An "alt-right" rally in Vancouver, Washington last month. Credit: Doug Brown
An alt-right rally in Vancouver, Washington last month.
An “alt-right” rally in Vancouver, Washington last month. Doug Brown

Hello. This BuzzFeed story describing a cache of e-mails from Trump officials, Trump donor families, celebrity racists, Breitbart staffers, and sympathizers in the media world is one of the few things worth reading on the Internet today.

One revelation from the piece, “Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream” by reporter Joseph Bernstein, is the alleged correspondence between former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos and an editor for Broadly, a Vice asset “devoted to representing the multiplicity of women’s experiences.”

Bernstein details how both Yiannopoulos and Broadly editor Mitchell Sunderland reportedly participated in an e-mail chain created to make fun of “social justice warriors.” In one e-mail, BuzzFeed reports that Sunderland asked Yiannopoulos to attack former Stranger writer and current New York Times columnist Lindy West in these terms:

“Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos in May 2016, along with a link to an article by the New York Times columnist Lindy West, who frequently writes about fat acceptance. And while Sunderland was Broadly’s managing editor, he sent a Broadly video about the Satanic Temple and abortion rights to Tim Gionet with instructions to “do whatever with this on Breitbart. It’s insane.” The next day, Breitbart published an article titled “‘Satanic Temple’ Joins Planned Parenthood in Pro-Abortion Crusade.”

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Vice spokesperson wrote, “We are shocked and disappointed by this highly inappropriate and unprofessional conduct. We just learned about this and have begun a formal review into the matter.”

On Twitter, where so many of these alt-right media strategies originally gained momentum, some are calling for Sunderland to be fired.

Others—like these women in media, for example—are unsurprised that sentiments like Sunderland’s can be found in media circles.

Sydney Brownstone writes about the environment, sexual assault, and general news for The Stranger. In 2017, her boss and Pulitzer winner Eli Sanders nominated her coverage of Seattle porn scammer Matt...