"They said banning me from Twitter would finish me off. Just as I predicted, the opposite has happened," says Yiannopoulos.
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?"
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.
Threshold and Simon & Schuster were not available for comment, but people with knowledge of the situation say Yiannopoulos is getting an advance of $250,000 for his book. The autobiographical book is his first, though Yiannopoulos, a flamoboyant and gay conservative, has a wide following for his writing, especially at Breitbart News, where he is an editor.
"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," Yiannopoulos told
THR.
Yiannopoulos is also
filming his "Dangerous F—t Tour" of college campuses for a feature-length documentary fiim.
"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," he said.
