Milo Yiannopoulos is proving to critics that he’s a hard man to get rid of.
On Friday, the conservative Daily Caller launched the first in what they promised would be a regular series of columns from the conservative provocateur.
In the piece, “A Round of Applause for Kevin Spacey,” Yiannopoulos — in his typical fashion — “applauded” Kevin Spacey for dispelling what he said were left-wing myths about LGBT people as paragons of moral rectitude.
Buried in the last paragraph, however was a cutting shot at Bob Mercer, the billionaire hedge fund recluse and Breitbart moneyman. Mercer severed ties with Yiannopoulos in a letter to his employees earlier this week, and accused the former Breitbart tech editor of causing “pain and divisiveness.”
Though Yiannopoulos wished Mercer well in a statement to TheWrap on Thursday, he pushed back forcefully on the billionaire’s critique in his essay.
“This week I have been accused of causing ‘pain and divisiveness.’ I should hope so. A terminal disease in contemporary American culture is niceness. Appropriateness and earnestness are this country’s cardinal sins,” Yiannopoulos wrote. “The Left can only win by forcing us onto the uneven playing field of political correctness and constructive dialogue. I choose war.”
In addition to the usual controversies that swirl around him, Yiannopoulos has been dogged by comments he made which seemed to excuse pedophilia and revelations in a BuzzFeed report detailing his connections to white nationalists.
Daily Caller editor-in-chief Geoffrey Ingersoll said that did not concern him.
“If NYT can publish the likes of Vladimir Putin and a Hamas terrorist (without informing their audience of his conviction), then we can entertain opeds from Milo, the value of which you can read for yourself,” Ingersoll told TheWrap in an email. “Also, he’s not reporting for us. There’s a distinct difference between the opinion section here and the news section, like most other media outlets.”
“Nobody uses Putin’s oped to call into question the credibility of Maggie Haberman’s reporting. We expect the same standard from our media colleagues,” he added.
“I’m delighted to join the Daily Caller as a Friday columnist! It’s been too long since I wrote a weekly missive,” Yiannopoulos told TheWrap. “Milo on Fridays at TheDC will be one of America’s most widely read and universally loved columns in no time.”