“Alt-Right” Hero Milo Yiannopoulos Offered Book Deal

Milo Yiannopoulos – Breitbart editor and defacto spokesperson for the so-called “Alt-right” (composed mostly of racists and neo-Nazis) via his work with Breitbart – just struck a deal with Simon & Schuster subsidiary Threshold Editions for a $250,000 autobiographical book. Best known for his ban from Twitter for inciting racial harassment against actress Leslie Jones, Yiannopoulos believes his brand of hate speech is not only popular, but will sell books – and Simon & Schuster apparently agrees.

The Hollywood Reporter initially reported on the book deal:

Milo Yiannopoulos has parlayed his ban from Twitter  — and some controversial appearances on college campuses and cable TV shows — into a $250,000 book deal with Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, The Hollywood Reporter learned on Thursday.

“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?”

“I met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions. I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building — but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money,” boasted Yiannopoulos, who openly exhibits racist and transphobic behavior. He added, “Every line of attack the forces of political correctness try on me fails pathetically. I’m more powerful, more influential and more fabulous than ever before, and this book is the moment Milo goes mainstream. Social justice warriors should be scared — very scared.”

Politico added details about the book reporting:

The book, titled “Dangerous,” will be published on March 14, 2017. [SNIP]

“Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will publish Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos on March 14, 2017,” the publisher said in a statement. “Dangerous will be a book on free speech by the outspoken and controversial gay British writer and editor at Breitbart News who describes himself as ‘the most fabulous supervillain on the internet’.”

Yiannopoulos, already an infamous provocateur whose “Dangerous Faggot” tour has riled up college campuses around the country, was permanently banned from Twitter over the summer after targeting “Saturday Night Live” actor Leslie Jones, who then endured a wave of racist abuse online.

What Politico said next should concern anyone opposed to racism, white nationalism, and the rise of neo-Nazis following Trump’s election:

Simon & Schuster is a subsidiary of CBS Corp., leading some to speculate that Yiannopoulos may end up promoting his book on CBS shows like “CBS This Morning” or “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

“We’re planning all that for January at the moment — we’ll be doing a lot of live appearances, a lot of TV, and of course I have a month of my college tour still to go … can’t say about any specific shows at this stage,” Yiannopoulos told POLITICO in an email.

At issue isn’t free speech (as the publisher is not an arm of the government and is free to offer book deals to whomever they want) but rather the normalization of the specific brand of hate speech that made Yiannopoulos famous. By offering a book deal to document his story, Simon & Schuster is essentially offering a paid, national platform for Yiannopoulos to explain why he was right to direct racial harassment at Jones. Or to go onto a college campus and single out a transgender student in the audience for targeted and malicious harassment.

In the market of ideas, Simon & Schuster is coming out in favor of promoting racism, neo-Nazism and more generally white nationalism.

Using the cover of ‘diversity’ in order to make a buck off controversy isn’t new; corporations and even mainstream national LGBTQ organizations have been doing it for years. That’s why many in the LGBTQ community won’t donate a penny to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Their focus on white gay men at the expense of persons of color and transgender people is so blatant they can’t deny it.

But it’s not just the HRC; rather, it’s the majority of mainstream America that uses the ‘G’ portion of LGBTQ to satisfy its need to demonstrate diversity in order to give voice to extremist platforms. So long as he’s gay, Yiannopoulos is free to be a racist Nazi – at least in the eyes of many who stand to make money from his shenanigans.

Let’s be clear: just because someone is gay doesn’t mean he can’t also be a racist, a Nazi, a misogynist, a xenophobe, or all of the above. Being gay is not a get out of jail free card giving someone free reign to be a horrible person.

But for companies like Simon & Schuster (and many others), that gay “checkbox” is enough to cover their fear of not being diverse while satisfying a bottom line no matter the cost.

Writer and journalist Peter Moskowitz made similar comments criticizing the publisher’s decision saying, “…but for people looking for token diversity (ie Simon and Schuster), allowing a gay man to publish a book checks their box, so they don’t care. Gayness is and kind of always has been the safe diversity. It’s accepted because it doesn’t threaten whiteness.”

“White straight people accept gays so they can view themselves as progressives while still hating people of color,” he added. “Selling out of race, gender, class of gay assimilation, gives almost no one rights except the people who needed them least (white men). But it makes straight people feel like they care about diversity while they’re actually upholding white supremacy in the name of diversity.”

What is the solution to stopping the weaponization of white male gay sexuality as a defense to hate speech?

Many on Twitter have already come up with the solution: capitalism and the free market.

If people don’t buy his book, Simon & Schuster loses money. If people take that a step further and stop purchasing all books published by the company, the message becomes even stronger.

In the meantime, Threshold Editions insists the book will be about ‘free speech’ while Yiannopoulos brags that his hate speech will go mainstream since the publisher is a subsidiary of CBS – a target he’ll naturally shoot for in order to further normalize the hate he’s built a career on.

[Editor’s Note: A prior version of this article referred to Milo Yiannopoulos as a “white nationalist.” Due to threats of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) from his management, we’ve altered the article to avoid costly litigation rather than having to go to court to argue the semantics of racism and white nationalism. It should be noted Milo Yiannopoulos works for Breitbart – the self-proclaimed “hub” of the so-called “alt-right” movement which explicitly espouses neo-Nazi and white nationalist views.]