Milo Yiannopoulos Fired From Conservative Website After Op-Ed on Kevin Spacey’s ‘Gay Privilege’

This has been a bad week for Milo Yiannopoulos.

Longtime patron Robert Mercer, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, cut ties with the right-wing troll following a statement in which he accused Yiannopoulos of causing “pain and divisiveness.” The 33-year-old was subsequently canned from his new op-ed gig at The Daily Caller following his first piece for the conservative website, which dealt with numerous accusations of sexual assault lobbied against Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey.

Spacey came out in a Oct. 29 statement after actor Anthony Rapp accused him of attempting to coerce him into sex when Rapp was just 14 years old. Rapp claims that the 58-year-old cornered him in the bedroom during a cast party for Precious Sons, pinning the teenage boy on a bed and attempting to force himself on him.

Yiannopoulos, who was fired from his editor job at Breitbart in 2016 after defending pedophilia, accused Spacey of hiding behind his “gay privilege” by coming out after the reports broke.

“This is why identity politics is so poisonous: it seeks to establish separate rules for separate groups based on perceived, or more often simply imaginary, victimhood,” Yiannopoulos wrote in the Nov. 3 column. “Gay people should be held to the same standards as everyone else. If you read left-wing blogs you’d be forgiven for thinking that gay people are perfect paragons of upstanding moral rectitude and the worst thing a black person has done in the last 50 years is break wind at the DMV.”

In fact, Spacey was criticized from numerous LGBTQ advocacy groups for attempting to deflect the controversy by opening up about his sexuality for the first time. GLAAD publicly criticized media outlets who made the actor’s sexuality the lede and not the predatory actions Rapp alleges.

“This isn’t a coming out story about Spacey, but a story of survivorship by Anthony Rapp and those who speak out about unwanted sexual advances,” CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement.

Just days after the article was published, Yiannopoulos says he was let go from the site.

“Sad news: The Daily Caller has caved to pressure and cancelled my weekly column after a day, claiming, falsely, they never planned to run weekly contributions from me,” he wrote in a Facebook post published Saturday. Yiannopoulos added that he was “disappointed, to put it mildly” to learn that the conservative website had parted ways with him.

Daily Caller co-founder Neil Patel subsequently claimed that the alt-right commentator “does not have a regular column with us.” In a statement, he seems to suggest that regular contributions were never part of the plan.

The site’s staff members tell a different story.

Employees at The Daily Caller told CNN that they were not notified that Yiannopoulos would be writing for the site and claimed that they were “blindsided and unhappy” to learn that he was being brought on board in an op-ed capacity. That decision was reportedly made by the site’s now-former editor-in-chief Geoffrey Ingersoll, who was subsequently fired after neglecting to inform staff of the deal.

An early version of Yiannopoulos’s post stated that his columns would be a regular fixture of the site. That language has since been removed.

Yiannopoulos rose to prominence in 2016 after leading a harassment campaign on Twitter against Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones, for which he was subsequently banned from the social media platform. But his infamy quickly unraveled: Old comments in which he makes light of child sexual abuse circulated earlier this year, leading to Yiannopoulos losing a lucrative book deal with Simon & Schuster.

That book, entitled Dangerous, would go on to sell under 30,000 copies its first two weeks in storeshalf of what Yiannopoulos claimed. He dismissed reports of low sales figuresas “fake news.”