Salon: Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos Is An ‘Internet Supervillain’

Mary Elizabeth Williams writes in Salon:

Yiannopoulos is well known around social media for his fierce advocacy of the trolls of GamerGate — who hide behind the phrase “ethics in gaming journalism” to harass and abuse women on Twitter and elsewhere with relative impunity. A profile for Fusion last fall described him as “utterly charming” in person — despite being “the ultimate troll.” In it, he stated that “My natural disposition is a satirist and a comic. I like to entertain and to please people.” And he added that at a certain point in his career he decided, “I didn’t like me very much and so I created this comedy character. And now they’ve converged.”

But though he says he likes to “entertain,” he also admitted to the LA Times last October that “I enjoy upsetting the right people. I love poking fun at earnest censors. I want to push the bounds of what can be said on the Internet.” Last fall, he was booted from an LA Slutwalk event when he showed up brandishing a sign that read “Rape culture and Harry Potter: Both Fantasy.” And earlier last year, after a female journalist was punched in a random Brooklyn street attack, he wrote on Breitbart, “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to punch her in the face. Well, actually, I can.” On his personal site, he describes himself as “the most fabulous supervillain on the Internet.”

Read the full article here.