real things. Where do you fix free speech? Obviously in education.
How is the tour going?
I’ve been shocked by the extent to which faculty in American universities don’t just not teach conservative and libertarian points of views, they don’t even know what they are. When they do hear about them, they subject them to ridicule, dismiss them and move on.
What is the difference between U.S. and U.K. universities?
I’m disappointed and frustrated with the students in England and I’m disappointed and frustrated with the faculties in America….after I spoke at Rutgers, Minnesota and Michigan, the faculties started saying free speech is very important. That’s new because the trajectory has for 15 years has been toward speech codes and safe spaces. This is the first time in a generation of American education that faculties and academics have been re-affirming the importance of free speech. The failure of American conservatives to do anything about this has been astonishing. America is constantly saved by waspish Brits coming over here and doing a better job than they do. I suppose I’m the latest one.
But your tour has also met with virulent opposition.
American students sincerely tell me they feel their physical safety is endangered by my opinions. They didn’t get that from home or from the New York Times, they got that from college… Rather than punishing people for ridiculous, authoritarian behavior, they reward them with safe spaces and resources, spending money on providing counselors for people who claim an opinion from somebody traumatized them. Two weeks after I left Rutgers, they had a group therapy session that involved the police for students who were so traumatized by the presence of a gay man with the wrong opinions. Even if people hadn’t attended the talk, they were in floods of tears. Something has gone very wrong. It’s funny, but on the other hand I feel so bad for these kids and so angry at their professors.
What is your take on safe spaces?
The more the public find out about safe spaces, the more they hate them. You have to take the fight to campus. No other conservative has the stamina or the balls to do it. Every campus I go on, it creates pandemonium.
Why in your mind has nobody done this before?
Nobody has been successful because conservatives in the media are idiots who only talk to other conservatives. There’s no one with that fight left in the American right anymore. Nobody has that spirit or the style or the swagger. I work hard and I have fun with a smile on my face. That’s what the left hates more than anything else. It’s easy for them to call Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck angry old men, but I’m somebody like them who disagrees with them on principle.
Do you want to go into the political arena yourself?
I want to be press secretary in Trump’s White House.
Seriously?
I totally want to do it. The press secretary in Trump’s White House isn’t going to look like a press secretary in previous White Houses. I’ll walk in and say, ‘Daddy [Trump] doesn’t feel like talking to you today. I’m going shopping. Over!’ New York Times and Washington Post are out. I’ll put Breitbart and TMZ in the front row and we’ll have some fun.
You think you could achieve that in practice?
Of course you could. Trump defies the laws of political gravity and does what the f**k what he wants. He is impervious to political rules.
Have you met Trump?
No. I don’t like to rush these things. I’ve never met my real dad. I’ve done an interview with [Trump] for Breitbart before about technology. Obviously the campaign is well aware of who I am and [I] look forward to meeting him in due course.
You became something of a pantomime villain in the U.K. on TV. Is there TV interest in you over here?
Yes. Gigantic over here. The majority of it I say no to…I can’t go into too much detail what I’m discussing career-wise in the next couple of years. But there are plenty of networks trying to give me shows. It’s obvious I am the most exciting conservative in the country, pretty much the only one speaking to anyone under the age of 40. It would surprise me if I didn’t have a very large national platform in two years.
What is your response to the recent BuzzFeed story that alleged you hired 44 interns to write for you?
They got everything wrong. It’s preposterous to suggest anybody could manage 44 interns. Obviously the story was planted by a disgruntled former intern I had to fire. The hand I had in massaging that story I won’t comment on, but what they published was a horrible embarrassment. Nobody writes my column for me but of course I have researchers and ghostwriters and a variety of people who chip in bits and bobs…sites like BuzzFeed are obsessed with me because they don’t know how to win against me. Conservatives aren’t supposed to talk like I talk, look like I look and behave like I behave. Of course the knives are coming out now, but the problem is they’ve got nothing on me, no dirt. So they’re doing these weird semi-admiring, ideologically opposed pieces about me.
What lessons did you learn from the crash of your website The Kernel in 2013?
I’ve learned to have better quality people around me and I can’t do everything. I’m not the best person to manage money. But as you’ll recall, although the company got in trouble, then we got fresh investment and I sold it. I’m probably the only person to sell a media start-up in Europe in over a decade. The Kernel was a huge success story. The minor blip that happened halfway through [was] me not getting a proper CEO in. I’ve learned to stick to what I’m good at and employ other people to do everything else.
You came under fire for not paying contributors.
That’s the hiccup I’m talking about. But unlike every other start-up that I’ve ever heard of, I did end up paying those people out of my back pocket before I went and got the company fresh investment. The debts they were owed came from my personal money. I could have easily shut down the company, but I didn’t.
Don’t you get fed up going too far?
No. What does that mean? I try to go too far every week. The only mistake provocateurs make is apologizing. I’m a journalist who writes robust stories. I say terrible things about people but I have never got sued because I don’t get things wrong and I check my f**king facts…. Look at Trump. There is a gigantic appetite among the American public for this kind of thing now and It’s been created by the progressive left telling everyone they were racist, sexist and homophobic when none of those things were true. The progressive left created me and Trump, and we are winning big and setting the conservative grassroots alight.
When you show up to protest marches against sexual violence with signs proclaiming: “Rape culture and Harry Potter. Both Fantasy”, that’s not going too far?
Why would you think that’s too far? Rape culture – the culture that encourages and enables rape and encourages behavior that leads to rape – doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean rape doesn’t exist but rape culture is fantasy like Harry Potter. The sign is factually accurate and didn’t go far enough.
What will you miss about England?
Nothing. England spat me out. I was on TV in your words as a pantomime villain and nobody likes me there. They like me here a lot. I’ve found a new, much larger and more exciting audience in the best country in the world. I quite it like it when people like me, and it’s an uphill struggle to even achieve apathy in England.
Who are your heroes?
Skeletor, Darth Vader and Margaret Thatcher.
Margaret Thatcher would have hated Trump’s campaign.
She may well have hated Trump but just because I admire someone doesn’t mean I agree with them on everything. I admire her for other reasons. She’s an example of the greatest heights to which a woman can rise when she’s unshackled from the lies of feminism. She has the world in front of her and she takes it.
Is there anything you would do differently concerning Gamergate [the online movement which fought back against charges of ‘sexism’ in the video games industry] that you embraced so strongly?
I would have been way harsher and more outrageous on the lying feminists who drove that and their bogus claims of harassment and abuse. You go into feminism because you have failed in life and are ugly and unsuccessful – feminism is the last resort of women who can’t do anything else. The journalistic failure to report on Gamergate properly is probably the largest professional failure of the last decade, the way it was reported as a misogynistic hate campaign by professional gender activists rather than the cultural libertarian consumer uprising that it was.
You’re unashamedly graphic about sex on social media.
My parish priest thinks it is awful.
Do you have a boyfriend?
I would prefer to respect the privacy of anyone I am in a personal relationship with, as I get dead animals and syringes through the mail. Not being a feminist, I don’t whinge about that.
Have you ever had sexual relations with a woman?
Of course. I sleep with one woman a year to make sure I don’t like it. I could have kids, a nice family, so I check once a year to make sure I’m definitely gay.
How do you relax?
My idea of relaxation and fun is taking out feminists on Facebook. If I want to chill, I’ll dismantle someone on Twitter. That’s my idea of fun.