Kaboom! BuzzFeed's dropped a bombshell report on a stash of Milo Yiannopoulos's emails yesterday, with the revelations stretching from Breitbart to Silicon Valley to, yes, even the hallowed halls of Vice Media.

Reporter Joe Bernstein's story illuminates a lot of internal operations at Breitbart, and puts the lie to the idea that more moderate "alt light" figures like Yiannopoulos are somehow in opposition to white nationalists.

There's a lot to sort through in the 9,000-word (!) report, so here's a special Right Richter highlighting the good stuff.

The big picture: The most important news from the report is how it shows Yiannopoulos as a vector for mainstreaming white nationalist ideas. While Yiannopoulos has longed claimed that he's actually the enemy of white nationalism, he regularly emailed white nationalists, hung out with them, and solicited them for advice.

Perhaps most damningly, the BuzzFeed story includes video of Yiannopoulos serenading a crowd that includes white nationalist ringleader Richard Spencer with "America the Beautiful." Spencer and others respond by throwing Hitler — er, "Roman" — salutes.

In a statement, Yiannopoulos said he didn't see the salutes in the dark karaoke bar because of his "severe myopia."

"The whole thing was a setup, engineered by white nationalists to take me out," Yiannopoulos says.

Yiannopoulos also exchanged emails with other prominent far-right figures, including neo-Nazi hacker Weev, as he worked on Breitbart's "guide to the alt right" — which has long been cited as the closest Yiannopoulos has been about anti-Semitism and white nationalism.

I don't have the psychology degree required to explain why a man of Jewish descent who makes a huge deal about how much he likes having sex with black men — and, in fact, just married a black man — pals around with people who are explicit white supremacists. (Incidentally, Yiannopoulos cites his husband's race in part of his defense, incidentally).

But myopia of the physical sort can't explain why Yiannopoulos's email passwords are littered with Nazi and anti-Semitic references:

In an April 6 email, Allum Bokhari mentioned having had access to an account of Yiannopoulos’s with “a password that began with the word Kristall.” Kristallnacht, an infamous 1938 riot against German Jews carried out by the SA — the paramilitary organization that helped Hitler rise to power — is sometimes considered the beginning of the Holocaust. In a June 2016 email to an assistant, Yiannopoulos shared the password to his email, which began “LongKnives1290.” The Night of the Long Knives was the Nazi purge of the leadership of the SA. The purge famously included Ernst Röhm, the SA’s gay leader. 1290 is the year King Edward I expelled the Jews from England.

Yiannopoulos was also in frequent contact with Devin Saucier, a prominent white nationalist who traded admiring emails with Yiannopoulos about their work, Wagner, and the violent far-right "Soldiers of Odin" group.

Mainstream media connections: It's important to remember that, before he started stomping around college campuses and blowing up his career over pedophiles, Yiannopoulos's claim to fame was whipping up internet frenzies about feminists, Gamergate, and "social justice warriors."

So it's interesting to see otherwise mainstream reporters collaborating with Yiannopoulos, or siccing him on their enemies.

Former Slate reporter David Auerbach, who was always curiously sympathetic to Gamergate in his writing, is revealed in the BuzzFeed story to have passed along tips and background about various Gamergate hate targets (Auerbach has denied the emails are accurate).



Prominent reporter Dan Lyons, meanwhile, emailed Yiannopoulos to ask whether various female Gamergate targets were transgender.

Vice Media writer Mitchell Sunderland, who worked on Vice's women's site Broadly (!), was part of what BuzzFeed calls "a long-running email group devoted to mocking stories about the social justice internet" with Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.



At one point, according to BuzzFeed, Sunderland urged Yiannopoulos to “Please mock this fat feminist," referring to writer Lindy West.

I get that journalists try to balance buttering up sources like Yiannopoulos with getting too cozy with them, but come on. There's a line you have to watch for when reporting on these folks, and it's probably when you're trying to get Yiannopoulos to whip up a hate mob against someone.

The reaction to BuzzFeed's reporting has even started to suck in reporters who aren't named in the report. Twitter attention has focused on New York Magazine's Olivia Nuzzi, who frequently covers the far-right and recently wrote what was seen by some critics as an awfully gentle profile of Mike Cernovich.

Nuzzi has sent tweets years ago praising Yiannopoulos (whose Twitter handle was @Nero) and Coulter, including one describing her as a "goddess." Combine that with what she describes as a close friendship with Sunderland, and Nuzzi has been in the hot seat!





I emailed Nuzzi to find out what's up. Nuzzi says that she wasn't aware of this "long-running email group" until the BuzzFeed report, and that she knew Yiannopoulos at the time as a "flamboyant anti-feminist troll."

"I obviously didn't anticipate then that Milo would come to be associated with nazis," Nuzzi writes.

Here's more:

When I first became aware of Milo, he was a flamboyant anti-feminist troll--I don't think the "alt-right" existed yet. I obviously didn't anticipate then that Milo would come to be associated with nazis. We interacted a bunch on Twitter, as people are now gleefully pointing out, and I remember emailing a bit with him and Mitchell--but not as part of any kind of long running email group with people like Ann Coulter. I thought Milo was entertaining and interesting then, I'm sure you remember that he was becoming kind of a media curiosity. We didn't continue to communicate like that as the campaign went on and the alt-right developed and Milo evolved into what he ultimately became, though. Even covering the campaign and eventually covering the alt-right somewhat, Milo was never a resource for me--beyond citing his Breitbart article wherein he explained what the alt-right was, which I did here.

Bannon and Milo: BuzzFeed's report, which mostly focuses on Yiannopoulos's career before he left Breitbart, includes Steve Bannon raging at Yiannopoulos to focus on Muslims instead of, say, writing articles about birth control making women fat:

Dude---we r in a global existentialist war where our enemy EXISTS in social media and u r jerking yourself off w/ marginalia!!!! U should be OWNING this conversation because u r everything they hate!!! Drop your toys, pick up your tools and go help save western civilization... There is no war correspondent in the west yet dude and u can own it and be remember for 3 generations--or sit around wasting your God-given talents jerking off to your fan base.

Emphasis mine.



Spy vs. spy: One of my favorite things about covering right-wing media is how frequently everyone involved is surreptitiously recording or otherwise spying on one another. It's like '70's East Germany over there!

The whole Seth Rich "independent investigation," for example, was apparently rigged with people recording each other to get incriminating evidence to use later.

Now BuzzFeed's story reveals how Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, while collaborating on creating the Yiannopoulos persona, were also spying on each other. Bokhari admitted to Yiannopoulos that he had logged into his email before, and used his credit card. Yiannopoulos, on the other hand, makes a reference to "30 hours of recording" he has on Bokhari.

Random interesting stuff:

Bokhari was paid $100,000 to ghostwrite Yiannopoulos's book, according to Buzzfeed.

Yiannopoulos roasted one-time tour manager (and now beclowned alt right mascot) Baked Alaska in emails, calling him an "obscure Twitter personality." — "He is becoming a laughing stock and that reflects badly on me.”

in emails, calling him an "obscure Twitter personality." — "He is becoming a laughing stock and that reflects badly on me.” Yiannopoulos's operation ran mostly separately from Breitbart itself, with Yiannopoulos's assistants forwarding "his" articles — often ones they had written themselves — to the site.

One of Yiannopoulos's associates was kicked off the tour after posting about cocaine use on Snapchat.

Another, who goes by "Mike Ma", had to be "monitored because of his propensity for racism and anti-Semitism."

The big mystery: Here's a puzzler — who hates Yiannopoulos enough to leak his emails to BuzzFeed?

Buzzfeed's Bernstein has been understandably tight-lipped about his sourcing. Yiannopoulos, for his part, ells me in an email that he's "trying to find out if Buzzfeed acquired my emails illegally."

Reading between the lines of the story, though, it seems like tons of people had access to his email account. We know Yiannopoulos's email accounts had Nazi-themed passwords, after all, because people were discussing it in emails.



Perhaps discussing negative personal information about his assistants, then storing those emails on accounts those same assistants had access to, was a bad idea.

As for the Nazi salute karaoke video, Yiannopoulos blames fellow (and apparently rival) far-right provocateur Chuck Johnson.

"I am told Chuck Johnson paid one of Richard Spencer's nutty goons $10,000 for this video," Yiannopoulos says in his statement.

In an email to me, Yiannopoulos — or whoever has access to his account these days — told me not to dismiss his claim that Johnson was behind the video.

"Chuck Johnson is trying to eliminate his competition," Yiannopoulos wrote.

But Johnson isn't about to confess to anything.

"Milo claims I paid $10k?" Johnson wrote in an email. "Lol wut."