Alt-right star Milo Yiannopoulos has resigned from Breitbart News after backlash from his statements regarding pedophilia put his status at the conservative publication in doubt.
Earlier Tuesday, Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow called Yiannopoulos’ remarks “indefensible.” Several staffers at Breitbart were on the verge of quitting if Yiannopoulos remained at the site, according to Washingtonian.
In a statement announcing his resignation, Yiannopoulos said he didn’t want his remarks to distract from Breitbart’s work.
“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,” Yiannopoulos wrote.
Yiannopoulos, who was banned from Twitter for harassing “Ghostbusters” actress Leslie Jones and has taken stances against birth control, feminism and Islam.
Yiannopoulos’ remarks have earned him disdain from critics on the left and many centrists. But recent statements that seemed to endorse sexual relationships between adult men and minors drew pushback from conservatives and resulted in a rescinded speaking invitation from the American Conservative Union. On Monday, Simon and Schuster announced it was canceling his forthcoming book, “Dangerous.”
In a video released by the conservative blog The Reagan Battalion, Yiannopoulos criticized the “arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent” and described relations between between gay men and minors as “coming of age relationships.”
In the homosexual world particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men the sort of coming of age relationships relationships in which those older men have helped those young boys to discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable — and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents.
In a Facebook post after the video began circulating, Yiannopoulos announced that he had been molested as a child and conceded that his “usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy.”
In a press conference Tuesday, Yiannopoulos said he would start his own media company and announced that other publishers have expressed interest in publishing his book.
The new media company would be Yiannopoulos’ second. He founded The Kernel, an online magazine devoted to Silicon Valley, which was acquired by The Daily Dot in 2014.
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled The Kernel. It also mixed references to the acquisition. The Kernel was acquired by The Daily Dot.
