As President Trump is pressured to substantively respond to the rise in
anti-Semitic incidents since his election, a new analysis reveals that
Breitbart News under Trump's chief strategist Stephen Bannon fostered a
comment section — a sample of Breitbart’s readership — that increasingly
reflected language specific to the white nationalist “alt-right”
movement, including anti-Semitic sentiment.
Comparing the language of Breitbart commenters to the language of the most aggressive far-right extremists online
— e.g. language used by Twitter users who advocate for violence against
minorities and are openly pro-Nazi — we can see a clear trend of
increasing similarity over a three-year period, the bulk of it under
Bannon. Bannon left Breitbart to join the Trump campaign in mid-August
2016 but the editorial focus of the site stayed the course he set it
on.
Click on the graph to increase its size.
Diving deeper into anti-Semitic sentiment we see a similar trajectory.
In early 2013, the term “Jewish” was used in a similar way as “white” or
“black” as a racial/ethnic descriptor, which is similar to how "Jewish"
is used in the mainstream press. By 2016 on Breitbart, however,
“Jewish” had morphed into an epithet, used in similar contexts as
“socialist” or “commie.”
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