Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos named the 10 winners of his white, male-only scholarship, flouting expectations that he would never award the money.
Yiannopoulos announced 10 winners of the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant, and each will receive $2,500, as reported by Red Alert Politics Sunday.
The majority of the winners will be using their prize money to study STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. The winners’ schools will receive the payment directly in the summer of 2017, according to the Privilege Grant site. The scholarships will partly fund the winners’ fall 2017 terms.
Yiannopoulos blasted those who questioned the fund on Facebook:
Yiannopoulos had received 30,000 applications 12 days into the grant’s 14-day application period, as reported by Breitbart in February.
“It was one of the easiest grants I’ve ever applied for,” Noah Roenitz, a Georgia State University freshman majoring in mathematics who won the grant, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“That was pretty easy for me; I applied for it in about 15 minutes and then I kind of forgot about it actually for about a month and a half. Then I got an email last week saying that I was awarded it and [it] kind of took me by surprise. I was kind of blind-sided about the whole thing, but definitely not a bad thing to be surprised about,” he said.
He noted the application asked for basic information like name and major, along with a one-minute video in which applicants described how they would make America better.
Roenitz found out about the grant on news and pop culture commentator Philip DeFranco’s YouTube channel.
Roenitz explained that he was a member of his college’s Naval ROTC and that the scholarship would help him with that, in addition to his schoolwork, when asked why he thought he was distinguished from other applicants.
“Right now, I’m kind of interested in the EOD community, which is Explosive Ordinance Disposal, so the minimum service requirement that comes along with that is five years,” Roenitz said. “So, following my graduation, I will enter into a career with the United States Navy for at least five years.”
“I agree with some of the things [Milo] says and I disagree with a lot of the things he says, but I definitely commend him for being an individual that I think will definitely stand his ground on a lot of things and I don’t see him flip-flopping or switching sides on a lot of things. I see him being pretty steady-footed.”
Yiannopoulos plans to release a second set of grants later in 2017.
(Editor’s Note: This reporter worked with Milo Yiannopoulos as an intern in 2015 and contributed to Breitbart from 2015 to 2016.)
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