The publisher that is releasing a book by Alt Right hate figure Milo Yiannopoulos has been accused of “spreading hate” by comedian Leslie Jones, who suffered sexist and racist abuse at the hands of his supporters
The announcement that Yiannopoulos, the tech editor of Breitbart News, had received a $250,000 book deal infuriated those who took exception to his antics, which include comparing feminism to “cancer”, pledging to offer an education grant available only to white men and saying the wage gap “isn’t real”.
Yiannopoulous was banned from Twitter in July last year after he encouraged people to troll Jones, as her role in female reboot of ‘Ghostbusters’ earned her huge attention.
Jones accused Yiannopoulos’ publisher, Simon & Schuster, of helping him and his allies “spread their hate to even more people”.
The publisher had issued a statement distancing itself from Yiannopoulos’ views, saying it had “never condoned discrimination or hate speech in any form” but published “a wide range of authors with greatly varying and frequently controversial opinions”.
On Tuesday, the UK arm of the publisher told The Bookseller it had no plans to publish Yiannopolous’ new book, Dangerous, in Britain.
The publisher did not respond to HuffPost UK’s requests for comment.
The book, due to published in March, 2017, rose to be the top selling politics title on Amazon through pre-orders alone.
News of the book deal was broken by The Hollywood Reporter last month.
“They said banning me from Twitter would finish me off. Just as I predicted, the opposite has happened,” he told the magazine.
“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.”
The publisher has come under a lot of criticism over the acquisition.
Comedian Sarah Silverman tweeted: “The guy has freedom of speech but to fund him and give him a platform tells me a lot about @simonschuster YUCK AND BOO AND GROSS.”
The publisher said Dangerous would “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 has denied being a member of the Alt Right but became its de facto spokesman in the wake of GamerGate, which saw the sustained online harassment of a female game developer and other women in gaming.
In December, 2014, Yiannopoulos announced he was writing a book about GamerGate, which never materialised.
The following year he announced he was writing a book called The Sociopaths of Silocon Valley, which also never appeared.