In both 20, Wired named him one of the top 100 "innovators and influencers shaping the Wired world." In 2014, he sold the Kernel and was hired by Breitbart, a hard-right outlet, as an associate editor. He made a name for himself in his native England writing provocative, gossipy pieces - founding the Kernel, which his website describes as an "online tabloid magazine," in 2011. Milo has worked in journalism, mostly tech journalism, since dropping out of college in the early 2000s. Milo, and his Twitter ban, explained ( The Rubin Report) Which is all to say that as much as Milo says he doesn’t need social media, it’s a bit hard to believe him. The key word there, though, is “platforms.” Milo’s ambitions are grand: He wants to mobilize his followers to win a culture war, and so far, that mobilization has mainly happened on digital platforms controlled by the very elites he’s gone to war against. It’s always the same message, but it’s a different style,” he explains. “I perform totally differently on different platforms, depending on what works. In fact, it’s always hard to tell with Milo - he quite openly admits that his ethos is in part performance art. It’s hard to tell if he actually thinks this or if he’s just putting on a brave face for the press. “My life is more fun now, and it’s about to get a lot more fun.” “Is anything more wonderful than getting banned? Are you insane?” Milo asks me, rhetorically. In our conversation, he sounded surprisingly upbeat about being banned from the platform he’s best known for using.
I caught up with Milo after his party, in a loading dock where he was smoking a cigarette with several members of his entourage. The cause was a wave of unbelievably vicious online harassment directed at Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones - harassment that, according to most observers, was kicked off by Milo highlighting Jones’s account to his followers. Late on Tuesday night, the social media platform announced that Yiannopoulos had been permanently removed from their service. What was the first thing he said? “I just got banned from Twitter!” He kicked off his appearance at the party with a speech, which began with a minor striptease: He tore off a bulletproof vest, revealing a tight-fitting T-shirt emblazoned with a rainbow Uzi and the slogan “we shoot back” (Milo is gay, and fairly militant about it). CLEVELAND - Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart Tech editor and fringe right provocateur, threw a party at a venue near last night’s Republican National Convention.