They were all friends until the Charlottesville protest happened on the weekend.

Then the so-called “alt-right” bared its fangs, running afoul of Canada’s more euphemistic brand of racism.

The rally to Unite the Right ended up fracturing it instead — at least in Canada.

Exhibit A is the exodus at The Rebel news site, the Canadian Tiki torch bearers of the far right, whose contributors celebrate the deaths of desperate migrants at sea.

An exodus so fast it was hard to keep up with all the names by Tuesday evening.

On Monday, Ezra Levant condemned Richard Spencer, the founder of the supremacist “alt-right” group in a letter to staff and tried to differentiate his philosophy from that of the Charlottesville supremacists.

Then, The Rebel co-founder Brian Lilley went one step further and left the site altogether because “he’s no longer comfortable with it.”

On Tuesday, key contributor Barbara Kay jumped ship, writing a wishy-washy goodbye, still claiming admiration for Levant and reporter Faith Goldy, whose characterization of Charlottesville protesters as “rising white racial consciousness” left even conservatives uncomfortable.

Soon after, contributor John Robson was out, saying he found the tone at The Rebel “too unconstructive.”

Perhaps this marks the end of The Rebel as we know it.

What went wrong between the natural bedfellows conjoined by their demonization of “the other”?

It’s now exposed: Not all whites are equal. And U.S. President Donald Trump’s unhinged press conference on Tuesday in which he once again drew a false moral equivalence between racists and counter-protesters, just cemented that thinking.

White supremacists openly espoused neo-Nazi ideology that singled out Jews as being an inferior, unwanted race or class of people. It was made clear: Jews do not belong.

Now, after years of spouting vitriol about Muslims, about Roma, about Black people, about immigrants, Levant’s note said: “We are not white supremacy. That term now effectively means racism, anti-Semitism and tolerance of neo-Nazism.”

“Like many of you, I had family that fought the Nazis, I never want to be in the same room as one,” Lilley said.

Cue the slow clap.

The likes of Levant and other “white-passing” Jewish people of the far right, are finally realizing that although many of them enjoy the privileges of white people, white supremacy casts upon them the same contemptuous gaze as it does on Black and brown people, that their common divisive ideology was not sufficient glue for true alignment.

Lilley has interviewed me in the past for his Bell Media radio show and he was not hostile; in fact he was friendly and reasonable. However, if he had grown uncomfortable with The Rebel’s ideology, it’s taken far too long for him to show it. And given his contempt of General Roméo Dallaire’s work on child soldiers, I can’t bring myself to feel grateful that the hard right has fewer champions.

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The folks at The Rebel had probably failed to understand the underlying differences between ideologies under the umbrella of white nationalism.

“There has been this bizarre infighting that has gone on within the alt-right groups,” says Lily Herman, a New-York based writer, who recently wrote a piece called “We need to talk about the anti-Semitism at the Charlottesville protest.”

“What do you do when you have white nationalists who are Jewish?”

“Jews actually did fight with the Confederate army in the Civil War which a lot of people don’t know. There were almost equal number of Jews fighting on both sides.”

Herman, who grew up Jewish in Jacksonville, Fla., a place she calls the “Southern tip of the Bible Belt,” also identifies as white. However, she’s puzzled by Jewish white nationalists.

“You know this history of Jewish people in western civilization, so why are you supporting these people who when they say ‘white people’ they mean a ‘pure’ white race?”

There have been incidents of anti-Semitism from The Rebel contributors and Levant was by all accounts sensitive to accusations of being a Nazi apologist. Here, I’m going by what reporter Jonathan Goldsbie writes in Canadaland. I must confess I lost interest in Levant’s brand of journalism long ago and have not kept close track of goings-on there.

Levant’s memo says flying Nazi flags, chanting Nazi slogans and the Nazi salute makes the alt-right racist.

I say being anti-immigration, demonizing people based on identity and then claiming not to believe in identity politics, makes the far-right hypocritical, xenophobic — and racist.

For all the pains Levant takes to draw out the differences, the only line he has drawn to separate his far right from Richard Spencer’s alt-right is one “ism”: Nazism.

Other than that, they still look like mirror images to me.