One of the extreme far right’s worst trolls who helped get Donald Trump elected with his racist, sexist and transphobic rhetoric just scored a major mainstream book deal worth a quarter of a million dollars.

Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at the alt-right website Breitbart, has called feminism a “cancer,” labelled trans people as “mentally ill” and called Black Lives Matter a “hate group.” His hateful speech is so bad he was banned from Twitter after he led an abusive attack on Leslie Jones, the Black star of the recent Ghostbusters remake.

Authors, artists and book critics are disgusted that Simon & Schuster has given the alt-right's biggest celebrity what he's calling "a wheelbarrow full of money" to spread his hate. There’s no way Yiannopoulos should get this kind of mainstream platform and we have to let Simon & Schuster know it.

Tell Simon & Schuster not to give Milo Yiannopoulos $250,000 to normalize hate.

The writing and publishing community reacted in widespread anger. The Chicago Review of Books has vowed that it won’t review a single title from Simon & Schuster in 2017 because of “this disgusting validation of hate.” Numerous authors have publicly stated that they’re looking for ways to break their agreements with Simon & Schuster after the publisher signed a white supremacist. If we add tens of thousands of SumOfUs members to that powerful list, we can stop this book cold.

This isn’t about free speech -- although Yiannopoulos’s rabid followers will try to make that argument. Yiannopoulos is free to hold his hateful beliefs and he’s even, unfortunately, free to publish them on Breitbart News. But he is not entitled to a mainstream platform to broadcast his hate -- and he’s certainly not entitled to a $250,000 payday just because Simon & Schuster knows controversy sells books.

Demand that Simon & Schuster cancel its book deal with the extreme far right's biggest troll.

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