Milo Yiannopoulos, far-right Breitbart journalist and Trump supporter, announced Tuesday that his up-and-coming book release date will be pushed back from March 14 to June 13. That means both his haters (of which there are many) and his fans will just have to wait to read the 32-year-old’s extremely controversial memoir: Dangerous.
Yiannopoulos decided to ask his publisher for an extra three months for Dangerous in order to write about the impassioned protests that sprouted up at campuses he was set to speak at through the past few weeks.
The Breitbart Tech editor was supposed to speak at the University of California Berkeley in early February. However, the UC Police Department shut down the event before it could start following a violent protest by about 150 masked “agitators” who interrupted a peaceful protest to attack UC Berkeley’s Student Union building.
“I am speaking on college campuses because education ... is really what matters. It's a crucible where these bad ideas are formed. Bad ideas like ... progressive social justice, feminists, Black Lives Matter ... that I think is so cancerous and toxic to free expression,” Yiannopoulos said to CNN at the time.
Several weeks before that, a similar protest happened at Yiannopoulos’ event at the University of California Davis. On the night of Trump’s inauguration, a man was shot outside of the far-right speaker’s event at the University of Washington Seattle.
Yiannopoulos, who is British and openly gay, was also banned on Twitter for inciting a harassment/hate speech campaign against SNL’s Leslie Jones.
“I asked my publisher, Threshold Editions, for more time to submit the manuscript for DANGEROUS so I could include material about the craziness and rioting at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UW Seattle,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a Facebook post. “It would be absurd for me to publish a book without some discussion of the insanity of the last few weeks.”
Yiannopoulos reportedly received $250,000 for his “memoir” deal with Simon & Schuster’s conservative Threshold Editions publisher. “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,” Yiannopoulos said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building — but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”
By taking on Yiannopoulos as an author, Simon & Schuster lost many others in protest, including feminist author Roxane Gay. This prompted Simon and Schuster’s president, Carolyn Reidy, to send out a letter to authors.
“First and foremost, I want to make clear that we do not support or condone, nor will be publish, hate speech,” Reidy wrote. “When Threshold Editions met with Mr. Yiannopoulos, he said that he was interested in writing a book that would be a substantive examination of the issues of political correctness and free speech.”
