Daily Life

It sure did take a lot for Milo Yiannopoulos to finally lose his book deal

On Tuesday it was announced that full-o-hate Breitbart editor, consummate internet troll and hero of the "alt-right", Milo Yiannopoulos, had lost his book contract from Simon & Schuster for his memoir, Dangerous.

This comes quite a long time after another author in the Simon & Schuster stable, Roxane Gay, pulled her own book, How to be Heard, in protest against his deal. At the time, she told Buzzfeed, "I was supposed to turn the book in this month and I kept thinking about how egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation. I just couldn't bring myself to turn the book in. My editor emailed me last week and I kept staring at that email in my inbox and finally over the weekend I asked my agent to pull the book."

It also comes after Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter after inciting his gruesome pack of fans to racially abuse Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones.

And it comes after his role in 'Gamergate', (the abuse campaign directed at women in the gaming industry) and take your pick from the offensive, hateful comments on everything that he's offended by: fat people, Muslim people, transgender people, liberal people, women... the list goes on.

But it seems the final straw has been the comments that Yiannopoulos made about paedophilia in a 2016 video that surfaced online this week where he criticised the age of consent and made jokes about his own molestation.

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"Paedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old, who is sexually mature," he said on the radio show Drunken Peasants. "Paedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Paedophilia is attraction to people who don't have functioning sex organs yet who have not gone through puberty."

Yiannopoulos later defended his comments on his Facebook page, writing, "I'm partly to blame. My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humour might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, 'advocacy.' I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past in different ways."

Thing is, Yiannopoulos has said a lot of deeply offensive things that did not mean that he no longer had a book deal. Which prompts the question, is this the hard line when it comes to being "too offensive?"

And why didn't anything else count before this? Yiannopoulos was invited on TV to share his views, toured universities in America. He said of his book deal (after he was kicked off Twitter for being deeply offensive), "I'm more powerful, more influential, and more fabulous than ever before, and this book is the moment Milo goes mainstream. Social justice warriors should be scared—very scared."

Because he no longer has a book deal, it seemed apt to look at other key low points in Yiannopoulos' career - points at which the line could well have been drawn.

The time he was booted off Twitter for inciting abuse against Ghostbusters actress, Leslie Jones

Actress Leslie Jones was subjected to a vile, racist torrent of abuse from Yiannopoulos and his cronies - after which Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter.

Twitter said in a statement at the time: "Over the past 48 hours in particular, we've seen an uptick in the number of accounts violating these policies and have taken enforcement actions against these accounts, ranging from warnings that also require the deletion of Tweets violating our policies to permanent suspension." Yiannopoulos had zero regrets.

The time he singled out a transgender woman to humiliate her

During one of his university speaking tours Yiannopoulos mocked a transgender student, slammed her use of the male bathroom and used her photo on-screen at The University of Wisconsin. The student later responded with a blistering screed against Yiannopoulos, and the university staff who had invited him to speak.

"You're as embarrassing as the people who wear a safety pin and think that counts as being an ally — patting yourself on the back for a job well done — all while you stand silent as fascists attack your students," she wrote.

"Do you know what it's like to be in a room full of people who are laughing at you as if you're some sort of perverted freak? Do you know what this kind of terror is? No, you don't," she wrote.

The time he wanted to put women back in the kitchen

In one of his many vile articles for Breitbart (don't forget that one of its founders Steve Bannon is now the chief strategist for President Donald Trump, who also put him on the National Security Council). Yiannopoulos wrote that women would be "happier" if society could "uninvent the washing machine and the pill".

The time he said gay people should get back in the closet

Yiannopoulos is a gay man, but he believes gay people have been "mollycoddled" for too long and should go back to pretending not-to-be-gay like in the good old days.

"Unless we want to fall behind the emerging superpowers in the east, and the Muslim world, we should follow their example and encourage gay men to keep having children and raising them in traditional nuclear family structures, whatever their private proclivities," he wrote on, you guessed it, Breitbart.

The times he was anti-Muslim

Yiannopoulos has written about his fears of mass-Muslim immigration and said that "mainstream Muslim culture," not radical Islam, was behind the mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando Florida last year.

As Roxane Gay wrote on Tumblr after news broke of his book being cancelled, "There are some who will spin the cancellation of this book contract as a failure of the freedom of speech but such is not the case. This is yet another example of how we are afforded the freedom of speech, but there is no freedom from the consequences of what we say."

Of course, there are always consequences to hate speech if people are prepared to take a stand against it. What's interesting, and concerning, is how much Yiannopoulos got away with before his publishers finally decided it was worth pulling the plug.

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