The Daily Caller just hired Milo Yiannopoulos

On Friday, The Daily Caller published an op-ed by former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos. The post, titled "A Round of Applause for Kevin Spacey," is the first installment in Yiannopoulos' new weekly column with the Tucker Carlson-owned site.

Yiannopoulos' post centers around the actor Kevin Spacey's alleged sexual relations with minors, which have made headlines in recent days after actor Anthony Rapp publicly said Spacey made a sexual advance toward him when he was just 14. The former Breitbart technology editor calls Spacey a "disgrace" to homosexuals, though he uses a slur to refer to gay men, and adds that Spacey should pay for his crimes "in the most obscenely painful ways imaginable at the hands of LeRoy from Cell Block E."

In February, Yiannopoulos was fired from Breitbart for comments he made that many construed as defending sexual relationships between adults and minors, and last month, BuzzFeed News exposed his connections to white nationalists and neo-Nazis. On Thursday, just one day before his op-ed was published by The Daily Caller, Yiannopoulos was publicly denounced by conservative billionaire and former Breitbart patron Robert Mercer, who said that his actions and statements had "caused pain and divisiveness."

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Yiannopoulos — who has been open about his own experience with sexual abuse when he was a teen — wrote that he "won't allow witch-hunts from left or right to silence my voice on this or any other subject." "I will always reserve the right to make light of my own experiences at the hands of a Catholic priest in England," he wrote.

Yiannopoulos additionally directly addressed Mercer's criticism of him in the op-ed's final paragraph: "This week I have been accused of causing 'pain and divisiveness,'" he wrote. "I should hope so." Kelly O'Meara Morales

Update 7:25 p.m. ET: The Daily Caller's opinion editor Robert Mariani reached out to The Week to clarify that Yiannopoulos had not been hired as a full-time employee, but rather as an opinion contributor.