Jesse Singal writes for NYMag.com:
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.
Jesse Singal only provides two points of view — those of Ben Shapiro and of himself.
