His speeches and writings criticise Islam , feminism , social justice , and political correctness. Yiannopoulos worked for Breitbart from to During this time, he rose to prominence as a significant voice in the Gamergate controversy. In July , he was banned from Twitter for online harassment of actress Leslie Jones. Yiannopoulos has been accused of advocating paedophilia after the emergence of several video clips in which he said that sexual relationships between year-old boys and adults can be "perfectly consensual" and positive experiences for such boys.
Yiannopoulos has said that he is not a supporter of paedophilic relationships and that his statements were attempts to cope with his own victimhood, as an object of child sexual abuse by a priest. His parents divorced when he was a child. As a teenager, Yiannopoulos lived with his paternal grandmother whose surname, Yiannopoulos, he later adopted. Yiannopoulos was educated at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury from which he has said he was expelled. He attended the University of Manchester but dropped out before graduating; he then read English at Wolfson College, Cambridge , but was expelled in In , Yiannopoulos was a U.
In March , during an interview with right-wing publication LifeSiteNews , Yiannopoulos stated he was no longer homosexual and that his husband had been "demoted to housemate". After he dropped out of university, Yiannopoulos initially secured a job at The Catholic Herald. In , Yiannopoulos moved to technology journalism with The Daily Telegraph. In November , Yiannopoulos co-founded The Kernel. After the acquisition by Daily Dot Media, Yiannopoulos stepped down as editor-in-chief, although he remained an adviser to the company.
In , Yiannopoulos started writing for Breitbart News , [ 42 ] and in October , Breitbart placed Yiannopoulos in charge of its new "Breitbart Tech" section. The site had six full-time staff, including esports specialist Richard Lewis , and was edited by Yiannopoulos until his resignation on 21 February In , Yiannopoulos emerged as a "lead actor" in the Gamergate harassment campaign through his work at Breitbart , [ 44 ] becoming one of the most vocal of Gamergate's supporters.
According to the report, Yiannopoulos and his ghostwriter Allum Bokhari regularly solicited ideas for stories and comments from people associated with the alt-right and neo-Nazi movements. Among the figures Yiannopoulos contacted were Curtis Yarvin , a central figure of the neoreactionary movement; Devin Saucier, the editor of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance ; Andrew Auernheimer , the administrator of neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer ; and Baked Alaska , a commentator known for his antisemitic and pro-Nazi tweets.
