Who is Milo Yiannopoulos, Kanye West’s new right hand man? Taking on Donald Trump for US president in 2024, Ye is reportedly in cahoots with the former Breitbart writer and banned Twitter troll

Nov 25 , 2022

Ye says he has recruited controversial alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos to help with his 2024 presidential campaign. Photo: Getty Images

He was banned from Twitter for trolling Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones, was a senior editor at Breitbart News, and once referred to Donald Trump as his ‘daddy’

The self-proclaimed ‘supervillain’ recently moved into politics, interning for congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and is now linked to Ye’s 2024 presidential campaign

Milo Yiannopoulos, 38, has a history of making headlines for all the wrong reasons. The Brit has thrived on the darkest corners of the internet and is widely known as a “supervillain” in the digital world, constantly churning out misogynistic, bigoted and racist comments.

In particular, Yiannopoulos rose to infamy for his hate speech about Islam, feminism and the LGBTQ+ community, as well as nurturing relationships with neo-Nazi and antisemitic figures and calling it “free speech”.

Milo Yiannopoulos has made a career out of being controversial. Photo: LA Times/TNS

The former Breitbart writer and editor has since been banned from most social media platforms, but still manages to make himself heard. He’s currently the topic of much debate on Twitter after Ye (formerly Kanye West) announced that Yiannopoulos would be helping him run his 2024 presidential campaign.

So just what made Ye chose the controversial writer, and what exactly has Yiannopoulos done to earn his reputation as a controversial figure?

Milo Yiannopoulos’ rise to fame

British political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos speaking during an event at Parliament House in Canberra, in 2017. Photo: EPA-EFE

Yiannopoulos grew up in Kent, UK, and enrolled in two of the country’s most well-known universities – Manchester and Cambridge. But he ended up dropping out of both of them, going to work for the Catholic Herald instead and writing technology related articles for the Daily Telegraph, according to The Guardian.

It was at The Telegraph that Yiannopoulos seemingly found his calling. Under the supervision of his then editor, Damian Thompson, Yiannopoulos became a professional troll, using clickbait to garner negative reactions from readers, also per The Guardian.

But Yiannopoulos didn’t just stick to trolling for The Telegraph. He went on to become co-founder of a tech journalism website called The Kernel in 2011, and by 2015 he had joined the US’ Breitbart News as a senior editor, the BBC reported. It was this role at Breitbart that would be Yiannopoulos’ stepping stone to infamy as a master of online hate-speech and encouraging violence.