Milo Yiannopoulos now says he was only kidding about his call for journalists to be ‘gunned down’

Right-wing provocateur and pedophilia apologist Milo Yiannopoulos is scrambling to justify comments he recently made to reporters from the Observer and the Daily Beast — comments that he made just two days before the mass shooting in the Capital Gazette’s newsroom which left 5 people dead.

On Tuesday, the Observer reported that Milo has taken up the habit of giving the following reply to journalists who contact him via text message or email: “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.” According to the Daily Beast, Milo issued them the same threat after they sought his comments on a story about his alleged effort to take over the UK’s failing far-right pro-white party UKIP.

The following Thursday, a gunman opened fire in the Capital Gazette’s newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five people. Almost immediately, news outlets and social media figures sought to tie Milo’s comments to the growing right-wing culture that demonizes and threatens the press and characterizes it as an enemy of the American people. The fallout prompted Milo to write a Facebook post (he’s currently banned from Twitter) explaining the motivation behind his comments as just a “troll.”

“You’re about to see a raft of news stories claiming that I am responsible for inspiring the deaths of journalists,” Milo wrote. “The bodies are barely cold and left-wing journalists are already exploiting these deaths to score political points against me. It’s disgusting. I regret nothing I said, though of course like any normal person I am saddened to hear of needless death.”

According to Milo, the Observer and the Daily Beast publicized his comments that were intended to be private.

“The truth, as always, is the opposite of what the media tells you. I sent a troll about ‘vigilante death squads’ as a *private* response to a few hostile journalists who were asking me for comment, basically as a way of saying, ‘F*ck off,'” he continued. “They then published it. Amazed they were pretending to take my joke as a ‘threat,’ I reposted these stories on Instagram to mock them — and to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious.”

Milo’s history of saying detestable things that he later needs to walk back is nothing new. After seemingly justifying pedophilic relationships between men and boys during a radio interview, he was forced to resign from his editorship role at Breitbart. He additionally lost a lucrative book deal with Publisher Simon & Schuster as a result of his comments.

Just recently, he was banned from Venmo and Paypal after he used the payment platforms to send anti-Semitic messages to a Jewish journalist.

Featured image via screen grab/YouTube

Sky Palma

Before launching DeadState back in 2012, Sky Palma has been blogging about politics, social issues and religion for over a decade. He lives in Los Angeles and also enjoys Brazilian jiu jitsu, chess, music and art.