Who is Milo Yiannopoulos? Everything you need to know about Donald Trump's alt-Right poster boy

He's banned from Twitter and speaking at his old school - but Milo Yiannopoulos has a mentor in the White House. Phoebe Luckhurst distinguishes the man from the myth
Milo Yiannopoulos gives a speech at Trinity University, San Antonio
Rex

In August, a copy of Milo Yiannopoulos’s tour rider was leaked to student news site The Tab. He was preparing for a speaking tour of American campuses, entitled Dangerous Faggot; the extensive emails revealed that his demands are long, various and draw on a cross-section of flamboyant traditions.

There were the rockstar requests for champagne (“2x Laurent-Perrier Brut NV Methuselah”) and the bizarre demands of a starlet losing his grip on reality (“framed, signed 8×10 photo of artist, next to roses”). Then there were the demands you could hear read out in the teasing tone of a man who has become the world’s first professional troll.

For example, he requested an “attendant” to rotate the framed picture “hourly to maintain sun aspect”, and “four topless Abercrombie models”. There was an instruction that “lesbian maintenance personnel must remain 100 feet away at all times and may not wear khakis, flannel Birkenstocks or plaid,” and calls for three Siberian husky puppies. At the time of its publication Yiannopoulos confirmed to The Tab that the rider was authentic — though ultimately it is impossible to know if anything 33-year-old Yiannopoulos does is authentic.

“Part of people’s obsession with Milo is that no one can work out how much of him is real and how much is persona,” agrees Jack Rivlin, founder and CEO of The Tab, who used to share an office with Yiannopoulos in Clerkenwell. “In person he is kind and generous, and ridiculously good fun, even for people who expect to be one of his ‘enemies’. A lot of people who hate his public persona would attend his funeral and be genuinely sad, which probably explains the Milo paradox quite well.”

Yiannopoulos is the alt-Right poster boy who delights in riling the sensible and liberal with incendiary statements and provocative stunts. Last month, he immersed himself in a bath of pig’s blood for a performance piece called Angel Mom, part of a pro-Trump art show in New York. He wore a baseball cap reading “Make America Great Again”. He is contemptuous of women and minorities, he once shared a Twitter poll inviting followers to answer the question, “which would you rather your child had: feminism or cancer?”. As a gay man he is scathing of certain elements of UK gay culture, surprising and offending many in the community. Is being homosexual wrong, he has asked. “Something somewhere inside of me says yes.” Critics point to this as an example of pathological self-hatred. In July he was permanently banned by Twitter, and as a result, he is hailed as a martyr by a certain coterie of young, white, angry men offended by liberal sensibilities.

Yiannopoulos has been on the margins of topical discourse for some time but after Trump’s election his viewpoints have found a startling, discomfiting relevancy. And accordingly, he has been making headlines again. This week, he was due to speak about American politics at his old school, Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury, but the speech was cancelled, after the intervention of counter-extremism authorities.

Yiannopoulos is a senior editor at Right-wing online magazine Breitbart
Rex

Reportedly, most parents and pupils are furious about the censorship — on the other hand, Yiannopoulos is delighted. “My return to the UK has been met with much fanfare,” he wrote on Facebook, along with an image of a newspaper article covering the dispute, on which was printed a picture of Yiannopoulos, astride a sedan chair, being carried by students in Santa Barbara.

It’s the latest “success” in a bumper year for the charismatic agitator. The Twitter ban was enacted in July, after Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones was targeted by racist trolls she said were doing his bidding. According to another of his victims who says she received rape and death threats, this is his modus operandi: “He was smart enough to never write anything abusive himself ” Indeed, even after the suspension Yiannopoulos’s voracious fans continue to target those who challenge him. This week, after he was interviewed by Cathy Newman of C4 News, the broadcaster tweeted: “The torrent of misogyny on @Twitter after my #MiloYiannopoulos interview illustrates EXACTLY why he had to be challenged.”

To top it all, he is about to have a champion in the White House. Yiannopoulos is a senior editor at Breitbart, a Right-wing online magazine and the most-read conservative news website in the States — and whose chair, Steve Bannon, has just been appointed President-elect Donald Trump’s chief strategist. “In the UK he’s a curiosity,” puts one Yiannopoulos acquaintance. “In the US, he’s also a curiosity but he’s somehow also a legitimate star. I was watching CNN last week and he just came up in a conversation about Steve Bannon. [Yiannopoulos] is passing-mentions-on-cable-news famous — and the guy who made him a star is now one of the most powerful people in the world. Think about that for a minute.” He has reportedly taken to calling Trump “Daddy”.

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Yiannopoulos does nothing unawares, and remains serene in the face of those spitting tacks about his illiberal positions — knowing it will infuriate them further — while being unforgiving in his own attacks. “Milo’s public success has been down to exposing people’s hypocrisy about what they think in private and say in public,” Rivlin offers. “He often has a laugh at the expense of shrill, insincere people and causes which is a valuable service to society. Unfortunately he sometimes takes this way too far and ends up saying and doing crazy, destructive stuff.”

Yiannopoulos has a considerable platform — even without Twitter, he is followed by almost 40,000 people on Facebook, and has appeared on programmes including Newsnight — but he meandered on his way up. Yiannopoulos was born Milo Hanrahan, in 1984. His father is Greek, and he was raised in a small village in Kent, near Simon Langton school. In a Brietbart piece he wrote that his parents had planned to split up until his mother discovered she was pregnant; they separated when he was six. It has been reported that Yiannopoulos’ mother was unhappy when he came out as gay, leading to the change in his surname. He appears to be an only child.

Yiannopoulos is banned from Twitter, but is followed by almost 40,000 people on Facebook
Getty Images

He spent much of his teens with his paternal grandmother. She raised him as a Catholic, and he still considers himself a practising one. He dropped out of both Cambridge and Manchester universities, though he has subsumed academic failure into his mythology.

“When I got invited to speak at the Cambridge Union, it was a real honour,” he once wrote. “And a pretty cool f*** you [after they] threw me out after repeated warnings for the ridiculously trivial reason that I didn’t show up to supervisions, didn’t submit any essays, and spent most of my time shagging and drinking instead of reading.”

Yiannopoulos and I both worked briefly for the same student newspaper in 2010. He was the theatre critic. An editor from the time remembers that a story about Yiannopoulos’s Twitter bust-up with Stephen Fry (the latter called him a “cynical, ignorant f**ker”) was the first piece about Yiannopoulos in the media. He became feted and feared in Cambridge for his acidic reviews. He once wrote that a student production of the Sound of Music “almost made me sorry to be alive”.

In an even earlier incarnation, Yiannopoulos worked under the name, Milo Andreas Wagner. During this time, he was photographed wearing the Iron Cross, a German military medal from the 19th century that was co-opted into the symbolism of Nazism in the Thirties, and under the name, published two poetry books: A Swarm of Wasps (2006) and Eskimo Papoose (2008). One commentator called the latter, a “deliberate parody of ‘poetry’ by a self-harming teenage Goth girl who’s read a bit of Nietzsche”. Neither is available to purchase on Amazon.

As “Wagner”, he worked as a speechwriter for Bianca Jagger, and is listed as her assistant on the World Future Council’s website, in an entry about a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Bali in December 2007. In January this year, Yiannopoulos wrote a column for Breitbart decrying hypocritical “climate alarmists”.

After Cambridge, he became interested in tech, organising The Telegraph Start-Up 100, which ranked Europe’s most promising start-ups.

Subsequently, Yiannopoulos started The Kernel, a media and technology publication, which one journalist remembers as “incredibly bitchy”. It launched in 2011, with the mission statement, to “fix European technology journalism”. Articles were informative but light in tone, and aimed at deflating an industry it considered self-important and reverent of its own hype. There was lots of gossip —though ultimately, the gossip turned on the Kernel. It closed in March 2013, after legal disputes .

Yiannopoulos started spending more time in the US. “He has more enemies in London than Tony Blair,” remembers one acquaintance. “Most of whom have perfectly legitimate reasons for hating him. When his site went out of business and I wrote something supportive on Twitter, a high-ranking media executive from another newspaper called me 15 minutes later, absolutely furious.”

Ultimately, Yiannopoulos resists definition, preferring to tease and provoke. And despite all this, in private, he seduces. “He’s well-connected, good at making introductions and can be incredibly charming and helpful,” offers another acquaintances. I once attended a birthday party of his, held at a bar in Old Street, where he arrived on a throne; Rivlin remembers he was “carried by four topless hunks”. “He’s like a combination of Eddie Monsoon from Ab Fab and Nigel Farage, with better hair,” he adds. A journalist who once worked in an office with him confirmed, “he always got the rounds in at the pub”. Though another source suggests he’s barely drinking, as he is taking his position as provocateur-in-chief seriously.

So where next? Not to Simon Langton; he has also been no-platformed by British universities including his sort-of alma mater, Manchester. There is no suggestion that he will be able to return to Twitter. But with his mentor in the White House, his position within an alt-establishment is affirmed.

“He’s like Trump,” concludes one Yiannopoulos acquaintance. “They’re opportunists who don’t mind taking it way, way, way too far if it gets them a connection with people who hate the mainstream discourse. God knows what they’re going to do with that power.”

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