As The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti reported earlier this evening, The Washington Post allowed Talia Lavin, a “guest instructor” at New York University’s journalism program, to scurrilously tar and feather Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro over his alleged imaginary stoking of racial flames against Muslims in the aftermath of the horrific burning of Paris’ iconic Notre Dame Cathedral.
As Zanotti reported:
Lavin, a “guest instructor” for New York University’s journalism program, made her ridiculous claims in the storied Washington Post, which published her op-ed entitled, “How the far right spread politically convenient lies about the Notre Dame fire.” In it, she alleges, without regard to the political position of the commentator or the real meaning of their words, that just as the first flames were licking the roof of Notre Dame, conservative writers set about to pushing conspiracy theories on how the fire started, apparently in the hopes of inciting violence against Muslims.
It’s not immediately clear how Lavin came to her conclusions … but she does know, it seems, that writers and commentators share an affinity for “dark conclusions,” and that Ben Shapiro, whom she refers to as a “fast-talking far-right pundit,” is among the leaders of the movement.
Shapiro, she claims, blew a dog-whistle for anti-Muslim violence when he commented that Notre Dame was a “monument to Western civilization” and “Judeo-Christian heritage.” To drive her point home, she juxtaposed Shapiro with Richard Spencer, perhaps the best known American neo-Nazi, as if Shapiro had anything to do with Spencer, whom Shapiro has repeatedly and vociferously condemned.
Comparing Shapiro to Spencer is about as true a sign of being an utterly insipid dunderhead as one could possibly concoct. Spencer is a notorious “alt-right” Jew-hating provocateur, and Shapiro was the single most targeted journalist during the 2016 election precisely due, in part, to his consistently staunch criticisms of the anti-Semitic “alt-right.”
“This, from [Talia Lavin] in The Washington Post, is the sheerest form of disgusting bulls***,” Shapiro tweeted. “I blamed no one for the Notre Dame fire, since it was an accident by all available evidence, and imputing malicious intent to me is simply gross.”
Alas, “watchdog” left-wing, pro-Clinton activist group Media Matters for America (MMFA) then saw fit to chime in. And what a doozy it was.
In an astonishing reply tweet that has somehow still not been deleted, MMFA replied back to Shapiro with, “F*** you and the burro you rode in on.”
Shapiro, screen-shotting the MMFA tweet in case the left-wing activist group subsequently deletes it, snarkily replied on his own: “I very much look forward to the media continuing to quote this garbage smear organization as a ‘media watchdog’ in every ‘objective’ news article.”
Shapiro is no stranger to MMFA, having written a Daily Wire piece just last month entitled, “Media Matters Makes America A Worse Place, One Bad Faith Hit At A Time”:
This was, from the first, an obvious political hit. Media Matters, contrary to media descriptions, isn’t a “media watchdog organization.” It is a political smear factory designed to perform precisely that function against anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. The organization was founded by professional smear artist David Brock, in conjunction with the Center for American Progress, an organization itself founded by John Podesta, the Clinton White House Chief of Staff. Hillary Clinton herself advised Brock on the creation of the organization. Mega-donor Leftist George Soros has poured money into the organization, announcing in 2010, “Media Matters is one of the few groups that attempts to hold Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.” Media Matters had regular strategy calls with the Obama White House.
For years, Media Matters has operated as an aggressive wing of Clintonworld, going so far as to suggest hiring private investigators to dig up dirt on Fox News hosts. Media Matters consistently attempts to tear down conservative hosts by either ripping them out of context or by digging up old Bad Things™, then astroturfing public pressure against advertisers. In reality, no real grassroots pressure exists in the vast majority of cases; the data show that secondary boycotts actually don’t materialize. But Media Matters simply contacts its list of activists, then has them contact advertisers, saying that they’ll stop using a product if that advertiser doesn’t pull its advertising. A few tweets or well-placed phone calls can knock an advertiser off a show. This last tactic, the launching of secondary boycotts, has been successfully used against advertisers across a broad range of conservative programming; advertisers are, understandably, risk averse, and so take any sign of discontent as a rationale for pulling their money. This leads, eventually, to the complete abandonment of advertisers support on political shows — at least from the right.
Alas, even after MMFA savagely and grotesquely goes after a prominent conservative commentator in defense of an indefensibly defamatory Washington Post screed, do not get your hopes up for the mainstream media to start treating MMFA like the left-wing militant aggressor that it is.