The Times of London: Milo the ‘British Poster Boy for America’s Far Right’

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The Sunday Times Magazine has published an in-depth profile of Breitbart News’ resident gay thot, MILO. The profile covers his childhood, his political values, and his barnstorming “Dangerous Faggot” tour around America’s college campuses.

Yiannopoulos – and this is important – was a pro-Trump partisan during the US election who wrote and spoke fervently in his favour and, towards the end, developed a habit of affectionately referring to Trump simply as “Daddy”. And he has direct links to the president-elect. Steve Bannon, the man who hired him to write for Breitbart – “The man who made me a star” – was the chief executive of the Trump campaign and will serve as a senior counsellor in the Trump administration. As a result of these ties and his tireless support online and across campuses, Yiannopoulos found himself a guest at Trump’s victory party last month.

“It was in New York. An invitation-only thing,” he says, airily. “It was wonderful. So much fun. I knew he was going to win all along.” He credits himself with prising away significant numbers of college-age voters from Hillary Clinton, a view apparently shared by Trump. “His campaign came to me and said, ‘We couldn’t have done it without you.’

“Journalists don’t give me power. People do. And if you want to ignore one of the most interesting cultural movements of the past 50 years, be my guest,” he says, meaning himself. “It makes no difference to me.”

“Everyone characterises me as some weird, reactionary, hateful, right-wing lunatic. And it’s so completely alien, that characterisation.“Yeah, yeah, me the white supremacist. Give me a break.” Some people, he says, have got it into their heads that he is a sociopath. Hang on, I say. You’ve said that yourself. “Yeahhhh,” he says. “I say it toyingly with interviewers to see if they’re idiotic enough to print it. And they normally are.”

“Everybody thinks that I’m either a troll-provocateur or attention-seeker for the sake of it. But nobody has ever really appreciated how smart I am,” he says at one point, almost annoyed.

“One of the other things people never capture about me is that I’ve applied entertainment-industry dynamics to journalism. I’m one of few people you could describe as a star journalist. In the true sense of the word ‘star’. There are star journalists because they have prestigious jobs, but they are not stars. They are boring, autistic dorks.”

“Nobody’s really captured the Willy Wonkaishness of me,” he says once the plates have been cleared. “Because that’s how I feel. I feel like I’m in this crazy, oppressive adult hell and I want to explode it. I want to blow it up with glitter cannons and God knows what. And that, for me, is a mission of compassion and love and joy. 

“There’s a reason I told you Madonna is not just my business role model but my cultural role model, too. I don’t have any fear about having to reinvent myself and find new ways to be interesting. Different ways of connecting with people. I’m currently in my Campus Queen phase,” he finishes. “But there will be many different Milos.”

The left despises him. To be fair, many on the right do, too. But if you spend any amount of time reading about politics and culture online, you also notice that plenty of the people who object to his views – or who question whether he even genuinely holds half of them – nevertheless have a morbid fascination with him. They need to analyse you, I say.

“No, they need to pathologise me,” he snaps. “They need to give me a disease. They need to say I’m self-loathing. Because it’s the only reason they can give that identity politics hasn’t worked in this case. I’m gay. I dress and I look and I act like I ought to have politics X and I have politics Y, and they can’t work it out. But it’s not difficult to work out. It’s really easy. It’s that identity politics is bulls***. It’s garbage. It’s total nonsense. It’s not based on truth or logic or anything else; it’s based on hurt feelings and victimhood.”

“People assume a lot about me,” he says. “People’s struggles are different. I’ve had unhappinesses in my childhood that are equally as shaping as struggling to put food on the table, you know? I didn’t eat in my teens either. But that was just because I wanted to be thin,” he quickly adds. “But everyone’s damage is different.”

“You grow up and you don’t want to have sex with women. That’s traumatic! I can’t create a child with the person I love. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

He would like to be a father – “Denying my genes to the species would be a crime” – but says he wouldn’t raise a child in a gay household. How come? “It’s weird,” he says. “Don’t listen to the progressive left when they tell you you’re born this way. It’s a lie. It’s a mixture of nature and nurture. And I don’t want to raise a child and push them in that direction.”

Read the profile here.

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