Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos says he was joking when he told two reporters that he couldn’t wait “for the vigilante squads to start gunning down journalists on sight.”

He said Thursday that he texted that comment to reporters at the New York Observer and The Daily Beast essentially as a way to get them off his back, and that they were responsible for taking his comments seriously and spreading it.

In a Facebook post, he expressed no sympathy to journalists involved in Thursday’s shooting. Rather, he described journalists who spread his comment about vigilante squads as “vermin.”