‘Alt-right’ poster child Milo Yiannopoulos is suing publishing house Simon & Schuster for $10 million after breaching the contract to publish his book, Dangerous.
In newly-released court documents in the US outlining why the firm cancelled the “unacceptable” tome, Simon & Schuster provides details of brutal comments attached to the original manuscript.
They reveal how senior editor Mitchell Ivers was clearly unimpressed with what he was supposed to make sing, repeatedly pointing to the author’s vanity and crude jokes that fall flat.
An email to the British antagonist and his agent in January 2017 made clear the book would not be published in its current form, as annotations state a section “doesn’t pass intellectual muster” and another was “unclear, unfunny, delete”.
Software engineer Sarah Mei accessed all of the edits to the manuscript and wrote a comprehensive summary of the editor’s frustrations on Twitter. Screenshots of the most entertaining notes have since gone viral.
The most brutally frank critiques, which speak of one inflammatory yet badly-conceived chapter after another, include:
“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.”
“All this pop psychology is hogwash”
“Let’s leave ‘fecal waste’ anaologies out of this chapter”
“This entire paragraph is just repeating Fake News”
“Smorgasbords don’t have bottoms”
“Don’t blow your own horn”
“This is definitely not the place for more of your narcissism”
“Don’t use ‘trannies’ here”
“The use of of a phrase like ‘two-faced backstabbing bitches’ diminishes your overall point”
“Tiresome and off the point”
“Beauty regime moved to the box at the end of the chapter, after the Nietzsche section”
“Delete ugh”
Ivers, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as a book editor with more than 20 years experience, later “retweeted without comment” someone suggesting his overall review described the book as “at best, a superficial work full of incendiary jokes with no coherent or sophisticated analysis of political issues”.
Yiannopoulos later claimed on Facebook that Simon & Schuster was positive about the book and Ivers is “put in charge of neutering its edgier conservative authors”, and also contended he “said one thing in manuscript edits but quite another” when communicating directly. “I look forward to prevailing in court,” he added.
Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter in 2016 after his role in the online harassment of the Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones.
The full court documents and notes can be found here. A version of Dangerous was self-published this summer.