Former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos hopes that journalists face violence.
When asked for comment by both The Observer and The Daily Beast, Yiannopoulos said, "I can't wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight."
He said it was his "standard response to a request for comment." The far-right provocateur was responding to questions for stories from the two publications about the U.K. Independence Party and an Upper East Side restaurant.
Yiannopoulos has a history of inflammatory rhetoric. He worked with white nationalists and neo-Nazis to amplify their voices while at Breitbart, a BuzzFeed News investigation found last year. While he has defended himself as someone who merely finds "humor in breaking taboos and laughing at things that people tell me are forbidden to joke about," the investigation lost him outside financial backing. Other offensive comments lost him his editor job.
The alt-right darling bragged about his "vigilante squads" comment on Instagram over the weekend, additionally posting a screenshot that shows him calling the Observer reporter who made Yiannopoulos' threats public a "delicate flower" who "wrote a vile hit piece." Read more at The Observer.