After BuzzFeed News exposed his extensive connections to white nationalists, far-right columnist Milo Yiannopoulos became so politically toxic that even Breitbart News and its chairman Steve Bannon have renounced their associations with him. But just as Breitbart was closing a door to him, the Daily Caller was opening a window for Yiannopoulos.
The right-wing website announced on Friday that it would be publishing Yiannopoulos on a weekly basis.
"This is the first installment in his new weekly column for the Daily Caller," the site's editors wrote at the bottom of Yiannopoulos' first bloviation, titled "A Round Of Applause For Kevin Spacey."
The former Breitbart star has become the latest of several white nationalist writers to be welcomed by the Daily Caller. The site is owned in part by Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson although he has said he is uninvolved in the site's operations. The primary financial backer of the enterprise is said to be Foster Friess, an investor who has donated to a number of Christian nationalist causes.
Geoffrey Ingersoll, the Caller's editor-in-chief, told Salon via email that Yiannopoulos is receiving no compensation for his writing.
"He has no contract, he has no salary, he’s not being paid," Ingersoll wrote.
Founded in 2010 as a conservative response to the Huffington Post, the Daily Caller's lower profile than Breitbart News has allowed its turn toward white nationalism to receive less press coverage than Bannon's infamous attempts to make Breitbart "the platform for the alt-right."
Primarily, the Caller's reorientation has been at the hands of Scott Greer, the site's deputy editor who was revealed in 2016 as having extensive friendship ties to prominent white nationalists, including Devin Saucier, the racist editor who also is connected to Yiannopoulos. Saucier is the assistant to Jared Taylor, the founder and publisher of the white supremacist website American Renaissance. Greer was also found to have regularly associated with the Wolves of Vinland, essentially a racist fraternity for the post-college set which also enjoys animal sacrifices.
Greer's exposure would have been enough to get him fired from any other conservative publication. Even Breitbart News seems to have blanched at Yiannopoulos' much less extensive connections to white nationalists. But the revelation seems to have had no effect on Greer's career at the Daily Caller. He's remained in his position ever since, in the process making a home for a number of racist writers, including Jason Kessler, the creator of the infamous "Unite the Right" march held in August in Charlottesville, Virginia which brought together various far-right factions from across the country and eventually ended in the death of a left-wing counter-protester.
Before Kessler's racial views and connection to the Caller was exposed by ProPublica in May, he had been hired to write three separate pieces by the site covering smaller white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville.
The Daily Caller still features several columns from Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist author and publisher. Its senior investigative reporter Richard Pollock is currently listed as a speaker at a conference to be held this weekend in Baltimore where traditional conservatives are encouraged to meet and greet with racist pseudo-academics and writers.
This article has been updated to include Geoffrey Ingersoll's statement that Yiannopoulos is not being paid for his work.
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