Milo Yiannopoulos’s ‘Dangerous’ Tour Led to Violent Protests. The Troll Is Back With a Book.

In a chapter titled “Why My College Tours Are So Awesome” in his new, self-published book Dangerous, Milo Yiannopoulos approvingly quotes Nicholas Kristof and Barack Obama. He rolls his eyes at safe spaces and trigger warnings. He calls American campuses “poorly dressed.” And he argues for universities where “constant intellectual and political stimulation” is the norm.

As danger goes, it’s fairly tame. Edit out the profanity and mentions of fetish gear, and you’re left with a moderate memo opposing campus speech codes.

You remember Milo. He’s the former Breitbart editor and British-born provocateur who, for a short while, seemed ready to eclipse Ann Coulter as the right-wing commentator liberals most love to hate. He mocked Black Lives Matters activists, referred to Donald J. Trump as “daddy,” and argued that “gays should pipe down and get back in the closet.” (Mr. Yiannopoulos is openly gay.)

His rising star dimmed somewhat in February, when he made comments supportive of sex between 13-year-olds and adults. As a result, Simon & Schuster yanked his $250,000 book contract, his gig at Breitbart evaporated, and many allies who once delighted in his outrageousness backed away quietly. Mr. Yiannopoulos issued a statement condemning pedophilia, but it seemed that “MILO,” his all-caps nom de guerre, had pushed the envelope too far.

Or maybe not. That ballyhooed then canceled book was released under his own imprint (“Dangerous Books”) on July 4, and quickly became an Amazon best seller. According to Mr. Yiannopoulos, it sold out its first printing of 100,000 copies. The book is filled with semi-serious self-praise and aggressive, sometimes repetitive score-settling. Feminists “shriek,” liberals are “power-mad cowards,” and Mr. Yiannopoulos is, he claims, “tremendous.”

If you expected anything less, you don’t know MILO.

But he also gives credit where it’s due. In 2015, subsidized by Breitbart, he embarked on a pot-stirring campus tour, delivering lectures that denied the existence of a campus rape culture and mocked transgender people. It was the reaction to his college tour, he acknowledges, that helped transform him from a marginal right-wing figure into — briefly — a household name and, to some, a First Amendment martyr.

That reaction included protests, and some of those protests turned violent. The most notable, and most disturbing, incident took place at the University of California at Berkeley in early February. News footage showed bonfires in the street and protesters ramming metal barriers through store windows. The university blamed a masked anarchist group for disrupting an otherwise peaceful protest, and for causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Mr. Yiannopoulos’s scheduled appearance was canceled, and President Trump tweeted the idea of withdrawing federal funds from the university.

While Mr. Yiannopoulos has been off the national stage for months now, the ruckus he helped kick up carries on without him, launching a thousand think-pieces, bringing once-obscure academic terms like “intersectionality” to the fore, and causing administrators everywhere to issue line-walking statements that both condemn hateful ideology and affirm the university’s traditional commitment to an unfettered exchange of ideas, including controversial and even despicable ones.

The news coverage at Berkeley moved from fires and masked protesters to Mr. Yiannopoulos asserting that liberals are hypocrites, colleges don’t really believe in freedom of speech, and so on. He couldn’t have designed a better platform or picked a better fight.

And that, more than anything, seems to have been the point. Mr. Yiannopoulos’s goal isn’t so much about pushing a thesis; you’ll search in vain for original policy prescriptions or novel cultural insights in his book. Instead, he’s interested in grabbing the spotlight by tweaking the sensibilities of college students and professors he believes are too easily trolled. In fact, he’s borrowing that word for his new college tour, “Troll Academy.” He says the tour will kick off with a return to Berkeley in September and last for seven months. Get your tickets, and placards, now.

Mr. Yiannopoulos responded by email with his characteristic élan to a question about how his college speaking engagements had raised his profile, writing that “schoolmarmish campus killjoys and social-justice censors” had created a need for him, and that the mission of his new tour would be “to educate dissident young mischief-makers everywhere.”

He also promised to keep going. “I’d love to claim victory and head home like Cincinnatus, but I’m only just getting started,” he wrote. “I’ll be doing this in 30 years’ time — in even more fantastic outfits, I’m sure.”

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and other things. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.