On Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter reported that alt-right provocateur and Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos signed a $250,000 book deal with an imprint of the publisher Simon & Schuster. From the Hollywood Reporter:
“They said banning me from Twitter would finish me off. Just as I predicted, the opposite has happened,” Yiannopoulos told THR, confirming the upcoming book without commenting on financial details. “Did it hurt Madonna being banned from MTV in the 1990s? Did all that negative press hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning the election?”
Yiannopoulos, a hero of the so-called “alt-right” (he says he doesn’t consider his political positions as alt-right) was famously banned from Twitter after engaging in an online spat with Leslie Jones. Some of his followers were accused of bullying the Ghostbusters actress with racist and sexist tweets.
Yiannopoulos has built a career on online abuse and predictable, bigoted commentary. Two Yiannopoulos-penned headlines—“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”—were referenced in Hillary Clinton’s August speech denouncing the alt-right. Earlier this month, Yiannopoulos used an appearance at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to mock a transgender student—whose photograph and name were projected in front of Yiannopoulos’ audience—with anti-transgender slurs. Yiannopoulos is considered a leading figure on the alt-right even though he is regarded with skepticism and scorn by many in the movement, particularly following a Breitbart article in March in which he insisted that the racism and anti-Semitism the alt-right espouses are largely satirical. The alt-right and neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer, for instance, has repeatedly denounced Yiannopoulos for being gay and part-Jewish.
Yiannopoulos’ deal has already outraged many who plan on boycotting Simon & Schuster in response:
The book, which an Amazon page suggests is called Dangerous, will be Yiannopoulos’ third. He has previously published two books of poetry as “Milo Andreas Wagner,” the name he went by in his days as a web developer, speechwriter-for-hire, and personal assistant to Bianca Jagger. His 2007 book, Eskimo Papoose, contained verses plagiarized from the lyrics of Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, and Tori Amos.
Dangerous will likely be a group effort of sorts as well—in March, BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein reported that Yiannopoulos employs 44 interns that write and conduct research for him. “I wrote articles for him,” one former intern told BuzzFeed. “His articles on Breitbart. He writes some of them, but most no. He has other people writing his shit.”
According to Amazon, Dangerous will be out on March 14, 2017.
