‘Phenomenally Petty’ — The Edits For Milo Yiannopoulos’ Manuscript Are Hilarious
Milo Yiannopoulos holds a copy of his complaint against Simon & Schuster in front of the company’s New York offices in July. Image by Getty
By Ari Feldman December 28, 2017
“Alt-right” provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, never one to self-censor, was exposed in a particularly embarrassing way today after a court filing revealed the edits made to the manuscript for his book “Dangerous.”
Yiannopoulos sued his onetime publisher Simon & Schuster in July after they pulled out of a deal to publish the book after learning that Yiannopoulos had made comments justifying pedophilia. The comments also led to Yiannopoulos’ resignation from Breitbart News, where he was a lead columnist.
Court filings from Simon & Schuster have been made public, and they describe — in sentence-by-sentence detail — why the company considered the book unpublishable in its submitted form.
The comments come from the book’s editor at Simon & Schuster, Mitchell Ivers, who called the book “tiresome,” “phenomenally petty” and full of “too much ego.” One edit simply reads, “unclear, unfunny, delete.”
Critiquing a chapter called “Why Establishment Gays Hate Me,” Ivers wrote that it needed “a better thesis than the notion that gay people should go back in the closet.” Ivers also pointed out that a paragraph describing a satanic ritual performed by the Clintons was “just repeating Fake News.”
One Twitter user found the original manuscript in the court clerk’s database, and tweeted out her favorite comments.
I didn’t read the manuscript. Just the comments. They’re…amazing. Even better than the excerpts in the filing. And a pretty good summary of the book I imagine. pic.twitter.com/2kPESxAlA9
— Sarah Mei (@sarahmei) December 28, 2017
The filing concludes: “Ivers considered Plaintiff’s first draft to be, at best, a superficial work full of incendiary jokes with no coherent or sophisticated analysis of political issues of free speech… Plainly, it was not acceptable to Simon & Schuster for publication.”
On Twitter, critics of Yiannopoulos met the release of the edits with a dose of schadenfreude.
having your editor’s notes on your book go public is a nightmare i had for a year straight and i can’t think of anyone more deserving of such a living catastrophe than milo himself
— Scaachi (@Scaachi) December 28, 2017
Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman
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