"Dangerous" author discusses his new book at the Wednesday Morning Club.

Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript to Milo Yiannopoulos’s appearance at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s July 14, 2017 gathering of the Wednesday Morning Club.

Milo Yiannopoulos: Thank you so much for coming out. And thank you so much to David, who has been an inspiration to me. I used to pretend that I aspired to be like David, but I’m too f**king lazy. The guy is prolific and incredible and has been one of my idols. The other person I must thank in the room is my liposuctionist. No, really, he’s here.

Now, I know what you’re all going to ask me. You’ve read the negative press. We’ve all read the story, so let me just lay it to rest. And I know what you’re all wondering. Chanel, Balmain, Dior, Robbins, and Giuseppe Zanotti.

A hundred thousand copies! Isn’t that impressive? I can’t wait to read it!

All right. To the serious stuff. Well, as much of the serious stuff as I’m capable of.

I was with the Freedom Center in November, and the world has changed since then. There’s a lot more Milo in it, for one thing. And there’s a lot more of these.

Now, I’ve been given advance notice, as some of you may have picked up, that tomorrow this book will be number two on the New York Times combined hardcover and e-book. Now, I made the decision to go in at number two because I wanted to give Mark Levin a fighting chance.

And I love him, I think he’s wonderful, but I like me more. So you can look forward to me ascending to my rightful position next week, as we finally manage – we can’t print them fast enough – as we finally manage to get all of the copies to waiting pre-orderers, even still, who haven’t got them 10 days later. We’re doing everything we possibly can. Retailers vastly underestimated how popular I am, despite me telling them repeatedly.

So we are printing them as fast as we can, getting them out as fast as we can. And it’s my hope that everybody who wants a copy will be able to get one within 24 hours by this time next week. But that’s how popular this book is. So I expect a long, successful run at the top of all the bestseller lists.

And we have debuted, I believe, yes, number one on The Wall Street Journal e-book nonfiction list, number two on the hardback list, number three on the USA Today list, and number two on Publishers Weekly, and they f**king hate me.

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as forcing your ideological enemies to give you awards. It’s great.

And that’s the great joy of America, because success, particularly commercial success, is an unarguable and incontrovertible fact. And against all of the odds, against all the odds, against the combined might of the media and the publishing establishment, despite everything that was thrown at me and my supporters, we have successfully published a smash hit bestseller. So thank you.

Now, you may have read – just to give you an example of why I wrote this book in the first place — I read some headlines over the last sort of 36 hours about the book only selling 152 copies in the UK, where I’m from. Which would be really depressing, except the book’s not on sale there. In fact, 152 diehard nutcases have paid for rush international shipping to get their copies from the US, which is much less humiliating for me, when you think about it. And this is the media in action for you, and this is one of the reasons I wrote this book.

Some of the major booksellers – I should tell you some of the horror stories. Now, I’m not going to name and shame anybody, because I still have this silly, vain hope that I might one day walk into Barnes & Noble and see them actually catering to consumer demand. But I – no, no, I don’t want to pick on Barnes & Noble, I’m sure Borders are just as bad – kidding. I do hold out some hope that common sense will prevail, as my CEO is nervously texting already. I’m not kidding, look at this, squirming in his seat.

But you should hear some of the horror stories from the frontlines. Indie book stores refusing to order the book, because they won’t support hate speech. Well, we are, nonetheless, cruising towards 10,000 copies dispatched to indie book stores. Now, I like to believe that that’s roughly equivalent to 10,000 bloated, facially pierced, blue-haired feminist monstrosities crying into their Ben & Jerry’s. Because they were forced to type the words “Milo Yiannopoulos dangerous” into their computer, and press order.

The first round of social justice suicides can’t be far off. I’m just kidding. There we are, look, see. The College Republicans are upset. I’ve already given them such a bad name.

Nonetheless, we are closing in on 10,000 orders just from indie bookstores. Leftists, of course, did everything they could to stop this book, including Simon & Schuster. Yes. No, I have to be careful what I say.

You know, I got an email the other day, which was very exciting for me. I got an email from my lawyer saying, “Congratulations for staying on message.”

I just replied, “F**k!”

No, so I have to be careful what I say. But we are pursuing Simon & Schuster for terminating a contract pretextually.

And you’ll be happy to know I’ve retained one of Daddy’s lawyers.

I have. His name is Stephen Meister. And with his colleague, Jeff, they are going to be getting a sum no less than $10 million from Simon & Schuster for pretextually canceling my book. You see, we found this wonderful thing. If they canceled the book, as we believe they did, because of pressure from leftists, well, I get all the money they made for canceling my deal. Supreme Court’s good for something, after all.

The feminist author Roxane Gay – the clue’s in the name – canceled a book deal she had with them. And it’s things like this that led, we believe, Simon & Schuster to pull my deal. They told us in emails and texts, 24 hours before they canceled the deal, how happy they were with the manuscript. They thought it was great, they were looking forward to marketing it with the full muscle of Simon & Schuster. And as successful as the book has been, I have to wonder how much more successful it would’ve been had the entire media and the entire publishing establishment not been implacably opposed to its success.

Now, you’ll have read some varying reports about sales numbers for this book. I can confirm that our entire first printing is allocated and accounted for, as I said previously. But even if you go with the smallest possible estimation on numbers, still the New York Times has kind of leant on the scales. I ought to be number two, and instead, number four.

And all these kind of petty, vindictive, spiteful little maneuvers designed to make it as difficult as possible for conservatives to launch books. Newt Gingrich had a terrible time with both of the last of his two books. But we have prevailed nonetheless.

But it does make me wonder how much more successful – I mean, let’s say the inconceivable happens. Let’s say I sell a million copies of this book. If I’d had the sort of press attention that odious gargoyles like Lena Dunham or talentless manatees like Amy Schumer had received, how many might I have sold? Ten million? Well, never mind, because we’re going to do great, anyway.

Now, as a famously humble person, I hate to brag.

But if anyone ever received the sort of outrage merely for declaring that they were intending to publish a book, the contents of which nobody knew, I don’t know, with the possible exception of Salman Rushdie — I mean, it’s quite a ballsy thing to say that, but I think it’s probably true. We have succeeded despite this uniform hostility.

Now, I wrote “Dangerous” for several reasons, partly to introduce brand Milo to the remaining idiots who don’t know who I am.

But more importantly, more importantly, and along the lines of David’s introduction, I wrote it to introduce young people to freedom and to fun.

It’s my observation as a Brit coming to America, and anticipating that this would be a free land, the land of opportunity, the land of hope, and the land of free expression, the country of the First Amendment, that you’d be able to be, do and say anything, as I say in the book, as David told you.

But actually, the social restrictions on what you’re allowed to say in this country are some of the most oppressive anywhere in the Western world. And they don’t come from the government, as they do in other Western countries. They come from you, they come from Americans. Americans policing other Americans. And that’s not a problem of politics, that’s a problem of culture.

And yet, Republicans poor hundreds of millions, if not by this point billions, of dollars into think tanks and magazines, who publish long, rambling essays about TPP. I don’t know what that is. I hope never to know what that is. I will be very happy if I get all the way through my life without ever knowing what TPP is. But I understand that some people think it’s really important. And they think they might win elections by making persuasive arguments about it. They won’t. They win elections by being fearless. They’ll win elections by being fun. They’ll win elections by being fabulous. Like Daddy.

I noticed that during the first leg of my tour, before it was called the Dangerous Faggot tour, that I was being called dangerous. I was being called dangerous by students. Despite, for insurance, not calling for a jihad on the President.

Linda Sarsour. Mm. You know, I know that God loves me, and I know that God is smiling down on me. Because every time I come for somebody, two weeks later, they do something to prove me right.

So a couple of weeks after I joined Pamela Geller, who is another hero of mine — couple of weeks after I joined Pamela Geller, and I explained to the crowd – as a lover of language, I looked this up – Sarsour is Arabic for cockroach.

And then I walked offstage. No. It is, you can look it up. After I said she should be allowed to speak, but everyone should know what a f**king c**t she is – sorry, you’ll have to bleep that out – two weeks later, she calls for a jihad on President Trump. They always, they always reveal themselves in the end, just when they’re getting arrogant, when they think they’re untouchable.

Well, I didn’t call for a jihad against the President of the United States, but I was called dangerous, anyway. Because I was effective. I was effective at showing that you don’t have to vote Democrat just because you were born with a lust …

I don’t know, how old are you? Quite old, I’ll skip it.

No, sometimes they write things for me, and I’m just – I have to gauge the room, you know? No, no. Just look up a porno called “Poor Little White Guy,” and you’ll get the idea.

Now, I’ll return to the book shortly, but I’d like to talk just for a couple of minutes about what makes a conservative dangerous to liberals. Now, David gave me the Annie Taylor award for courage in journalism, and a testament to his good judgment and excellent taste. And you know, I didn’t know whether to accept it at the start. Because I thought, you know, once I start putting award-winning in front of my name, people will think I’m part of the establishment. People will think I’ve sold out. But then I hit the New York Times Bestseller List.

And then, next week, hopefully number one New York Times Bestseller List. So I’m coming round to it, I’m starting to embrace the honorifics. But David really was the first person who let me know it was okay to be me. And not that I was going to have this huge army of memesters, tricksters, trolls and students, but that I’d never be able to rear my head in polite society. So I’m grateful to him for that.

No, I won the award for courage [and] speak at universities. And taking an award for courage from somebody like that seemed preposterous to me. But I was grateful for it. And the reason that I think it matters is because of what’s happened to universities. Universities in this country are no longer places of learning. At least, not primarily. The primary function of the press has become virtue signaling. It’s become advertising the journalist’s own moral virtue to others.

The primary purpose of politics has become self-enrichment. And the primary purpose of the arena that matters most, universities, has become the policing of language, the establishment of political correctness, and the destruction of the First Amendment and of free speech in the name of progressive politics. It is an evil.

It is an evil that, if allowed to run unchecked, this country will not survive. Because if we don’t have the language to describe the threats to us, if we don’t have the language to discuss the ideas, to come to conclusions about the threats to us, if we aren’t able to freely and completely express ourselves, to tell what jokes we want, to investigate whatever philosophies or political ideas we want, then we become slaves to whichever authoritarian doctrine happens to hold cultural power at the time.

Now, in the ‘90s, that perhaps arguably could’ve been the religious Right. And I don’t suppose I would’ve liked them any more than I like Lena Dunham. They were saying silly things about video games and silly things about Marilyn Manson.

Now the problem is the Left. I like Marilyn Manson. I know I don’t look like it, but I do. Although he’s gone a bit soft now. I liked – he’s sort of like the perfect Trump pop star, you know? Just whatever people go for, just say the opposite, and do it with a middle finger outstretched. He’s kind of like the perfect Donald Trump supporter. But then he did this stupid music video of him killing Trump. It’s just sort of my political kind of – I suppose when I grew up, it was when I realized that even my own idols had gone soft, and then it would fall to me to keep shocking people.

But no, these campuses these days have become reeducation camps. Feminism, radical race theories about colonialism, Marxism, anti-American politics, culture relativism and cultural appropriation, which we’ll get to in a minute.

Today’s universities, it’s okay to be anything. Well, it’s okay to be a lesbian. That’s the only place it is okay to be a lesbian.

College campuses and porn. If you identify as a minority, race studies professors will love you. If you’re obese, they’ll say it’s wonderful. They won’t tell you you’ll have hip replacements by 30 and be dead by 40. And if you’re an illegal alien, you’ll be presumed to exist in some protected class, some saintly category, exceeded only by Muslim terrorists.

If your loathing and hatred of the West is sufficient, you might even end up as one.

I can think of only one thing that it’s not acceptable to be on college campuses today, and that is Republican, conservative, or even libertarian. You will be threatened by your fellow students, you will be harassed by your professors. Your essays will be marked down because you have the wrong opinions. Your appeals to logic, fact, truth and reason will be met with scorn and punishment.

Used to be the same for gays. But you don’t come out as gay these days, you come out as conservative. We’ve got two choices. What’s that?

Unidentified Speaker: Good call.

Milo Yiannopoulos: No, I know, well, it’s in the book. You’d have known if you’d read it.

I’m just teasing, I’m just teasing. You’re probably on the Amazon backorder list. You’re probably – which makes it my fault.

Now, we’ve got two choices – either we fight, or we surrender.

Audience: Fight!

Milo Yiannopoulos: We can surrender to the useful idiots of the Left and their suicidal determination to make excuses for and pander to radical Islam, and to all of the forces that want to destroy what makes this country wonderful – freedom, democracy, and yes, property rights and capitalism.

Now, if you think all these spoilt social justice retards are going to improve after graduation, you’re dreaming. They have to be defeated, and they have to be defeated now. Because if not, you’ll be working until 100 to support their lazy asses. And there are some people in here look like they are 100 and may well still be supporting – look at this, head in your hands. It’s an old drag queen trick, you’re supposed to roast the audience. They said it would make them like me.

Sorry. Thanks for coming.

The temperature on college campuses has, of course, been rising. After winning this courage award, my mettle was put to the test at UC Davis, UW Seattle and UC Berkeley. We entered Seattle, by the way, there was a flag on a bridge over the freeway that said, “Stab Milo.” To which I replied, only in the back, and only if you ask me nicely.

The easy ones are the best, you know. Low-hanging fruit. It’s my nickname in college. No, okay.

See, if you laugh at the crap jokes, you’re just going to get more crap jokes. You’re only encouraging me.

And at UC Davis, the university administration lied to the students in order to circumvent their own First Amendment responsibilities. They told the students, in conjunction with the UC Davis police, that people were carrying weapons, that windows were getting smashed, and that people were about to get hurt; and told the College Republicans that they would be personally liable for damage to property and to people.

Now, if you tell a 19-year-old child – no disrespect to any students in the room – that they’re going to be personally liable for people f**king dying, what do you suppose the response might be? They canceled the event. But this was a machination. This was a deception. This was a maneuver by UC Davis to circumvent their First Amendment obligations by making the students cancel the event instead of them doing it. And it was unacceptable.

And of course, this sorry trajectory reached its apotheosis at UC Berkeley, which now everybody knows about. I’m hugely proud, of course – the most gigantic riot in campus history.

And you know, my crime was that I was planning to show up in a Native American headdress. I was going to say, “How. My name, Chief Kneels Readily.”

You laughed at the last one. And I was going to give a talk about cultural appropriation, which again we’ll come to in a minute. Sushi’s racist, f**k off.

Political violence on college campuses is a sort of invention of the Left. And they’ve been really clever about it, they’ve done a really, amazingly smart thing. Because they’re not stupid, they’re just evil. What they’ve done is they have created an environment in which it’s okay to punch a Nazi. They’ve called everyone Nazis. They have emboldened their students to react like petulant children to different ideas and to be completely unprepared for experiencing them in the first place. They have inculcated this atmosphere of hatred and division between the sexes, the races, the genders, the orientations, you name it.

And then, when libertarian or conservative speakers arrive, suggesting that perhaps it might be a nice idea if we all got along a bit better and subscribed to a universal set of values, rather than constantly reminding one another of what makes us different, they say that we’re a threat to student safety. Because the students that they have trained to be intemperate, let’s say, are actually the ones that are going to smash the place up. But they can say that we’re a threat to safety.

It’s a sort of amazing Orwellian, Kafka-esque – I don’t read enough to know, David will know – whatever the adjective should be. It’s an amazing thing. And they’ve been getting away with it for a really long time. And the first time anyone in a position of real power ever did anything about it was Donald Trump, tweeting just after UC Berkeley that if the university can’t stand up for free speech, perhaps it should lose its federal funding.

And it’s not just me. I mean, you may be sitting in the audience thinking, I thought this was some successful new conservative author, and actually, he’s just saying we’re all old, and being a big fag. But there are perfectly respectable people that you’ll like more, like Ann Coulter, who can’t speak on campus, either. Respectable, reasonable, mainstream conservative voices.

I’ve never cared to be respectable or reasonable. But the range of my opinions in this book and in my college speeches doesn’t stretch very far outside the usual bounds of Republican debate. I don’t like abortion. I don’t like taxes. I don’t like speech codes. And I really, really like the Bible and guns.

But they dislike me because I’m effective. And they dislike you, too, because you’re buying my book and participating in this culture of hate speech.

If you’re here tonight, you’re probably not ready to roll over for dead. You’re probably ready to confront the Left. And there’s only one path forward. And it is when CNN threatens the life, in fact, in reality, of a private citizen for posting what amounts to a cartoon, there’s only one possible thing to do – stop watching it. Stop participating in it.

And use what has made America great, capitalism and the free market, to suffocate the bastards.

And when universities trample on the free speech rights of conservatives, we must come back 10 times stronger. And that is why I have recently announced Berkeley Free Speech Week.

Now, this isn’t going to be like other free speech weeks. There’s going to be lots of triggering, no safe spaces, no trigger warnings, and lots of swearing. I’m going to assemble the most obnoxious, irritating, controversial and brilliant people I know. And I’m going to set up camp on Sproul Plaza, until that university actively and proactively assists us in staging a lecture series of libertarian and conservative thought leaders from the respectable to the utterly disreputable.

Because the First Amendment doesn’t discriminate.

And it’s also my intention, and I hope she accepts – although she keeps evading the question, because I don’t think she thinks it’s really going to happen – I hope that Ann Coulter will accept my inaugural Mario Savio award for free speech. And perhaps some kind of lifetime achievement award for the gentlemen who put this together.

There is a war. There’s a war for Western civilization. And it is something that Donald Trump – although he may not read that much, although I did send him a copy of this, via Steve, and I know Steve reads, so Steve likes it – then maybe Daddy will at least see my face. Maybe he’ll notice me.

Maybe he’ll know my name.

I put inside, “Dear Daddy, nuke Mecca. Love, Milo.”

So I don’t expect a reply, but I hope he gets to see it.

All right. The first step to becoming dangerous is this, and supporting the Freedom Center and David Horowitz, and all sorts of other wonderful people that you probably already know about. And I will just tell you, young people are much easier to fix before they get this stuff poured into their heads. So buy a copy for yourself, buy a copy for your fat friends.

As Ann says – and I had to make this the first blurb on the back – fat people will hate this book.

I mean, when you get a blurb like that, you just stop writing to anyone else. Although, of course, I did save the best for the interior. And I’ll just – conventional book readings involve boring you with stuff you’ve already read, except for the guy over there. So I won’t read you that.

But I’ll read you some of the praise from the first couple of pages. ”The most hated man on the internet” – The Nation. ”Milo Yiannopoulos doesn’t have feelings” – New York Times Magazine. ”The ultimate troll, terrifying” – Fusion. ”The Kanye West of journalism” – Red Alert Politics. I still don’t know if that’s a compliment.

“Bullying bleach-blonde tantrum starter” – the Daily Beast. That’s definitely a compliment. ”Trump troll with daddy issues” – Tablet Magazine. ”Pretty, monstrous,” by Bloomberg. See what they did there? ”Mocking and trollish” – The Washington Post. ”A goblin prince teaching the internet how to hate” – GQ. “Exactly what’s wrong with conservative politics” – New Republic. ”Polarizing and counterproductive” – The Dartmouth Review. ”Undignified, cold and low” – The American Thinker. It goes on. ”Doesn’t deserve Twitter” – The New York Observer. ”Idiot” – ABC Nightline.

“Hatemonger” – Complex. ”An icon of the fringe internet, cartoonish and astonishingly self-important.” Well, I can’t sue them for libel, can I? Vox. ”Flamboyant homosexual with movie star good looks” – how did that get in here?

No, that’s real, that’s true. That’s from The New American. ”The pit bull of tech media,” from The Observer. ”Digital media’s Citizen Kane,” from Forbes. ”Where did he come from?” from the BBC.

“A young, gay, alive Christopher Hitchens,” by Bill Maher. ”Completely f**king exhausting,” says GQ Australia. And The Stranger rounds out the praise for this book with, “It’s really irritating he can say such hateful things.”

I am Milo. Thank you so much for your support of this book. We did it in spite of the odds, we did it in spite of the combined pressure and machinations of the entire media and publishing establishment. I intend to sell half a million copies of this f**ker. Because it is the ultimate –

Unidentified Speaker: Yeah!

Milo Yiannopoulos: -- the ultimate middle finger.

As you’ll know, as regular browsers of my Facebook page, we recently released an ad with words that I’ll leave you with – “Finally, a book you can judge by its cover.”

Thank you very much.