Editor’s brutal mark-up of Milo Yiannopoulos’ manuscript draws ridicule for alt-right author

Editors are the unseen warriors of the writing world. Their work – advising, shaping and cutting a piece of writing to make it more readable – is done in private. Their names are rarely widely known.

But Mitchell Ivers of Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of the New York-based publishing house Simon & Schuster, is getting an unlikely moment in the limelight after a manuscript he worked on surfaced in a high-profile court case. The mark-up of Milo Yiannopoulos’ Dangerous, which statements in court documents say were largely made by Ivers, became a sensation on social media on Tuesday.

Perhaps it was the earnestness with which the editor went about his task, writing clipped, direct notes of feedback to the conservative media figure, who made a name for himself by making outrageous statements designed to raise people’s ire.

“Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke,” the editor writes in one comment.

“This entire paragraph is just repeating Fake News,” he says later.