Ben Shapiro, conservative activist and editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, dedicated a portion of his daily podcast to airing his grievances over fawning media coverage of the new Marvel superhero film “Black Panther,” mocking African Americans who are excited about the film’s majority black casting.
In an episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show” uploaded yesterday, Shapiro dedicated a segment to expressing his frustration that entertainment media has focused on the release of “Black Panther,” which is the first world-release superhero movie to feature a majority black cast and be directed by an African American. Shapiro expressed disdain for the media attention surrounding the cultural significance of the movie’s release.
“Everyone in the media is talking about the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity, or at least since Caitlyn Jenner became a woman—a transgender woman—and that, of course, is the release of ‘Black Panther’. It is so deeply important,” Shapiro said, mockingly.
“We’ve heard it’s deeply important to millions of black Americans, who after all were not liberated from slavery 200 years ago and liberated by the civil rights movement with federal legislation, have not been gradually restored to what always should have been full civil rights in the United States. None of that has mattered up till they made a Marvel movie about a superhero who is black in a country filled with black people. ‘Blade’ was not enough. ‘Catwoman’ with Halle Berry, no. OK, Wakanda is where it is,” Shapiro said.
He continued sarcastically, “This is the most important moment in black American history, not Martin Luther King, not Frederick Douglass, not the Civil War, not the end of Jim Crow, none of that, not Brown vs. Board—the most important thing is that Chadwick Boseman puts claws on his hands and a mask on his face and runs around jumping off cars in CGI fashion—deeply, deeply important. Black children everywhere will now believe that they too can be superheroes who jump off cars in fictional countries.”
Shapiro said that he loathed the media coverage surrounding “Black Panther” because he disliked “identity politics” and had never complained as “an Orthodox Jewish kid” that no presidents have been Orthodox Jews. He went on to compare the release of “Black Panther” to the election of President Barack Obama.
“We heard this about Barack Obama when he was elected, too. ‘Now that Obama has been president, black Americans will feel like they too can be presidents. It’s a transformative moment.’ Yet, all we hear now is that America is deeply racist and that black people are still systemically discriminated against and that black people are still victims in America society. So, it turns out it didn’t mean anything,” Shapiro said.
Later in the podcast, Shapiro apparently felt it was important to explain to black people that the fictional setting of “Black Panther,” a country named Wakanda where superhuman heroes fight crime, is not a real place.
“Sorry to break it to you folks, Wakanda is not a real place,” Shapiro said. “It does not exist.”
(h/t Cody Johnston)
