Milo Yiannopoulos ( ;1 February 2017 , Archived on 2 February 2017. video taken from Yiannopoulos' official YouTube channel. né Hanrahan, Greek: Μίλο Γιαννόπουλος; born 18 October 1984) is a British far-right conspiratorial political commentator, known for his opposition to Islam, feminism, and social justice. He is a former editor of Breitbart News, an American far-right news and opinion website.
Yiannopoulos worked for Breitbart from 2014 to 2017, during which time he became a significant voice in the Gamergate controversy. In July 2016, he was banned from Twitter for online harassment of actress Leslie Jones. He was permanently banned from Facebook in 2019. Yiannopoulos solicited white nationalists, such as American Renaissance editor Devin Saucier, for story ideas and editing suggestions during his tenure at Breitbart.
In 2017, video clips circulated of Yiannopoulos stating that sexual relationships between 13-year-old boys and adults could be "perfectly consensual" and positive experiences for adolescents. Following backlash, Yiannopoulos resigned his position at Breitbart, his invitation to speak before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was rescinded, and Simon & Schuster cancelled a contract to publish his autobiography. In response, Yiannopoulos condemned sexual abuse, stated that he was referring to adolescent gay males rather than prepubescent boys, and that his statements reflected a humorous means of handling his own sexual abuse and experience with a priest.
In 2022, Yiannopoulos served as an intern for United States Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, later working with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and rapper Kanye West on the latter's short-lived 2024 U.S. presidential election campaign. In April 2024, Yiannopoulos was listed as Chief of Staff at Yeezy Apparel, but resigned the following month due to West's announcement of an adult entertainment division at the company. As of 2026, Yiannopoulos has resumed work with West, serving as his spokesperson and legal liaison.
In August 2026, Yiannopoulos was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). An immigration judge issued a final order of removal in July 2026 after he failed to appear at a hearing. He was deported to the United Kingdom on 28 August 2026.
Early life and education Born as Milo Hanrahan, Yiannopoulos was born and raised in Chatham, Kent, England. His father has Greek and Irish ancestry and his mother is German born. He is described as a practising Roman Catholic. His parents divorced when he was a child. Yiannopoulos' mother is Jewish. Yiannopoulos has referred to himself as Jewish; according to the BBC, his maternal grandmother was Jewish. Raised by his mother and her second husband, Yiannopoulos has stated that he did not have a good relationship with his stepfather. As a teenager, Yiannopoulos lived with his paternal grandmother whose surname, Yiannopoulos, he later adopted.Family and religion:
Yiannopoulos was educated at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury from which he has said he was expelled. He attended the University of Manchester but dropped out before graduating; he then read English at Wolfson College, Cambridge, but was expelled in 2010.Education:
Career After he got kicked out of university, Yiannopoulos initially secured a job at The Catholic Herald. In 2009, Yiannopoulos moved to technology journalism with The Daily Telegraph. His Telegraph columnist biography described him in 2009 as one who "writes sceptically about Web 2.0 and social media but enthusiastically about the internet in general."
In June 2022, Yiannopoulos became an unpaid intern for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The Kernel In November 2011, Yiannopoulos co-founded The Kernel. In March 2013, The Kernel was shut down amidst allegations of unpaid wages, at a time when Yiannopoulos was editor in chief and sole director of its parent company, Sentinel Media. It was reopened later that year under Kernel Media, with Yiannopoulos remaining as editor in chief and having privately settled the previous debts.
In 2014, The Kernel was acquired by Daily Dot Media, the parent company of The Daily Dot. After the acquisition by Daily Dot Media, Yiannopoulos stepped down as editor in chief, although he remained an advisor to the company.
Breitbart News
In 2014, Yiannopoulos started writing for Breitbart News, and in October 2015, Breitbart placed Yiannopoulos in charge of its new "Breitbart Tech" section. The site had six full-time staff, including esports specialist Richard Lewis, and was edited by Yiannopoulos until his resignation on 21 February 2017.Breitbart News Network:
Gamergate
In 2014, Yiannopoulos emerged as a "lead actor" in the Gamergate harassment campaign through his work at Breitbart, becoming one of the most vocal of Gamergate's supporters. Yiannopoulos employed Gamergate as a basis for online attacks on women,Aghazadeh S.A. et al. (2018) "GamerGate: A Case Study in Online Harassment". In: Golbeck J. (eds) Online Harassment. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. and his role in Gamergate allowed him to become one of the central figures in the mainstream growth of the alt-right.Winter A. (2019) "Online Hate: From the Far-Right to the 'Alt-Right' and from the Margins to the Mainstream". in: Lumsden K., Harmer E. (eds) Online Othering. Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Before Gamergate, Yiannopoulos referred to gamers as "pungent beta male bollock scratchers" and also said that "few things are more embarrassing than grown men getting over excited about video games".
Association with neo-Nazism and the alt-right
In early October 2017, BuzzFeed News published leaked email chains from Yiannopoulos' tenure at Breitbart. According to the report, Yiannopoulos and his ghostwriter Allum Bokhari regularly solicited ideas for stories and comments from people associated with the alt-right and neo-Nazi movements. Among the figures Yiannopoulos contacted were Curtis Yarvin, a central figure of the neoreactionary movement; Devin Saucier, the editor of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance; Andrew Auernheimer, the administrator of neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer; and Baked Alaska, a commentator known for his antisemitic and pro-Nazi tweets.
The story also reported that Yiannopoulos had a penchant for using personal passwords with antisemitic overtones, such as "Kristall", a reference to Kristallnacht, and "longknives1290", a compound reference to the Night of the Long Knives and the Edict of Expulsion.
In a Breitbart article, Yiannopoulos and a co-author described the alt-right movement as "dangerously bright". The Tablet stated that many of these intellectual backers write for publications it describes as racist and antisemitic, such as VDARE and American Renaissance. The Breitbart article was criticised by opponents of the alt-right for excusing the extremist elements of the movement, and also by the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer which holds that racism and antisemitism are pillars of the alt-right.
The Anti-Defamation League classifies Yiannopoulos as part of the alt-lite, a term used to distinguish individuals sometimes associated with the alt-right from those who are openly white nationalist and antisemitic. These accusations, as well as Yiannopoulos's support for Donald Trump, have contributed to a feud between Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative political commentator who refused to support Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Shapiro accused Yiannopoulos, his followers, and other Trump supporters of racist and antisemitic behaviour. He criticised Yiannopoulos's attempts to distinguish between real racist or bigoted behaviour and trolling, stating that "words have meaning" and that the distinction that Yiannopoulos was attempting to make "simply doesn't exist in objective reality".
In 2017, Yiannopoulos was depicted singing "America the Beautiful" at a karaoke bar, where a crowd of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, including Richard B. Spencer, cheered him with the Nazi Sieg Heil salute. In response, Yiannopoulos denied observing the Nazi salutes while he was singing, citing what he claimed to be "extreme myopia". According to the bartender who was working on the night of the incident, Yiannopoulos, Spencer and their entourage came into the bar and asked to sing karaoke even though it had ended. When the bartender saw the Nazi salutes she rushed the stage and told Yiannopoulos and his friends to leave, at which point they began harassing her, chanting "Trump! Trump! Trump!" and "Make America Great Again!". According to her, Yiannopoulos was getting the others "roused".Breitbart emails:
Following these revelations, billionaire Robert Mercer ceased his support for Yiannopoulos and condemned him,Nguyen, Tina. (2 November 2017). ""Holy S—t": Allies Shocked as Bob Mercer Renounces Milo, Dumps His Stake in Breitbart ", Vanity Fair. Retrieved 11 September 2019. as did Yiannopoulos's former employer Steve Bannon.Nguyen, Tina. (23 October 2017). "Steve Bannon Half-Heartedly Disowns Milo Yiannopoulos ", Vanity Fair. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
In November 2019, Yiannopoulos released an audio recording which appeared to feature Spencer using the racial slurs "octaroons" and "kikes", referring respectively to African Americans and Jewish people. The recording appeared to date from the immediate aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the murder of Heather Heyer.
Social media controversies and bans In December 2015, Twitter briefly suspended Yiannopoulos' account after he changed his profile to describe himself as BuzzFeeds "social justice editor." His Twitter account's blue "verification" checkmark was removed by the site the following month. Twitter declined to explain its removal, saying they do not comment on individual cases. Some news outlets speculated that Yiannopoulos had violated its speech and harassment codes, as with an instance where he told another user that they "deserved to be harassed." Others worried that Twitter was targeting conservatives.Twitter controversy:
In July 2016, Yiannopoulos panned the Ghostbusters reboot as "a movie to help lonely middle-aged women feel better about being left on the shelf." After the film's release, Twitter trolls attacked African-American actress Leslie Jones with racial slurs. Yiannopoulos wrote three public tweets about Jones, saying "Ghostbusters is doing so badly they've deployed Leslie Jones to play the victim on Twitter," before describing her reply to him as "barely literate" and then calling her a "black dude". Multiple media outlets have described Yiannopoulos' tweets as encouraging the abuse directed at Jones. Yiannopoulos was then banned by Twitter for what the company cited as "inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others". He later stated that he was banned because of his conservative beliefs.Leslie Jones abuse:
In November 2022, a month after Musk purchased the platform, he reinstated a number of suspended accounts, including Yiannpoulos'.
In May 2019, Yiannopoulos and several others active in politics and culture, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and conspiracy theorists and fellow right-wing pundits Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, were permanently banned from Facebook, which called them "dangerous". "We've always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology", a Facebook spokesperson said. "The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today."
Tours