Milo Yiannopoulos says he ‘hopes’ Capital Gazette shooter is transgender
Milo Yiannopoulos (Michael Masters/Getty )
Milo Yiannopoulos says he is “hoping” that the gunman who murdered five people in the Capital Gazette newsroom turns out to be transgender.
Yiannopoulos, a ‘hero’ of the far-right and white supremacist movements online, came under fire after the mass shooting at the newspaper over comments advocating violence against journalists.
The former Breitbart columnist had claimed days before the massacre: “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.”
Milo Yiannopoulos (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty)
In a response to criticism last night, Yiannopoulos refused to apologise for his comments and added that he “hopes” the shooter is transgender, alluding to a discredited right-wing conspiracy theory about a previous shooting incident.
He wrote: “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this shooter — just like the last one at YouTube — is another demented left-winger. Let’s hope it’s another transgender shooter, too, so the casualties are minimal.”
Yiannopoulos proceeded to brand journalists who reported his alleged incitement of violence as “scum” who “definitely deserve to be put out of business and they one hundred per cent deserve to fear the reputational consequences of the hate and slander and lies they spread”.
He claimed: “The bodies are barely cold and left-wing journalists are already exploiting these deaths 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 truth, as always, is the opposite of what the media tells you. I sent a troll about ‘vigilante death squads’ as a *private* response to a few hostile journalists who were asking me for comment, basically as a way of saying, ‘Fuck off.’ They then published it.
“Amazed they were pretending to take my joke as a ‘threat,’ I reposted these stories on Instagram to mock them — and to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious.
“Headlines soon appeared claiming that I was “inciting” people to murder journalists. This is wholly false. The only people whipping up hysteria about killing reporters this week were Will Sommer at the Daily Beast and Davis Richardson at the New York Observer.
“If there turns out to be any dimension to this crime related to my private, misreported remarks, the responsibility for that lies squarely and wholly with the Beast and the Observer for drumming up fake hysteria about a private joke, and with the verified liberals who pretended they thought I was serious.”
Yionnopoulos was once closely affiliated with figures from the Trump White House, but fell from grace when he was accused of endorsing pederasty in a series of clips which emerged in February 2017.
In one video Yiannopoulos attacked the age of consent as an “arbitrary one-size-fits-all policing of culture”.
Milo fell from grace in 2017 (Getty)
He claimed: “In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship — those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents.”
In just 24 hours after those remarks, the columnist was dropped from far-right news website Breitbart News, had his book deal axed by Simon & Schuster, and was removed from the line-up of the Republican CPAC conference.
