BuzzFeed reports: Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon has told multiple people that he will never work with Milo Yiannopoulos again in the aftermath of a BuzzFeed News exposé linking Breitbart’s former tech editor to white nationalists, BuzzFeed News has learned.
Yiannopoulos, Bannon told at least one acquaintance, is “dead to me.”
But members of the Mercer family, Bannon’s and Yiannopoulos’s key, shared patrons and partners on the new right, have not signaled whether they will continue to bankroll the controversial culture warrior. Their decision may shed light on the extent to which the hedge fund billionaires are motivated by the raw ethnonationalist politics a cache of leaked documents related to Yiannopoulos and Breitbart revealed.
The Mercers did not respond to multiple emails asking them if they intended to continue funding Yiannopoulos, nor did they respond to emails informing them that Bannon had excommunicated him.
BuzzFeed News’s story demonstrated that Breitbart, which the Mercers partly own, ran numerous stories that were conceived and coedited by white nationalists. The central figure in this effort was Yiannopoulos, who, the story revealed, once sang “America the Beautiful” in a karaoke bar as a crowd, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, gave Nazi salutes. [Continue reading…]