Fox's Chris Wallace ignores Ben Shapiro's history of bigotry and misinformation
Written by Grace Bennett
Published
In his weekly “power player of the week” segment, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace presented a glowing profile of former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro without acknowledging Shapiro’s history of bigotry, extremism, and misinformation.
On the December 10 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace lauded Shapiro’s “special brand of combative conservatism,” and noted that his “militant conservative views” sometimes “spur protests.” What Wallace failed to tell his viewers is that Shapiro has a long track record of promoting racism, sexism, and extremism. In addition to Shapiro’s bigotry, he also has a penchant for misinformation,.
Shapiro frequently expresses anti-Muslim and racist views, once tweeting that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.” He is quick to downplay police brutality, arguing that, “if you don’t commit a crime, you’re not going to be arrested for it,” and has claimed that income inequality between races in the United States “has nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture.”
It is not the first time that Wallace has ignored the obvious failings of his weekly “power players,” nor is it the first time that media outlets have failed to hold Shapiro accountable for his hateful and dangerous views. Just last month, The New York Times published a flattering portrait of Shapiro, referring to him as “the cool kid’s philosopher.” From the December 10 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday:
CHRIS WALLACE (HOST): If you've ever wondered who will eventually succeed Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity as the voice of conservative opinion, it may just be Ben Shapiro. Who's that? Here's our power player of the week.
BEN SHAPIRO: In a free country, it is up to you to succeed or fail on your own merits. So, get off your ass and do it.
WALLACE: Yes, Ben Shapiro talks fast. But then for most of his 33 years, he’s been a man in a hurry.
[BEGIN VIDEO]
SHAPIRO: I’m Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
[END VIDEO]
WALLACE: He’s the host of the most listened to conservative podcast in the country.
[BEGIN VIDEO]
SHAPIRO: I do like that that Trump does have a rotating series of about 10 insults that just keeps going around and around.
[END VIDEO]
WALLACE: He’s the editor of The Daily Wire, which gets 100 million pageviews a month. And he’s a big presence on college campuses, where his militant conservative views spur protests.
[BEGIN VIDEO]
SHAPIRO: You’re not a man if you think you’re a man.
WALLACE: This exchange with a 22-year-old college student over transgender identity has attracted 47 million views on Facebook.
SHAPIRO: Why can’t you identify as 60? What is the problem with you identifying as 60?
[INAUDIBLE]
SHAPIRO: You’re right. Age is significantly less important than gender. You can’t magically change your gender. You can’t magically change your sex. You can’t magically change your age.
[END VIDEO]
WALLACE: At the University of Utah, he listed what he calls the hierarchy of victimhood in America.
[BEGIN VIDEO]
SHAPIRO: So, there’s LGBTQ, and then black folks. Then there’s Hispanic folks. And then women. And then Jews. And then Asians. And then way down at the bottom, white, straight males. Right? Those are the people who are at the very bottom. And then their opinions do not matter at all.
[END VIDEO]
WALLACE: Shapiro has been called the voice of conservative millennials. How are conservative millennials different from conservative baby boomers?
SHAPIRO: By the time a lot of conservatives hit baby boomer age, there's a mentality that’s set in that they're always losing and that every choice, every political choice particularly, is a lesser of two evils choice. If you’re conservative millennial, I think that you tend to be a little bit more idealistic, just as younger people are generally.
WALLACE: While he applauds some of President Trump’s policies, he says the tweets are needlessly divisive and turn off his generation.
SHAPIRO: Young people in the United States dramatically dislike this administration and they dramatically dislike the Republican Party. And it is President Trump’s responsibility, for conservatives anyway, to fix that. And sitting there on Twitter and retweeting Britain First is not going to do that.
WALLACE: Shapiro worked for Breitbart in the campaign, but quit when he said it was turning into a Trump propaganda arm. As for Steve Bannon:
SHAPIRO: I think that Steve is very interested in being perceived as powerful, as being perceived as a mover and shaker. But I don’t think he’s nearly as much of a mover and shaker as he wants to be seen as.
WALLACE: As we said, Shapiro has always moved fast. At age five, he dressed for Halloween as John Adams. By age 17, he wrote a nationally syndicated political column.
SHAPIRO: I skipped a couple of grades. I was a virtuosic violinist. I actually, when I went to college, thought that I was going to double major in genetic science and music. So, I was always pretty driven.
[BEGIN VIDEO]
SHAPIRO: Things that I hate.
[END VIDEO]
WALLACE: And his only plan now is to keep pushing his special brand of combative conservatism.
SHAPIRO: Sometimes the best way to get a message across is to just speak bluntly. And so, I'm not going there to deliberately offend people. I'm saying things that I think are true with precisely the amount of verve I think necessary to convey the message.