After signaling that he would be attending Friday’s White House daily press briefing, Milo Yiannopoulos announced on Friday that, as the subject of headlines due to the anti-free speech riot outside of his speaking event at UC Berkeley, he had better things to do.
“I won’t be headed to the White House today as some news reports are suggesting — en route to New York for cable news,” he wrote on Facebook Friday. “Had fun at the press briefing last time but I’m the biggest story in the country and I’m focusing on TV! I’ll drop Sean and Daddy a line about Berkeley privately.”
By “Sean and Daddy” Milo means Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Donald Trump, who Milo consistently calls “daddy.” According to Yahoo News reporter Hunter Walker, Yiannopoulos originally said in an email that he would be attending, prompting the need for the clarification.
In an email exchange with the NY Daily News Thursday, Yiannopoulos made clear that if he wanted to attend a press briefing, he could do so easily. “I’m a senior editor at America’s most influential news outlet. How the f— do you think?” he wrote concerning his ability to get press credentials.
The Trump administration has made clear that it intends to encourage more non-establishment news sites to attend the press briefings. “The popular Gateway Pundit blog stated it will be sending a reporter, while far-right Infowars, led by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, says Jerome Corsi will be their White House correspondent,” notes The Hill. Trump has made clear his affinity for Breitbart News, InfoWars, and other right-leaning sites. Jones even claims Trump called to thank him the night he pulled off his historic upset of Hillary Clinton. Combined with this war with the “opposition party,” the
Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart News editor and Alt-Right darling, has attended a WH press briefing before. In March 2016, he asked Obama press secretary Josh Earnest if he thought Facebook and Twitter were “punishing conservative and libertarian points of view.” Milo was banned from Twitter in July for an exchange with leftist comedian Leslie Jones.
Trump came to the defense of Milo and his supporters on Twitter Thursday, tweeting out a threat to pull federal funding from UC Berkeley over its failure to protect free speech the night before. As an editor of Breitbart, Yiannopoulos has several ties to the Trump administration, most significantly former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon.
Yiannopoulos has fully embraced the role of provocateur, and as the Daily Wire has chronicled, has helped popularize the Alt-Right movement. Though he rejects the Alt-Right label, Yiannopoulos espouses many views that align with their ideology and methods, including conspiracy theories on Jews running the media and justifying racial and anti-Semitic memes as mere “taboo-defying” trollery. Though he has openly acknowledged that Alt-Right intellectuals believe that “culture is inseparable from race,” Yiannopoulos casts himself as a “chronicler of, and occasional fellow traveler with the alt-right.”