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The B-list version of Milo Yiannopoulos is following his idol’s downward trajectory

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Jim Hoft and Lucian Wintrich at the White House. Photo: Screengrab

Lucian Wintrich has always been a poor man’s version of Milo Yiannopoulos.

Like his idol, Wintrich is gay and likes to provoke outrage. He got his start in right-wing politics by promoting Twinks for Trump, despite being a little long in the tooth to qualify himself.

Wintrich then parlayed his support for the winning candidate into a gig as a reporter for Gateway Pundit, a right-wing site. (Gateway Pundit is itself a B-list variation of Breitbart News.) Despite having no journalism experience and Gateway’s own promotion of crazy conspiracy theories, Wintrich was credentialed by the Trump White House as a correspondent.

Those days are over. Taking yet another page from Yiannopoulos, Wintrich has managed to lose his job at Gateway Pundit following his flirtation with white supremacists.

Wintrich appeared on a podcast hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, who is described by Right Wing Watch as a white supremacist. In the course of the interview, Wintrich promoted the idea of IQ differences based on race and called on the U.S. to halt immigration from “the shittiest immigrants in the world.”

Wintrich also recalled that when his school bus went to poor neighborhoods, he was introduced to people he described as “real shit human beings” who would call white people “honky.”

It’s not as if Wintrich’s animus was a blinding revelation. He flirted with the alt-right during the campaign, but disavowed connection to it when white supremacist Richard Spencer began the poster child for the movement. Wintrich preferred the term “new right,” a distinction without a lot of difference, as the podcast proved.

Yet, just last year Wintrich got into a spat with a reporter from Fox News Radio, of all places, after he lauded the reporter for speaking up at a White House briefing “as a white man.”

Wintrich’s attempts to build the same kind of profile that Yiannapoulos did have flopped. He attempt to gin up a free speech controversy by appearing at the University of Connecticut last year only to end up having himself arrested following an altercation with a protester. (The charges against him were later dropped.)

Wintrich’s departure from Gateway Pundit has apparently been in the works for a while. He’s been on “sabbatical” since May. As for his next gig–well, perhaps he can follow his idol Yiannapolous and start hawking vitamin supplements. 

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