The Conversation (0)
Joe Sommerlad
Jun 06, 2019
Right-wing American political commentator Ben Shapiro, last seen making a chump of himself on the BBC's Politics Live with Andrew Neil, has once again blundered his way into controversy.
Amid a slew of patriotic tweets about D-Day on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, The Daily Wire's editor-in-chief compared the concerns of contemporary Americans unfavourably with the heroism demonstrated by GIs on 6 June 1944 in storming the beaches of northern France, a pivotal moment in the fightback against Nazi Germany.
Young Americans whining about people making mean jokes about them on YouTube and demanding censorship, you say?
As Media Matters editor Parker Molloy was quick to point out, Shapiro's words serve as a fairly exact summary of precisely the sort of content his own Daily Wire spends much of its time covering.
Molloy's accompanying videos list all the articles The Daily Wire have written about comedians Kathy Griffin and Samantha Bee, frequent critics of the Trump administration who have made fun of everyone from Ivanka and Melania to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, ex-Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Griffin is notorious for posing with a replica of President Trump's severed head, a stunt for which she was forced to apologise that has made her a hate figure to the American right ever since.
As Molloy notes, Shapiro - or BS for short - managed to prolong the controversies surrounding these MAGA antagonists by calling for their resignations, keeping his site's various stories about them going for weeks and ensuring The Daily Wire was able to pick up valuable additional web traffic by playing to their audience's appetite for outrage.
She also suggests Shapiro was referring specifically to Vox video producer Carlos Maza in his D-Day tweet.
Maza recently complained about conservative YouTube personality Steven Crowder making homophobic slurs against him, forcing the site to investigate the Louder with Crowder host.
In an earlier tweet, Shapiro had defended Crowder's words by arguing they were not offensive because he is a comedian, a defence blowing a hole in his own site's routine assaults on Griffin and Bee.
Maybe he should just talk less.
Molloy's tweets naturally prompted a deluge of abuse to rain down on Shapiro, with many questioning his own lack of heroism in running out on the Neil interview last month.