Ben Shapiro, no doubt hoping for a permanent Fox News gig, took a page out of Tucker Carlson’s playbook and defended the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a civil rights issue for white people and men.
Shapiro currently hosts a limited-run “election special” that is clearly more about trying out Shapiro for a permanent show than about delving into election weeds. Which is probably a good thing given that Shapiro has no actual credentials on the subject, unless you consider hating on liberals a credential.
But if Shapiro is supposed to provide a fresh, millennial face on Fox, his Kavanaugh shtick sounded a lot like the white nationalist, men’s rights cloaked in concern-for-equality shtick we get every weeknight from 49-year old Carlson.
Media Matters caught Shapiro channeling Carlson last night (emphases added):
SHAPIRO: I mean, it is kind of shocking to say that due process should not apply to men. I mean, that is the essence of sexism, the idea that certain rules should not apply to people on the basis of their genetics. That’s obviously discrimination of the highest order, but this is the world in which we now live in, in which white men are presumed guilty because they are white men, because they are supposedly in a position of privilege. I wasn’t aware that Brett Kavanaugh forfeited his presumption of innocence or due process of law simply because of the color of his skin or the nature of his genetics.
In fairness, Shapiro was egged on to this position by host Martha MacCallum. She said that Donald Trump had “raised the issue of men and young men and boys and the environment that they are in” during his rally the night before, Then MacCallum played a clip of Alyssa Milano saying that because women have been the underdogs for so long, "the pendulum has to shift" even if that means “men have a hard time right now.” Milano was clearly not talking about oppressing men in favor of women. But MacCallum described the comments before playing them as “basically say[ing] ‘Cry me a river’ when it comes to men.”
MacCallum asked for and got the above reaction from Shapiro after the clip. She responded to the Carlsonism with approval. “Yeah, she said, “It’s a very interesting argument.”
So it’s quite possibly not just Shapiro’s idea to emulate Carlson but Fox News' desire to clone Carlson onto a younger face. Whatever the reason, the last thing the country needs now is more of that poison.
Watch it below, from the October 3, 2018 The Story with Martha MacCallum.
