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Who is Milo Yiannopoulos? The ultra-conservative 'provocateur' and Donald Trump fan who has resigned from Breitbart News over Paedophilia comments

Milo Yiannopoulos, the ultra-conservative British "provocateur", has resigned as editor of Breitbart Tech after coming under fire from other conservatives over comments on sexual relationships between boys and older men.

A past video emerged earlier this week of Yiannopoulos defending sexual relationships between men and boys as young as 13 years old. He also speaks approvingly of his own sexual relationship with a 29-year-old priest when he was 17.

The 32-year-old former journalist, who is a prominent figure of America's "alt-right" movement, is a passionate Donald Trump supporter. Until Tuesday, he had been an editor at Breitbart News, which was previously run by Stephen Bannon, a key aide of the president. 

He is a self-proclaimed internet troll who has been widely criticised for comments he has made about Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists and feminists.

Paedophilia comments scandal

The latest controversy stems from a video in which Yiannopoulos seems to suggest the standard for paedophilia is whether the younger partner has gone through puberty.

Yiannopoulos later said his experiences as a victim of sexual abuse as a teenager made him feel he could say outrageous things on the subject.

At another point in the video, Yiannopoulos says the established age of consent, which is 16 to 18 years old in the United States, is "about right".

In his Facebook statement on Monday, Yiannopoulos denied condoning pedophilia.

"I find those crimes to be absolutely disgusting. I find those people to be disgusting," he said, while expressing regret he used the word "boys" instead of young men while discussing the benefits of relationships between men with large age differences.

Yiannopoulos was disinvited to this year's Conservative Political Action Conference in the wake of the scandal. 

Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint announced that "after careful consideration" they had pulled Yiannopoulos' book, for which pre-orders placed it high on Amazon.com's best-seller lists. 

In brief | Milo Yiannopoulos

Breitbart resignation statement

In his resignation statement on Tuesday, Yiannopoulos said:

Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved. They have allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communities that would otherwise never have heard them.

They have been a significant factor in my success. I’m grateful for that freedom and for the friendships I forged there.

I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately. This decision is mine alone.

Breitbart said in a statement:

Milo Yiannopoulos’s bold voice has sparked much-needed debate on important cultural topics confronting universities, the LGBTQ community, the press, and the tech industry.

University of California, Berkeley riot

Earlier this month, Yiannopoulos made headlines after his planned appearance at the University of California, Berkeley, descended into a riot.

Mr Yiannopoulos was evacuated and the event cancelled after a crowd threw smoke bombs and smashed windows. The incident prompted President Donald Trump to tweet:

Yiannopoulos' talks have sparked protests, shouting matches and occasional violence at stops around the country. A man was shot and wounded at protests outside his January 21 talk at the University of Washington.

Rowdy protests at UC Davis on January 13 prompted campus Republicans to cancel his appearance at the last minute. His final stop was supposed to be UCLA on Thursday but the invitation was rescinded.

Response to Berkeley protest

Yiannopoulos, who was born in Greece, took to Facebook to criticise the protests against his talk at Berkeley. He told Fox News: 

"Obviously it's a liberal campus so they hate any libertarians or conservatives who dare to express an opinion on their campuses. They particularly don't like me."

'Free-speech fundamentalist': Yiannopoulos' controversial views

Yiannopoulos has sparked controversy for his offensive views on a number of subjects.

On Muslims

Their outfits are hilarious. Ridiculous. Is there anything more comically sinister than the sight of a herd of women swathed in black bedsheets? Anything more unintentionally ironic about a religion that hates gays that gets its men in a room together 5 times a day to stick their asses in the air?

On gays

In the course of my Dangerous Faggot tour, I’ve had my fair share of bans… but here’s one I didn’t see coming. I’ve been banned from San Francisco! Me, the gayest person on the planet. Banned. From San Francisco, the queerest city in America. Apparently I’m just too dangerous of a faggot, even for a city that pumps AZT directly into the water. Alas, Milo-roni will not become the new San Francisco treat any time soon.

On Black Lives Matter

For any Black Lives Matter activists who have snuck their way in, blacks have the highest obesity rates in America at 47.8 percent. If you combine obese and overweight, it can reach to 76 percent. If Black Lives Matter cared about black people, in addition to their fact-free musings about police officers, they would be organising aerobics classes, not protesting the police. If Black Lives Matter cared about black lives, they’d be fire-bombing McDonald’s, not their local neighbourhoods.

On comparisons to Trump

The strength of feeling in my crowds, the enthusiasm for me from the audiences is the same - the same instinct, the same sort of motivating force (that) put Trump in the White House... It's almost cool to be Republican now.

Twitter ban

In July last year, Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter for life for his role in the online abuse of Leslie Jones over her role in the new Ghostbusters film.

He described Ghostbusters as "a movie to help lonely middle-aged women feel better about being left on the shelf". Twitter trolls attacked Jones with racist slurs.

Yiannopoulos accused Jones of playing the “victim” for complaining about receiving hate mail, described her reply to him as "barely literate" and called her a "black dude".

Book sales soared

Book sale soared for Yiannopoulos' book before the publisher announced it was pulling out.

The book was scheduled to come out on March 14 but Yiannopoulos had pushed it back to June 13 so he could include the "craziness and rioting" that resulted from his planned appearances at a handful of West Coast campuses earlier this year.

The controversy that drove pre-orders for "Dangerous" also made promotion unusually complicated.

Yiannopoulos' book deal was greeted with immediate anger when announced in late December. Hundreds of authors objected and one writer, Roxane Gay, withdrew a book she had planned for Simon & Schuster. 

Many independent sellers expressed uneasiness, saying they would make the book available if asked for, but would not promote it. One store, The Booksmith in San Francisco, announced it would neither stock the book nor order a copy upon customer request.