BRENDAN O’NEILL: Why are people so terrified of Milo Yiannopoulos’s book?
The response to Milo Yiannopoulos getting a big-bucks book deal with Simon & Schuster has been nuts. Even by today’s standards. The cry has gone up that S&S — or SS, amirite? — is endangering the wellbeing of women and gays and blacks and other minorities that have felt the sting of Milo’s camp polemics. Please. It’s a book, not a bomb. It’s words, sentences, ideas, not fire and pogroms. Everyone needs to calm down.
Milo is the Breitbart editor turned darling of the agitated, anti-PC right, given to manicured fuming against feminism, Islam, censorious students, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and other things that apparently threaten Western civilisation. When it was revealed that Simon & Schuster would be publishing his first book in March, and that it is called ‘Dangerous’, and that Milo has been remunerated very handsomely indeed for it, Twitter went epileptic; snowflakes melted; literary doyens called for a boycott.
The New Yorker went full haughty, calling on its readers to protest ‘vociferously’ against S&S, ‘in emails, letters, tweets, phone calls — you name it’. The publishing house should be made to ‘answer for the harm it condones through [this] decision’, it said, as if S&S were making landmines rather than bits of paper with words on them. Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters actress subjected to vile racist abuse by alt-right morons on Twitter, said S&S is helping the alt-right to ‘spread their hate’. S&S-published author Karen Hunter said she was rethinking her relationship with the publishing house.
Most perversely, the Chicago Review of Books said it would not review any S&S books through the whole of 2017, in protest against what its editor, Adam Morgan, calls the ‘deadly consequences’ of Milo-style ‘hate speech’. Morgan says rhetoric like Milo’s, whether on race or transgenderism, has ‘real-world consequences’ — it nurtures violence. ‘It arguably encourages people such as Omar Mateen [the Florida nightclub shooter] and Dylann Roof [the Charleston Church shooter] to think of entire groups of people as less than human,’ he says. In short, publish Milo’s book and people will die. This is bonkers, and indistinguishable from the fuming of pointy-hatted policers of heresy in the past, who likewise feared that certain ideas, certain words, might warp minds and destroy souls.
Ultimately, this is about status anxiety. If they can’t silence and marginalize people, what have they got left?
But they’re not doing a very good job of silencing and marginalizing Milo.