At the start of 2017, alt-right agitator and all-around shit unit Milo Yiannopolous sued publishing house Simon & Schuster for nearly $13 million, after they canned his planned memoir Dangerous.
Their reasoning for cancelling the contract? The revelation that Yiannopolous had previously made some very, very questionable comments regarding paedophilia.
From there, the situation somehow only got worse for Yiannopolous. Breitbart, Steve Bannon’s bubbling cauldron of hatred, parted ways with Yiannopolous. Buzzfeed News also published a huge exposé revealing how he all-but asked white nationalists to line-edit his work.
The bloke eventually resorted to an Australian tour to chat shit with a new band of incensed, wayward weirdos, and to flirt with a media system that isn’t so dismissive of his empty provocations.
Now, at the tail end of a forgettable year, a final insult: some documents from the ongoing Simon & Schuster lawsuit have been made public. They include a transcript of Dangerous, complete with remarks from editor Mitchell Ivers.
To say Ivers was scathing sells it pretty bloody short.
Some of the highlights, which are scattered across the entire manuscript, speak to the kind of vain, intellectually bankrupt bullshit Yiannopolous peddles on an everyday basis.
“Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke,” Ivers writes. “I will not accept a manuscript that labels an entire class of people ‘mentally ill,” he says in another section.
The hits keep coming.
“You can’t say ugly people are drawn to the left. Have you seen people at a Trump rally?”
“This is not the time or place for another black dick joke.”
“Delete entire chapter. The book is better overall without hitting these “ugly people” notes in the other chapters and better overall by deleting this one.”
“Let’s leave ‘fecal waste’ analogies out of this chapter.”
“Gratuitous sexual comment destroys your authority here.”
“This section feels phenomenally petty.”
“These gratuitous epithets destroy the intelligence of this final paragraph. Delete”
Then there’s Ivers’ distaste for Yiannopolous’ ego. The editor wrote the author’s “best points seem to be lost in a sea of self-aggrandizement and scattershot thinking,” adding “this is definitely not the [place] for more of your narcissism.”
Some of those who’ve dug through the manuscript point out that while it’s funny to watch Ivers dunk on Yiannopolous, the book likely would have been published had those paedophilia-adjacent comments not re-emerged.
Others have noted that Ivers, who has edited books by U.S. President Donald Trump and former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, is largely sympathetic to Yiannopolous’ viewpoints. He just wishes the author would have presented them with less of his trademark manky panache.
And yet more have added that having an editor tear strips off your work is necessary to actually produce something good. It’s just heavily schadenfreude-y that we get to observe Yiannopolous so thoroughly criticised by someone who was, at one point, on his own side.
If you feel so inclined, you can catch the full transcript – listed as Exhibit B – right HERE.
