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Breitbart.com Editor: Anti-Semitism Is Fine If It’s Just Done For Attention

New York magazine’s Jesse Singal attempts to unpack today the intramural feud between former Breitbart.com editor Ben Shapiro and his former colleagues. Shapiro, an ardent member of the #NeverTrump camp, split from the site after an incident in which his then-colleague Michelle Fields was grabbed by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Shapiro’s refusal to support Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee has fueled a plethora of ugly and bigoted attacks against him, coming in particular from the “Alt-Right” movement.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “the Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that ‘white identity’ is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.” The movement’s “key tenets,” according to SPLC: “Racist ideas. Race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-Immigrant ideas.”

Breitbart.com Technology Editor and Shapiro nemesis Milo Yiannopoulos is one of the Alt-Right movement’s most prominent voices.

Singal quotes Yiannopoulos, who has in the past claimed “matrilineal Jewish heritage,” defending anti-Semitic attacks on conservative journalists:

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.

So, according to a prominent editor of a media company closely associated with the Republican nominee, using the most vile and bigoted language against Jewish reporters is now okay if the goal is just to get a reaction.