The alt-right bites its own tail

The alt-right bites its own tail

by digby














A must-read today from Sarah Posner on Brietbart and the alt-right. It concludes with this chilling observation:
The reception he and another conservative Jewish Breitbart critic, Bethany Mandel, have experienced in the Bannonosphere is revealing: In May, when Shapiro, who became editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire after leaving Breitbart, tweeted about the birth of his second child, he received a torrent of anti-Semitic tweets. "Into the gas chamber with all 4 of you," one read. Another tweet depicted his family as lampshades. Mandel says she has been harassed on Twitter for months, "called a 'slimy Jewess' and told that I 'deserve the oven.'"

After Shapiro called out the anti-Semitism, Breitbart News published (under the byline of Pizza Party Ben) a post ridiculing Shapiro for "playing the victim on Twitter and throwing around allegations of anti-Semitism and racism, just like the people he used to mock."

Back at the RNC, Bannon dismissed Shapiro as a "whiner…I don't think that the alt-right is anti-Semitic at all," he told me. "Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don't believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic."

In any case, Breitbart's conservative dissenters are fearful of what the Trump-Bannon alliance might bring. As Mandel puts it, "There's no gray area here: Bannon is a bad guy. And he now has control of a major campaign for president."
What these people have had to put up with is awful. One hopes they will re-think some of their own behavior in light of it. Crude, obnoxious intolerance has been part of the online right as long as I've been online. That they're turning on each other is unsurprising. But it's the sort of thing that should wake a few people up to the bigger picture.

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