Breitbart tech reporter Milo Yiannopoulos is well known for his advocacy of free speech on Twitter. And his advocacy has taken such admirable forms as going to the White House to protest Twitter taking away his verification check, and getting banned from the platform altogether for sending sexist and racist trolls after Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. Now after the ban, Yiannopoulos spoke to CNN Money about how unrepentant he is in going after Jones.
The beginning of the video has Yiannopoulos defending his Ghostbusters review, which he called “measured,” accusing everybody else about lying about liking the movie. He also downplays his insults towards Jones as cracking “a few jokes at a Hollywood megastar’s expense,” while his tweet where he calls her a “hot black guy” comes up on the screen. In calling all of the leads ugly and fat, Yiannopoulos says he did that in protest of society accepting all forms of beauty. “We’ve started to marginalize traditional beauty standards,” he said.
As for the trolls who descended on Jones, Yiannopoulos said that he wouldn’t “endorse anything horrible people said to her,” but that he also wouldn’t police any of it. He only takes responsibility for the offensive things he says, because it’s for a societal purpose. “But so long as there is a politics in this country as there is, where people can turn victimhood and grievance into currency, I will continue to be as offensive as possible.” In this case, people’s grievances seem to mean Jones having the audacity to speak out against the harassment she received on Twitter, and that currency is Yiannopoulos actually facing consequences for targeting her in the first place.