Milo Yiannopoulos said that he couldn’t wait for vigilantes to start “gunning journalists down.” Those comments came a few days before a gunman shot five people dead inside of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland.
Yiannopoulos made the comments to a reporter from the Observer and to a reporter from the Daily Beast. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Yiannopoulos said in a Facebook post that his comments were meant as a “troll.” He said that he used that response as a means of saying, “F*** off.” Yiannopoulos added that if deaths are attributed to his comments, the blame for those deaths belongs with the Observer and the Daily Beast for publishing his words.
After the shooting in Annapolis, Yiannopoulos deleted these Instagram posts:
Instagram/Milo Yiannopoulos
Instagram/Milo Yiannopoulos
The Facebook post was later turned in to a blog for his website, Dangerous. The final paragraph of the blog reads, “I made a private, offhand troll to two hostile reporters, who breathlessly publicized it and like vermin their fellow journalists swarmed to remind the world how much they hate Milo. If the Left was truly horrified by violence against journalists, they would have shown it in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo. As you all know, they didn’t.”
Yiannopoulos also created an Instagram post showing him with a gun amid the controversy surrounding his comments. The caption read, “The bodies are barely cold but journalists are already exploiting them to score political points against me. It’s disgusting. I regret nothing I said, though of course like any normal person I am saddened to hear of needless death.”
The Donald Trump-supporting provocateur is quoted in the Observer story as saying, “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.” When asked to elaborate, Yiannopoulos said it was a “standard response to a request for comment.” The Observer report says that a journalist was seeking comment regarding a restaurant on the Upper East Side that Yiannopoulos is known to frequent. The Daily Beast was trying to write an article about Yiannopoulos’ support for the United Kingdom Independence party.
In February 2017, Yiannopoulos was forced to resign from his role at Breitbart after he gave an interview for Joe Rogan in which he was perceived to be advocating for pedophilia. At a speech he gave shortly afterward, Yiannopoulos railed against the media saying, via Business Insider, “And that is part of, you know, part of the failing of the media in this country. They have gleefully reported things about me they know aren’t true over the last 48 hours. With the result, you know, that you now all know. And you guys are responsible for that, and f—you for that. Because you, you know, you did a bad thing. I take responsibility for the words I used. I take responsibility for the things that I said. but I don’t believe that any journalist writing a story or any editor pressing the publish button believes that I sincerely advocate for or support pedophilia. It’s an absurd and ridiculous allegation but they gleefully printed it anyway. America knows better and knows different.”
Yiannopoulos is vocal supporter of Donald Trump’s attacks on the media. Trump has spent much of his political career attacking the media. Most recently, Trump called the coverage of the North Korea summit “almost treasonous.” Some of the phrases used by Donald Trump to describe the media have been, “the enemy of the American people,” “our country’s biggest enemy” and “fake news.”
CBS News’ Lesley Stahl reported in May 2018 that Trump had told her candidly that his constant attacks on the media were simply meant to discredit them. Republican Senator Jeff Flake has said in the past that Donald Trump has used the words of Joseph Stalin to attack the media.
