As Twitchy reported earlier this week, BuzzFeed sent out a tweet about a man who vandalized a synagogue with Nazi symbols and suggested that reading Ben Shapiro sent him on his “road to radicalization” — at least that’s what he told federal agents … or was it?
BuzzFeed deleted that tweet and replaced it with a corrected one in which it was the man’s wife who was reading Ben Shapiro, and perhaps he vandalized the synagogue to please her.
Caleb Howe writes in a column for Mediaite that BuzzFeed still hasn’t gotten the story straight.
Strike Two! BuzzFeed’s Retraction of a Ben Shapiro Headline is Also Wrong (Column by @CalebHowe) https://t.co/kAf87tODGv
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) May 28, 2019
Howe writes:
… The original tweet said that “A man who vandalized a synagogue with Nazi symbols told federal agents his road to radicalization included meeting with the far-right group Identity Evropa and reading Ben Shapiro, Breitbart News, and the Nazi propaganda site Stormfront.”
That is wrong because the man didn’t tell federal agents that.
Then they retracted it with a snarkastic “fake but true” correction that says “We have deleted this tweet because it was inaccurate: the man told prosecutors his road to radicalization included his wife reading Ben Shapiro, Breitbart News, and the Nazi propaganda site Stormfront.”
And that is wrong, also. The man also did not tell prosecutors that.
In fact, as the court documents show, the man’s LAWYER brought up Shapiro prior to sentencing in hopes of mitigation, in the context of naming his WIFE as the one who radicalized him. The defendant’s attorney said that the wife read Shapiro, to the court. The “man” did not tell “prosecutors” anything of the kind.
This is directly from the sentencing memorandum.
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So this is still wrong. After looking at the FBI interview doc, it appears the only place @benshapiro’s name appears is in a sentencing document, submitted by the defense, arguing (weirdly) that this guy was radicalized by others and did the crime to please his wife. https://t.co/pRm3hAwp6B
— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) May 28, 2019
The news even made The Washington Post, and again, Ben Shapiro is lumped in with Fox News (?) and Nazi propaganda site Stormfront.
The media will let a lawyer build his client’s defense by blaming conservatives like @benshapiro for this while still giving a pass to all the left wing groups who demonstrably radicalized James Hodgkinson. https://t.co/c208mr2LRV
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) May 28, 2019
It's even weirder than that. The document that mentions @benshapiro was just a standard plea for leniency in sentencing, not even a trial doc! He waited until after it was all over and he was facing jailtime to suddenly decide he'd been conned into being a Nazi. https://t.co/fbtrrjb7iu
— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) May 28, 2019
The weirdest thing of all is how the media has been conned into thinking Shapiro is some sort of “alt-right” extremist — no wonder they’re so anxious to feature him in stories like this one.
Related:
Stay tuned: BuzzFeed’s hit piece linking Ben Shapiro to synagogue vandalism is ‘evolving’ https://t.co/XiIbgL8aiU
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) May 27, 2019
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