Milo Yiannopoulos Mysteriously Changes His Stance on ICE Deportations

Hi,

My first interaction with Milo Yiannopoulos was small, but pleasant.

It was back in March of 2014, and Milo had retweeted a Kickstarter for a project I was working on. We reached our funding goals, and then some. I suppose Milo – who was growing a large following at the time – had a small part to play in that. 

Thank you, Milo.

Back then, my only fleeting impression of Milo was that he was a loud gay man from the UK. And that was correct.

But the now 41-year-old was also honing the attributes he would become known for: Racism, sexism, homophobia (yes, you heard that correctly), and an overall attitude of intolerance. He spoke loudly against Islam and feminism, and was on the “anti-woke” brigade before “woke” was a common word in our cultural lexicon. He peppered his social media posts and live tours with outrageous comments, at one point saying sexual relationships between children and adults could be “perfectly consensual”. 

This year, he’s taken to using the N word a lot.

When Milo was tweeting about my Kickstarter, he was living in the US – and was a few months into working for far-right US news outlet Breitbart News. Two years after that he’d be kicked off Twitter for his ongoing racist harassment of Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones. 

Three years later he’d be kicked off Facebook, too.

The bans simply added to his infamy, and during 2016 – as editor of Breitbart News – he helped usher Donald Trump into power. Reporting from Buzzfeed in 2017 showed how Milo’s outlet helped foster Trump’s base of racist, angry, white Americans. 

During the 2016 presidential campaign, under [Steve] Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

Leaked documents and video showed that Milo was an incredibly savvy, smart player in courting literal Nazis.

New emails and documents show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream.

It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.

These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.

After Joe Biden became president in 2020, Milo worked as an intern for Marjorie Taylor Green, before working for a variety of Trump-simps including white nationalist Nick Fuentes and Kanye West (who he still works for).

And over the last year or so – while working on a book called Ex Gay – Milo has been tweeting a lot in support of ICE deportations, each tweet getting hundreds of thousands of views from his conservative and edgelord fanbase.

But something fascinating happened this week. After a year of cheering ICE on, Milo Yiannopoulos has mysteriously changed his stance on ICE deportations.

It wasn’t a slow change of opinion. It happened overnight.