Milo Yiannopolous’ Terminated Manuscript is a Late Christmas Present to Progressives.
My brothers, sisters, and genderqueer siblings in Spite, have you read the Good Word?
My brothers, sisters, and genderqueer siblings in Spite, have you read the Good Word? I’m speaking, of course of the aborted manuscript of Milo Yiannopolous’ book “Dangerous”, with comments and edits typed in the margins by his publisher, Mitchell Ivers.
This glorious tome, released on Thursday as part of Yiannopolous’ lawsuit against his former publisher, Simon & Schuster, is a late Christmas gift to progressives, a work of incendiary self-destruction that invites all God’s petty children to gather round and warm themselves in its glow.
If you are overjoyed by the suffering of your enemies, you shall be sent into paroxysms of pleasure by this document, over and over, until you transform into a blissful, left-wing, perpetually nutting “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa”.
Here’s a taste. Chapter 1, Page 10. Ivers has left the following comments in the margins: “Citations needed.”; “Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke.”; “Inappropriate humor only works sometimes.”; and “This is unclear.”
Or Page 126. Ivers writes: “Not a sentence.”; “Let’s leave “cuck” out of here”; and “This whole paragraph is off topic.”.
On page 142, Ivers highlights a sentence by Yiannopolous, asking, “Is my argument a few paragraphs back starting to make sense now?” In all caps, Ivers writes, “NO!”.
Keep in mind that Ivers has polished paragraphs for Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Donald “That’s Not a Sentence, Daddy” Trump himself. Yet it’s Yiannopolous, a former editor for Breitbart News, who forces Ivers to type, “Fact check”, “This isn’t true”,“Nobody believes this”, “Stupid joke, undercuts your point” and “Let’s leave fecal waste analogies out of this chapter.”
This is an unparalleled portrait of writer’s career and an editor’s lucidity unraveling in parallel. Of course, Yiannopolous began this free-fall long ago.
When Simon & Schuster advanced this book for $250,000 in December of 2016, they were clearly expecting a provocative tell-all from a flashy, fascinating gadfly. Yiannopolous was bathing in infamy at the time, following an international tour to college campuses that did not want him, his plastic Earing Magic Ken doll haircut, or his Forever 21 necklaces. His appearances were disrupted by protestors and cancelled at DePaul, Rutgers, Berkley, the University of Manchester, and Ohio State. He had rapidly become a lightning rod for conversations about intellectual freedom and the ease with which millennials feel offense. Around that time, Yiannopolous was banned from Twitter for calling Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones “a black dude” and encouraging his followers to compare her to Harambe the gorilla.
Simon & Schuster thought they knew what they were getting into. They expected a book that liberals would hate-read and every neo-fascist Redditor would gently rub his dick head to. Milo would be every conservative middle-American’s gay best friend, bottoming for Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter hardcovers on the bedside table.
What Simon & Schuster got instead was a poorly-organized screed written by a show-pony who dropped from prominence the moment fans noticed he was into pedophilia. In a video released in February 2017, Yiannopolous states that it’s acceptable for an adult man to have sex with a 13-year-old, so long as the teen’s genitals are “mature”. He calls consent an “arbitrary idea”, and praises the 29-year-old man who elicited sex from him when he was 17. His position at Breitbart News & his publication deal were withdrawn days later.
And oh, those comments.
Page 33, “This sentence is completely unclear.” … “Don’t toss off [the phrase “Gay Uncle Tom”] casually.”
Page 15, “Unsupportable charge.”;
Page 17, “Unclear, unfunny, delete”;
Page 20, “There was no blood, no Semen, and there was no Satanism. Delete.”;
Page 21, “Unclear”; “Baseless claim”; “Citation needed”;
Page 73, “Three unfunny jokes in a row. Delete”; and “Don’t use lesbian as a slur.”;
Page 194, “Don’t use lesbian as a slur”;
Page 136, “Leave the lesbians out of it”;
Page 135, “This Chapter is in the worst shape of any chapter in this book…You can’t just toss off poorly thought-out theories about [how gay people should] go back in the closet. You have to meet [readers’] curiosity with an appropriate level of intellectual rigor.”;
Page 107, “This section feels phenomenonally petty. Delete.”;
Page 192, “Delete the entire chapter.”, and, perhaps best of all “Your usual style negates any value your information might have.”
As the reader wanders this minefield of specious claims, flat jokes, narcissistic diatribes, and slurs, it’s easy to forget that Yiannopolous was once a cogent tech writer. From 2010 to 2012, he wrote mostly bland articles about Silicon Valley trends and tech research, for sites like The Telegraph and The Kernel.
It wasn’t until GamerGate and the rise of Men’s Rights Activism that Yiannopolous became obsessed with whipping people into a lather of outrage. He realized that the perplexing hatefulness of his prose correlated positively with the attention he got. He began churning out chirpy, self-assured headlines like “Birth Control Makes Women Ugly and Fat” and “Gay Rights Makes Us Dumber”.
Over the years, Yiannopolous became so adept at smiling and spitting out barely intelligible bon mots of hate speech that he could no longer return to the clarity of thought he’d once possessed. Like our President, the internet served as both his king-maker and brain-killer. There is no better way to illustrate this transformation than by reading his 2012 essay, “The Internet is Making us all Sociopaths”. A younger, coherent Yiannopolous writes:
“Social media is turbocharging a fundamental problem with people and the internet: the mediating layer of a screen and keyboard encourages us to write unspeakable things to other human beings that we would never dream of saying in person… If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed.”
Five years after writing those words, Yiannopolous was banned from Twitter for life, lost his job at Breitbart, and had his book offer rescinded. He had ridden a sparkling, snide personality to celebrity, then driven it into the ground. In the Epilogue of his book, in a bizarre moment of self-effacement Yiannopolous writes:
“I don’t want to be doing this. It’s so low rent, so boring, so easy.”
The line was cut by his editor for being disingenuous. But in a book full of incomprehensible venom and lies, it’s the only thing that can be easily believed.
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This piece was originally read live by the author at The Paper Machete, Chicago’s Live Magazine.