Reading the Milo Manuscript

Here he is again, begging for our attention (granted!) as he pursues a lawsuit against Simon & Schuster and its imprint Threshold Editions. Threshold is dedicated to publishing conservative polemics by media demi-celebrities like Jerome Corsi and Mark Levin. When Yiannopoulos achieved some notoriety in 2016—Twitter shut down his account for verbally abusing fellow Twitterers, and his speeches drew well-publicized protests on several college campuses—Threshold was more than happy to sign him to a quickie deal to write a book called Dangerous, with an advance against royalties of $250,000.

“I met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions,” Yiannopoulos told the Hollywood Reporter. “I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building—but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”

The decision by Threshold and its editorial director, Mitchell Ivers, to sign Yiannopoulos did not please the book-publishing industry, which like every other cultural gatekeeper is dominated by people with political views roughly equivalent to Milo’s, though on the other side. Authors and editors from all over signed petitions demanding that Threshold renege on the contract. The Chicago Review of Books called the deal a “disgusting validation of hate” and announced it would refuse to cover any books published by Threshold’s parent company, Simon & Schuster—a move applauded by both of the Review’s readers. The comedian Sarah Silverman took to her own Twitter account in outrage: “YUCK AND BOO AND GROSS,” she argued.

Yiannopoulos generates controversy and outrage the way a blowtorch throws sparks. His persona relies heavily on his sexual identity, which in a more innocent age we would have called “flamboyant” and left it at that. We are to suppose that his energetic gayness clashes with his right-wing politics, making for an exciting and unexpected combination, although it’s not clear, prima facie, why right-wingery and homosexuality should be irreconcilable. With his trademark mix of High Camp and Falangism, Yiannopoulos is a kind of alt-right Liberace, lacking only the candelabra and musical talent. Controversy is his daily meat. Even as his manuscript was being edited, many observers knew it was only a matter of time before Yiannopoulos gave Ivers and Threshold a reason to abandon the book, and him, thus getting the literary community off their backs.

And sure enough, in February of last year, with the book’s publication date just a month away, some industrious Milophobe discovered an old podcast that had somehow escaped everyone’s attention. In it Yiannopoulos made light of pedophilia and endorsed its salubrious, life-affirming effects on his own upbringing. (He says he had his first sexual encounter with an older man when he was 13.) The podcast lit up the Internet, and Yiannopoulos acknowledged that he had misspoken. He condemned pedophilia in the strongest possible terms. What he had been endorsing, he explained, was not pedophilia—the abuse of pre-pubescent children and a horror to every decent person. No, what he’d been endorsing was hebephilia, which he defined as sex between adolescents and adults. From now on, he promised to be more careful with his words.

This is when Bannon repudiated him and Breitbart News fired him.

As night follows day, Threshold terminated the book contract. The quality of Yiannopoulos’s manuscript, the publisher announced, made it “unacceptable for publication.” There was no mention of the pressure brought to bear on Threshold to drop the book nor a peep about its author’s “controversial” views on man-boy sex. Yiannopoulos understandably thought this explanation disingenuous. Indeed, not long before dropping the book, Ivers, his editor at Threshold, had congratulated the author on his good work with the manuscript. So last summer, several months after Threshold reneged, Yiannopoulos sued the publisher for $10 million. The filing said the cancellation had done “irreparable harm to the commercial value of Yiannopoulos’s public persona, including long-lasting harm to the development and exploitation of his stature as an important, sought-after media figure and free-speech celebrity.”

Notwithstanding such delusional legalese, Yiannopoulos’s case looked pretty tight. Ivers and Threshold had signed up for controversy and got it; surely they knew what they were getting when they hired a man who is famous for calling himself a “dangerous faggot” and boasting of his fellating skills. Ivers’s flattering interactions with Yiannopoulos (a text message reading “you done good,” for example), cringe-making as they are, don’t suggest an editor on the verge of firing an author. All the evidence suggested that Ivers and his imprint terminated the book because of social and political pressure and nothing more.

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Or so it seemed until the end of last month. Threshold’s lawyers had a brainstorm: If people don’t believe the publisher rejected the manuscript because of its low quality, let ’em decide for themselves! They entered Yiannopoulos’s original manuscript as evidence in a court filing, putting all 264 pages in the public domain, along with Ivers’s proposed edits. The thing is now available for anyone to read, as far as they can.

Yiannopoulos has used a ghost writer for his blogging, and he may have hired one for this book. If the old saying is true and good writing is like a window pane, allowing you to see straight through to the meaning behind it, then whoever wrote the unedited manuscript of Dangerous is an excellent writer indeed. Every page lays bare the author with pristine insouciance. From the opening paragraph, the text is as repellent as the man himself. The year 2016, the first sentence tells us, was “the year of the troll,” and hence 2016 “was the year of me.” All but two chapters are titled “Why [someone] Hates Me”: “Why the Progressive Left Hates Me,” “Why the Media Hates Me,” and so on.

After a few pages a reader will wonder if there’s anyone who doesn’t hate him, and why. As an author Milo is relentlessly self-referential. He inserts himself in the oddest places, parenthetically. When he talks about competition among “victim groups,” for example, he calls it “a tragicomic battle for the bottom.” Then he adds: “also the name given to my warring ex-boy friends.” Is he a racist? Impossible, “given my penchant for black men, denizens of the dark continent.” A mention of the Clintons inspires an aside: “You have to feel for poor Bill. Every time he hears ‘gender’ and ‘gap’ in the same sentence he gets hard, then he sees Hillary’s crossed eyes and evil smile and he’s booking another flight on the Lolita Express.”

In the end, he says, the book has an overarching purpose: “Keep reading and you’ll find out how you can become as terrifying to the forces of political correctness and social justice as me—and you won’t even have to suck a dick to do it!” Ivers suggested deleting this last phrase.

Several months after Ivers terminated the contract, Yiannopoulos published Dangerous himself. The phrase has been struck in the self-published version and replaced by a lamer wording: “And you won’t even have to turn gay.” Indeed, from a quick comparison between the manuscript and self-published book, it appears that Yiannopoulos accepted many if not most of Ivers’s proposed edits and deletions. The warring boyfriends are gone. Clinton’s Lolita Express has disappeared. The denizens of the dark continent have been banished. The best he can do is a unconvincing retelling of the old “some of my best friends” argument. “Many of the most cherished people in my life are black men. Because I love and respect them, I believe they deserve truth, not lies.” Suddenly the “dangerous faggot” sounds like Oprah.

The result is milk-and-water Milo. But it’s probably the only Milo that’s publishable, as even Milo understood.

From the start I’ve wondered how an editor who had published the lunatic speculations of Jerome Corsi or the crazed, self-infatuated musings of Mark Levin could find a book beneath his dignity. But Ivers found one. Case closed.

Andrew Ferguson is a national correspondent at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author of Crazy U, published by Simon & Schuster.