The Best, Most Savage Pieces Of Feedback For Milo Yiannopoulos’s Shithouse Book
"Unclear, unfunny, delete."
2017 was quite a year for Milo Yiannopoulos. He was caught out appearing to condone paedophilia, he lost his book deal, he was busted laundering the views of neo-nazis so that they’d be fit for publication and he met Pauline Hanson!
But it’s those first two that are causing him more pain today. Back in February, book publisher Simon & Schuster cancelled Milo’s controversial book deal after audio emerged of him saying that sex between older men and young boys could sometimes be a “hugely positive” experience.
The incident signalled the end of Yiannopoulos’s mainstream relevance. His “career” now largely consists of him making troll appearances at universities and flipping the bird at the Opera House.
In July, Milo decided to sue Simon and Schuster for $USD10 million for breach of contract. As part of that lawsuit, the publisher has submitted a whole heap of documents related to the publication process for the book, which was to be titled Dangerous.
In the documents, lawyers for Simon & Schuster describe the suit as “a meritless publicity stunt, a bid by Yiannopoulos to sue his way back into relevance”. Ouch.
Also among the documents is feedback from the book’s editor, and hoo boy, it sounds like the book would have been truly awful, had it ever been published in its raw form. We’ve compiled some of the tastiest morsels of feedback, so you can get a big helping of end-of-year schadenfreude.
The Most Savage Feedback For Dangerous
- “Black-dick jokes won’t suffice. They are too glib for a book.”
- “Throughout the book, your best points seem to be lost in a sea of self-aggrandizement and scattershot thinking.”
- “Careful that the egotistical boasting … doesn’t make you seem juvenile.”
- “Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke.”
- “I will not accept a manuscript that labels an entire class of people ‘mentally ill.’”
- “Let’s leave ‘cuck’ out of it here.”
- “The gay chapter: This needs a better central thesis than the notion that gay people should go back in the closet.”
- “You will need to develop a stronger argument against feminism than saying that they are ugly and sexless and have cats.”
- “Don’t start chapter with accusation that feminists = fat.”
- “DELETE UGH.”
- “Feminists can care for children. (So can lesbians.)”
- “Paris Hilton is NOT the best authority to quote here.”
- “Citations needed”
- “The way you casually bring up the KKK makes no sense.”
- “Do you have proof of this?”
- “This is not true.”
- “Careful that the egotistical boasting that your young audience finds humorous doesn’t make you seem juvenile to other readers.”
- “This entire paragraph is just repeating Fake News. There was NO blood, NO semen and there was NO Satanism. Delete.”
Milo’s “Superhero Origin Story”
The documents also include emails from Milo himself, in which he asks his publisher for some tips or thoughts on whether he should include certain anecdotes and opinions, such as:
- “The day I got banned [from Twitter] and how it felt? (I can pretend I felt something)”
- “Relationship I had with a Muslim guy”
- “Hateful stuff from other gays?”
- “How lovely the Trump movement really is”
- “Letters from people I’ve fat-shamed telling me how I changed their lives”
Milo also asks if he he needs to do more to set himself up as a character by explaining his “superhero’s origin story”.
There are so many more golden moments in the documents, feel free to just open up a random one and have a read.
The feedback is getting plenty of love on Twitter, but it’s worth pointing out that Simon & Schuster knew what a terrible person Milo was and still decided his book was worth publishing. It was only when his persona became too toxic, and they realised the book would be awful that they decided to drop him.
So, no points to them.
The publisher knew who Yiannopoulos was when they gave him a $255,000 advance. The editor’s brutal comments are somewhat entertaining, but none of this should distract from the fact that they sought to make his bigotry both digestible and marketable. https://t.co/Ssg20zht0h
— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) December 28, 2017