Mere days after billionaire Robert Mercer cut ties with Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart over ties to Nazis, Milo’s bad week has only grown worse. The right wing provocateur has been fired from his weekly columnist gig at the Daily Caller website — the news and opinion outlet founded by Tucker Carlson — after one inaugural installment. Backlash is to blame, of course, for Milo’s first column saw him sarcastically applaud Kevin Spacey after he was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy. In doing so, Milo blamed Spacey’s bizarre decision to respond to accusations by coming out as emblematic of leftist hypocrisy regarding identity politics. CNN summarizes the disaster:
At the time, Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey Ingersoll told CNN the website approached Yiannopoulos for a column on Spacey because they “thought him particularly fit for it.”
According to Ingersoll, opinion editor Rob Mariani later struck a deal with Yiannopoulos for an unpaid, weekly contribution. A note at the bottom of his Spacey column indicated it was the “first installment” in a “new weekly column.” The note is no longer attached to the column.
Yes, the column was an unpaid one — which is quite a backslide after Milo raised $10 million and promised to make everyone’s lives hell — and he’s been dropped from the gig. It’s not clear why Ingersoll ever thought Milo (who fell from grace earlier this year after newly released audio featured him endorsing pedophilia) was “fit” for the subject. However, Ingersoll has now also fired Mariani over the whole mess while charging that the opinion editor had “fail[ed] to properly convey” a deal that “blindsided” staff at the Daily Caller.
As one might imagine, Milo is hopping mad at losing his (unpaid) gig. He lashed out on his Facebook page:
“I’m disappointed, to put it mildly. Never mind book publishers — even right-wing media these days are spineless in the face of outrage mobs, Twitter protests and frothing establishment Republicans. Where will it end? So: no new MILO column for now. This sort of cowardice is why the Right in America loses and will keep losing the culture wars.”
Milo also rants about how the Daily Caller “caved to pressure” and complains that they had no problem accepting his advertising money earlier this year. Yet now (other than Facebook, since Twitter permanently banned him), his voice has sort-of been muted. Now for long, though, for Milo is sure to soon dream up another outrageous way to bring his message to the masses.
(Via CNN, The Daily Caller & Milo On Facebook)