Top Right Wing Podcaster Victim-Blames Tyre Nichols

Ben Shapiro racks up views by “reacting” to video of deadly police beating

By David Andrew Stoler, February 1, 2023

In a reaction video posted this Tuesday on YouTube, Daily Wire founder and your College-Age Nephew’s Second Favorite Podcaster Ben Shapiro did what was 100 percent expected, spending nearly 15 minutes victim-blaming Tyre Nichols. Predictable, yes, but don’t ever say Shapiro doesn’t know where his bread is buttered: the clip ka-chinged Shapiro’s YouTube channel to the tune of 150,000 views and climbing as of this writing.

It’s no shock it’s doing so well: reaction videos have been all the rage since 2007 and the infamous 2 Girls 1 Cup, a video to which even the reactions are too gross to link to here. Whether they’re about music, TikTok mashups, or that stalwart, Kids Being Kids, they draw millions of views following a standard format: a video of someone watching a video and reacting. It’s like keeping the camera on the audience during America’s Funniest Home Videos, and people love it.

For Shapiro, who styles himself an erudite intellectual, they’ve been both big hits and as clear a sign as any that he’s not above massive pandering for views: his reactions to things like “INSANE woke tiktoks” and “EVEN MORE INSANE woke tiktoks” feature prominently on his YouTube Channel for good reason, as they average 2.66 million views each — beating his “Sunday Special” shows by ten times, and more than double his standard podcast viewership.

Murder Through Ben’s Eyes

Shapiro begins the Tyre Nichols reaction with a rant about what he calls liberal “Single Factor Analysis” – his pseudo-intellectualized term for confirmation bias. “White supremacy,” he says sarcastically, “is responsible for literally everything in life. If you’re a left-winger on race everything looks like white supremacy.”

He can hardly contain his glee as he reads the names of the police officers charged with Nichols beating and murder – they’re all black! And they killed a black man! See, it can’t be racist — and he doesn’t pause for a second to consider the role of institutional racism in policing, regardless of the race of individual officers. Single Factor Analysis, indeed.

Shapiro then focuses on the video of Nichols’s murder itself, and how the 29-year-old was only “trying to ‘half’ comply” [air-quotes his] with police officers before getting up and running. This makes room for conservatives favorite solution to police violence: “Never run away from the cops,” Shapiro says – as if he ever had the need to do so. “It is a stupid thing to do.”

Shapiro takes similar umbrage with Nichols’s claims of innocence when police rush his car and yell at him to get “f**ing” out of it. “[This] of course is not the proper response to the police when they start yelling at you.”

Brutal Maybe, But Not Nearly Criminal

Shapiro watches as Nichols is violently assaulted, tasered, and pinned to the ground. But when – somehow – Nichols gets up and runs from the officers, Shapiro says, “At this point, nothing untoward has happened.”

After Nichols is re-apprehended, pepper sprayed multiple times, and beaten up, Shapiro admits things “get wild,” and seems to think it’s all because Nichols – who is rubbing his beaten head and pepper-sprayed eyes – won’t behave. “They’re telling him over and over to give them the hands, he’s not giving them the hands, he’s already run away once.”

When Nichols lies prone between four officers who are now beating him with their nightsticks, Shapiro doesn’t let it go. That Nichols is trying to block the blows shows, “He’s still not complying,” Shapiro says. “The officer is using the baton on him to get him to comply.”

“Here’s where things get out of control,” Shapiro says for the third time – as if the previous kicking, night-sticking and pepper-spraying were some other kind of “out of control.”

Shapiro then admits, nearly defeated by what he’s seeing, “[Nichols] doesn’t appear to be…physically free…and they’re still hitting him.” But that doesn’t stop Shapiro from rallying. “It looks like police brutality,” he says. “[But] spraying him with pepper spray while he is refusing to comply with demands to put his hands behind his back…that does not nearly look criminal.”

Shapiro never returns to the liberals-blame-everything-on-White-Supremacy argument with which he began his reaction. Perhaps what he saw on the tape actually affected him; more likely he was distracted by all the coin he was going to make ripping on LGBTQ+ and other minorities later in the week.

David Andrew Stoler’s writing has appeared in the Guardian, Politico, and McSweeney’s, among many others. He is the founder of misanthropictures, an independent film company whose award-winning work tells the stories of the traditionally underrepresented.

Interested in more news about right-wing media curated especially for mainstream audiences? Subscribe to our free daily newsletter.