Conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos — whose scheduled speech at a California college sparked a riot this week — will join the White House press corp for Friday’s briefing.
Yiannopoulos, the tech editor for the right wing website Breitbart, formerly headed by one of President Trump’s top advisers, Steve Bannon, has attended the press briefings before.
Last March, he grilled the Obama Administration’s spokesman about free speech and censorship on social media, not long after he was banned from Twitter for cyberbullying actress Leslie Jones.
Asked by a media outlet how he got credentialed for the briefing, he boasted, “I’m a senior editor at America’s most influential news outlet. How the f–k do you think?”
The firebrand delights in challenging political correctness and attacking radical Islam and feminism, and his campus speeches generally draw loud protests by students and others on the left who try to shout him down or have him banned altogether.
He was scheduled to speak Wednesday at the University of California, Berkeley, but cops cancelled the event after a couple dozen masked and black-clad anarchists turned a peaceful protest of about 1,500 people into a riot.
“That is the price you pay for being a libertarian or a conservative on American college campuses,” Yiannopoulos said Thursday night on Fox News.
Trump on Thursday threatened to pull federal funding from the Berkeley campus after the havoc forced the cancellation of his speech.
“If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Trump tweeted.
Other employees of Breitbart — a darling of the co-called “alt-right” movement — regularly attend White House press briefings.
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