Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversial British media personality who aligned himself with the American alt right movement, allegedly used passwords with Nazi references and sang karaoke as his audience gave Nazi salutes, according to new leaks published by Buzzfeed.
The report alleges that one of the media figure’s passwords “began with the word Kristall”, according to Allum Bokhari, a frequent collaborator who had access to some of his accounts. Kristallnacht, a violent pogrom that took place in Germany in 1938, is sometimes considered the start of the Holocaust.
The report also claims that in June 2016, Yiannopoulos’s email password began “LongKnives1290” – a twin anti-Semitic reference to the Night of the Long Knives, a Nazi internal purge, and the year that the Jews were expelled from England.
A video from April 2016 shows Yiannopoulos singing the song America The Beautiful onstage at a karaoke bar as onlookers, including self-proclaimed white nationalist Richard Spencer, give Nazi salutes.
‘Global existential war’
The leaks also revealed an email exchange between the former Breitbart tech editor and Steve Bannon, who has now returned to running the website after a spell in the higher reaches of the Trump administration.
Bannon warned Yiannopoulos that he was too focused on “marginalia” while he should be engaged in the broader culture war as conceived by the right-wing website and its followers.
Describing a “global existential war”, he warned Yiannopoulos to “drop your toys, pick up your tools and go help save western civilisation”.
Yiannopoulos acknowledged the message and promised to begin work on a “week of Islam” – presumably critical – but Bannon told him this was unnecessary and that he should “just get into the fight”.
He resigned from Breitbart in February 2017 after a recording emerged in which he appeared to support 13-year-old boys having sex with adult men.
‘Fat feminist’
While Breitbart is commonly seen as a fringe organisation by many in the mainstream media, the leaks revealed that people working for liberal outlets, including Vice’s women’s outlet Broadly and the website Slate, used email to send tips and encouragement. Male journalists specifically were highlighted as communicating with Yiannopoulos about feminist women.
Mitchell Sunderland, a senior writer at Broadly, encouraged Yiannopoulos to target New York Times writer Lindy West as a “fat feminist”.
Dan Lyons, a tech reporter who wrote for the TV show Silicon Valley, speculated about the birth sex of a woman targeted by the Gamergate movement.
Former Slate tech correspondent David Auerbach passed on tips about the love life of another Gamergate target.