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From: hannity_is_gay@fox.net

Explaining Ben Shapiro’s Messy, Ethnic-Slur-Laden Breakup With Breitbart

Ben Shapiro, the 32-year-old former editor-at-large of Breitbart News,
doesn’t come across as the sort of conservative who would be cannibalized
by his ideological fellow travelers for being too soft. The titles of his
books and e-books, for example, suggest solidly right-wing beliefs: Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future, Brainwashed:
How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth, and The People vs. Barack
Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration, to name a few.

But these are strange times on the right, and since his resignation from Breitbart in March, Shapiro, currently editor-in-chief of Daily Wire, has increasingly found himself targeted by the so-called alt-right movement, a loose conglomeration of online personalities — many if not most of them anonymous — currently devoted to tweeting and posting their support for
Donald Trump and attacking those who disagree, often in racist and anti- Semitic ways. They have been denigrating Shapiro as a “pussy,” a “cuck,”
and — inevitably, given the nature of this movement — a “Jew” and a “kike.”

His former employer has gone after him too. Shortly after Shapiro resigned, Breitbart published — and then quickly pulled down — a bizarre article
bylined with a pseudonym previously used by Shapiro’s father on Breitbart
and headlined “Ben Shapiro Betrays Loyal Breitbart Readers in Pursuit of
Fox News Contributorship” (Shapiro’s father, David Shapiro, stepped down as
a contributor at the same time Shapiro did — Ben told Politico that his
father had written under a pseudonym to shield himself from the death
threats Ben receives). Then, last week, Breitbart published a piece by an alt-right Twitter personality known as “Pizza Party Ben” — yes, that was
how his byline appeared on the site — that consisted mostly of a video
mocking Shapiro for having complained about anti-Semitism, the alt-right,
and Trump:


The nadir came a couple of weeks ago, though, when Shapiro’s wife gave
birth to the couple’s second child. As the Daily Wire noted, Shapiro was
hit with a wave of vicious anti-Semitic abuse, including multiple Holocaust references and requests that Shapiro and his family be sent to the ovens.


It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Until he left Breitbart, Shapiro, a conservative wunderkind who graduated from UCLA when he was 20 (he also published his first book that year) and Harvard Law when he was 23, was the site’s young, telegenic face. On YouTube, there are dozens of videos of him
on TV and at speaking events discussing everything from Black Lives Matter
to media bias favoring the “anti-Israel” left to the “spoiled children” of
the microaggression era, and they tend to rack up hundreds of thousands of views or more. Even if you disagree with him — and, full disclosure, I
disagree with almost every one of his positions on everything — it’s hard
not to acknowledge that he is a forceful speaker. Breitbart made a regular habit of publishing articles about the protests and controversy Shapiro’s campus appearances sparked.

During the Republican primary, Shapiro supported Cruz — no surprise given
that both men are staunch conservatives. But his overriding focus this
campaign season has been on Trump, whom he views as not only a fake
Republican, but a legitimately dangerous figure. So on March 4, Shapiro
“came out” as a #NeverTrump proponent on the Daily Wire:

I will never vote for Donald Trump because I stand with certain principles.
I stand with small government and free markets and religious freedom and personal responsibility. Donald Trump stands against all of these things.
He stands for Planned Parenthood and trade restrictions and targeting of political enemies and an anti-morality foreign policy and government
domination of religion and nastiness toward women and tacit appeals to
racism and unbounded personal power. I stand with the Constitution of
theUnited States, and its embedded protection of my God-given rights
through governmental checks and balances. Donald Trump does not. I stand
with conservatism. Donald Trump stands against it.

I stand with #NeverTrump.

It was clear that this put him at odds with Breitbart, which by then had transformed itself, in the eyes of many, into something of a Trump
propaganda outlet. Breitbart employees themselves had taken note of this:
Last August, BuzzFeed ran an excerpt from McKay Coppins’s then-upcoming
book, in which he revealed that staffers at Breitbart “Believe[d] Trump Has Given Money to Site for Favorable Coverage,” as the headline put it. At a
time when Trump had only recently established himself as the GOP front-
runner, Coppins noted that Breitbart had “set itself apart by plastering
its homepage with fawning headlines about the candidate, and all-caps
assaults on his critics.” Others noticed this, too: By February of this
year, Glenn Beck was angrily lashing out at Breitbart on his radio show for what he saw as overly favorable coverage of Trump, comparing the site’s executive chairman, Steve Bannon, to Joseph Goebbels.

At first, Shapiro didn’t react to this shift. In the months preceding his departure, he explained to me, “I didn’t pay much attention to what else
was going on on the site. I wrote my pieces, but I didn’t read the rest of
my site, and I certainly didn’t read the comments sections.” He did get the sense, however, that the site’s higher-ups were growing more and more comfortable stoking the racial resentment constantly bubbling up from its comments section (as rough as the rest of the internet can be, the
Breitbart comments section is basically the sewer from Ghostbusters 2).

It was the Michelle Fields incident that severed Shapiro’s relationship
with Breitbart, though. In March, Fields, then a reporter for the site, was grabbed hard by Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, after a
press conference in Florida. Breitbart did not exactly come out swinging in defense of Fields, raising eyebrows among journalists both outside and
within the organization — the prevailing assumption was that Breitbart’s higher-ups didn’t want to jeopardize the site’s cozy relationship with
Trump, even in an instance where one of its reporters had been manhandled
by a campaign operative. (Fields, who posted photos of her bruised arm,
filed charges against Lewandowski, but they were later dropped by Palm
Beach County.)

When Fields resigned in protest, Shapiro went with her (as did various
other staffers) — and on his way out the door he made a loud point about
what he saw as Breitbart’s dangerous trajectory. “Andrew’s life mission has been betrayed,” Shapiro wrote in his statement about his decision,
referring to the site’s founder, the controversial conservative-media figurehead Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012 and was a mentor of
Shapiro’s. “Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon,
has put a stake through the heart of Andrew’s legacy. In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back
another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s
personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut [Fields] in
order to protect [Lewandowski].”

Once Shapiro had bashed his former employer that assertively, an open feud quickly erupted. And Shapiro’s main nemesis in it has been Milo
Yiannopoulos, the flamboyant 31-year-old British provocateur who, since
carving out a name for himself as a Gamergate supporter in 2014, has been
one of Breitbart’s most attention-getting figures, largely by writing and saying outrageous things about Black Lives Matter, feminism (“feminism is cancer” is one of his catchphrases — he sells a shirt with those words emblazoned on them), and everything else. His current college speaking tour
has left a wake of upset students, and just as Breitbart has capitalized on
the outrage generated by Shapiro by covering that outrage itself, the site
has done the same with the even greater campus drama sparked — and sparked quite consistently — by Yiannopoulos (just this week, he was threatened by protesters who climbed onstage at one of his events at DePaul University).

At first glance, Shapiro and Yiannopoulos occupy — or occupied — similar
places in the Breitbart ecosystem: Both are youthful pundits whose main
draws are their ability to appeal to young people, and who can capably do a
lot of TV and campus appearances.

But to Shapiro, at least, the similarities end there. In his mind, he is a principled defender of an embattled conservative ideology, while
Yiannopoulos, who refers to Trump as “Daddy,” is a clown who is simply
trying to get attention by stoking and excusing the very extremism that is hollowing out American conservatism. In their feuding, the two have
something like the dynamic you might see between a straight-edge older
brother and party-animal younger one. (Yiannopoulos: “DONALD TRUMP IS MY DADDY”; Shapiro: “No, Donald Trump Isn’t Your ‘Daddy.’ Grow Up.”)

One reason the feud between Shapiro and Yiannopoulos has escalated is that,
as part of his project of promoting the alt-right and attracting its
followers to himself and to Breitbart, Yiannopoulos has repeatedly excused
and explained away the movement’s anti-Semitism, which targeted Shapiro and which seems to target basically any Jewish writer (myself included) who expresses anti-Trump or anti-alt-right opinions on Twitter.

Recently, for example, Yiannopoulos — who at various points has said he identifies as Catholic, Jewish, or having matrilineal Jewish heritage —
told the talk-show host Dave Rubin (as quoted by Daily Wire):

Generation Trump, the alt right people, the people who like me, they’re not anti-Semites. They don’t care about Jews. I mean, they may have some assumptions about things, how the Jews run everything; well, we do. How the Jews run the banks; well, we do. How the Jews run the media; well, we do. They’re right about all that stuff … It’s a fact, this is not in debate.
It’s a statistical fact … Jews are vastly disproportionately represented in
all of these professions. It’s just a fact. It’s not anti-Semitic to point
out statistics … The anti-Semitism on the internet, which is really
important, I want people to understand this because nobody seems to, when
Jonah Goldberg of National Review is bombarded with these memes, and anti- Semitic “take a hike, kike” stuff, it’s not because there’s a spontaneous outpouring of anti-Semitism from 22-year-olds in this country. What it is
is it’s a mischievous, dissident, trolly generation who do it because it
gets a reaction. Right? That’s been the case for young people for
generations … They can get to people in positions of power, and people in positions of power and keep biting, they keep taking the bait … It’s a
direct response to the language policing, it’s a direct response to being
told they can’t say things.

Around that same time, Yiannopoulos co-authored an article with Breitbart reporter Allum Bokhari in which the duo wrote, “Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too
do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with
outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish ‘Shlomo Shekelburg’ to ‘Remove
Kebab,’ an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide.” They went on to
write that the openly racist websites VDARE and American Renaissance “have
been accused of racism,” and they cast a variety of figures widely
understood by just about everyone to hold racist or anti-Semitic views as
part of some sort of vibrant intellectual movement reacting to the
strictures of political correctness.

That article earned Breitbart a rebuke from the Southern Poverty Law
Center: In an article posted on that organization’s website, SPLC staffer Stephen Piggott ran down the many recent examples of Breitbart’s racially charged content and then argued that Yiannopoulos and Bokhari’s article represented “possibly its most disturbing piece to date. The piece ignores
the racist views of the Alt-Right founders — white nationalists Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor and others — instead referring to them as the
movement’s ‘intellectuals.’ The piece is a striking example of the
direction the network has moved over the past year.” (Disclosure: Bokhari recently wrote an article that was critical of my reporting on an internet controversy, and I have in the past been critical of Yiannopoulos’s
reporting.)

There is a kernel of truth to the idea that there are some anti-Semitic
Twitter accounts that seem to exist more to provoke outrage by tweeting out offensive content than to express the actual felt sentiment of the person behind them, and this elevation of gonzo ultra-offensiveness to a first-
order virtue is one driving force behind 4chan and other communities where alt-righters gather. But for any Jewish writer with even a bit of internet sophistication, it’s not hard to distinguish these accounts from the many
that are run by actual, real-life Nazis and white supremacists who, if they don’t really and truly hate Jews and view them as part of an attempt to
corrupt the European Union and America, sure do put a lot of time into
playing those roles on Twitter as soon as someone tweets about Trump or the alt-right. Plus, plenty of self-professed white-supremacist and anti-Semite figures, among them David Duke, have explicitly endorsed Trump — it’s not
like the idea of a connection between Trump and white extremism was
conjured up the Donald’s political opponents.

So it’s not surprising that commentators from across the political spectrum have forcefully disagreed with Yiannopoulos’s characterization of the alt- right’s beliefs and motives — many of those commentators, like Shapiro,
solidly conservative. Ian Tuttle argued convincingly in National Review,
for example, that in examining the intellectual roots of the alt-right, any thread you tug on leads invariably back to figures with genuinely racist understandings of human relations.

All of this explains why Shapiro doesn’t spend much time parsing the distinction between “real” and “trolling” online anti-Semitism. “[Yiannopoulos’s] argument seems to be that an alt-right person tweeting a
gas chamber at me in a way that’s indistinguishable from David Duke
tweeting a gas chamber at me, or an alt-right person calling me a cuck
Jewish supremacist, versus David Duke doing the same thing — it’s my

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