Controversial alt-right poster boy, Milo Yiannopoulos, said he was joking when he said ‘can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning (down) journalists’.
But days after he made the comments a mass shooting at a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland has left five people dead and more seriously injured. On Thursday a gunman opened fire in the Capital Gazette newsroom, but police have not yet released his identity.
Yiannopoulos claimed he trolled ‘hostile’ journalists days before the mass shooting as way of telling them to ‘fuck off’.
He sent the text message to journalists Davis Richardson at the Observer and to the Daily Beast’s, Will Sommer.
Couple of days ago Milo Yiannopoulos commented “i can’t wait for vigilante squads to start gunning down journalists”
And now Annapolis Journalists getn gunned down
Again all you… https://t.co/gEDINoGSeF
— T’Questlove (@questlove) June 28, 2018
The former editor of conservative news site, Breitbart, took to Facebook saying he was not responsible for Thursday’s shooting.
‘You’re about to see a raft of news stories claiming that I am responsible for inspiring the deaths of journalists,’ Yiannopoulos wrote.
‘I regret nothing I said, though of course like any normal person I am saddened to hear of needless death.’
Am I getting this right: Two days ago, Milo called on people to kill journos. A few hours ago, someone started gunning down reporters at a newspaper… Right!?
— James Findlay (@james_findlay) June 28, 2018
It was a ‘joke’, not a ‘threat’
Yiannopoulos said the journalists should not have made his message public. He argued the onus of Thursday’s death was on them for making the message public.
‘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, “Fuck off.” They then published it,’ he wrote.
‘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.
‘If there turns out to be any dimension to this crime related to my private, misreported remarks, the responsibility for that lies squarely and wholly with the Beast and the Observer for drumming up fake hysteria about a private joke, and with the verified liberals who pretended they thought I was serious.’
