The Dangerous Subtlety of Shapiro’s Take on the Floyd Court Case
It’s probably safe to say that most of us often prefer a fiery political take on social media or YouTube over the consumption of information from an established source. But do these videos add to the Gish gallop age of misinformation? And are they detrimental to the modern young mind overwhelmed with a conveyor belt of high speed information distracted with modern life and little time for nuance? Recently, a young family member of mine sent me a Ben Shapiro video entitled “Are The Correct Charges Being Applied In The George Floyd Case?” In it, he argues that upping Derek Chauvin’s murder charge from 3rd degree to 2nd degree is wrong because the Attorney General, Keith Ellison, is acting out of public pressure.
Shapiro is a well known reactionary who is famous for his “leftist take down” videos of naive young people challenging him in a room full of ardent fans, where bad faith arguments flow like the rivers of Minnetonka and truth doesn’t matter all that much.
Like everybody’s favorite U.S. president, Ben always wins. He is also very active on social media through his website, the Daily Wire, where he produces a lot of content on politics and current affairs. To the young mind, this fast talking swindler appears to be searching for some kind of objective truth when he talks of morality and values. The reality is that he has a very skewed worldview and has been caught more than once paying for shady and hateful Facebook pages to boost his algorithm.
In the aforementioned clip, Shapiro attempts to back his claims with different accounts from conservative media like the Daily Signal and the Heritage Foundation. His sums up what the 3rd and 2nd degree murder charges would separately entail for the prosecution to prove and asserts that it is very important the AG gets it right because the officer should go to jail for the crime he “actually committed.”
Shapiro slyly leaves out what he personally thinks the AG should charge him with, saying that Chauvin obviously committed “an assault, or actually, a battery.” Later, he says that the officer “should go to jail,” but questions under what crime? If you watch the video, your ears aren’t failing you. His basic argument is that because the 2nd degree might not stick in court, they should consider charging him with felony assault or battery. What an SJW!
Completely unrelated to the Floyd case, Shapiro casually smears AG, Keith Ellison, as an anti-Semite Antifa supporter and a previously “bad” congressman without any context or proof. According to Shapiro, Mr. Ellison, a black man, is charging Chauvin with a higher degree because of the political pressure coming from those “outside of the justice system…based on public outrage” and they are trying to “agitate.” If we know anything about black history, this sounds a lot like good old fashioned dog whistling.
You would think that the legal minds in Minneapolis are completely unaware that the 2nd degree requires the intent to kill because Shapiro tells us that from merely “looking at the video, it doesn’t look like you can prove it.”
This fast talking pundit is basically arguing that his viewing of the tapes is proof enough that there is no intent to kill. After listening to him spend a considerable amount of time speed reading laws and coming to his conclusions, one can’t help but ask why is he arguing for felony assault or battery? Is it because it comes with a much lesser sentence?
Of course, he’s smart enough to give himself an out by saying Chauvin should definitely go to jail, no matter the charge, setting himself up for saying “I told you so” if Chauvin gets acquitted on 2nd degree.
He also slides in his opinion on the three other cops who did nothing to stop Chauvin from murdering George Floyd. Without any hesitation, he says that aiding and abetting is going be hard to argue when those officers “were just standing there.”
He goes on to say that you need to prepare the American people for all the nuances of the justice system. He doesn’t really specify who should be directly doing the “preparing” of the American people. One can only assume he means Ellison or the big bad leftist media he always complains about. If you don’t, according to Shapiro, people are going to say that the American Justice system is racist.
That is the crux of his video and where he has been trying to get to at all along. In a number of other YouTube videos, Shapiro simplifies and conflates individual racism claims with systemic racism. While he has no qualms agreeing individual racist cops exist, he will tell you that you are chasing ghosts when you make systemic racism claims.
It’s great that he wants the American people to be educated with the nuances of the justice system. What about the pitfalls? Nowhere in his rant about the Floyd case does he talk about qualified immunity or about any of the other myriad of reasons the police face little to no legal consequences. This begs the question; if the AG has to go through hurdles just to make any guilty charge stick, might that not be an indicator that the justice system serves the interests of the police over the victims that they abuse?
In other words, the individual agent within a system doesn’t have to be an outright racist. Most agents are not racist at all, barring the implicit prejudices they have like all other humans do. But it doesn’t then follow that the system doesn’t protect them from abuse when there is overwhelming empirical data that black people are disproportionately policed and assaulted. This is another point you will never find in Shapiro’s videos when he talks of disproportionate black crime. He conveniently forgets to mention the compounding historic reasons behind disproportionate amounts of policing in black communities.
The white woman who asserts her power based on all of our cultural signifiers by calling on those same agents of authority to silence a black birdwatcher is tied into that system as well. She didn’t say anything racist. But, she did it by lying about how he was about to physically harm her. If Shapiro is sincere in his attempts to understand the full picture, it will become clear to him that ignoring the police issue has not helped the problem go away. The mere fact that most of the hard data collected thus far came from journalists is an indication that there hasn’t been much done from the government or the police to rectify the problem.
WHY ARE THESE TYPES OF VIDEOS DANGEROUS?
Shapiro is literally planting seeds in the minds of his listeners (who already have these biases to begin with) in the name of justice, insinuating that black victims are getting favorable treatment and the proof is that the AG upped the charge because of public pressure.
At some point in the video, there is a cutaway of Ellison saying that “one prosecution will not rectify the hurt that people feel,” reiterating the black community’s angst at these repeating cases. Shapiro waves this off as more or less a conspiracy and says that Ellison is catering to the public and “perpetuating the idea that the justice system doesn’t work, even if it works.”
He goes on to mention a Magic Johnson tweet and implies that Ellison is acting on behalf of the black community as well as public pressure.
These types of videos spread on social media like wildfire and are worrisome because they manipulate young people’s preferences for watching a witty ten minute YouTube clip over reading a book on the history of police and the justice system, for example.
By watching Shapiro, they too can become “experts” and know everything there is to know about race relations, police culture, and the law, without ever having to plug in historic perspective while spouting on the virtues of personal responsibility and how systemic racism doesn’t exist.
These historically driven and complex issues are painted in a vacuum and what you often find in these circles are regurgitated statistics about “black on black” crime rates that are meant to deter the question of police brutality.
Ben Shapiro and other famous YouTube reactionaries have a history of fighting against progress and social change and they are now trying to hijack the minds of young people in the name of “objective truth” and “justice” while continuing to subtly inject their skewed views.
This may be the age of misinformation but it is genuinely scary that young people are losing their actual potential for empathy and real change by lazily inheriting certain kinds of ideology from bad actors like Ben Shapiro.
