Ben Shapiro is decrying what he described as a double standard when it comes to the way health experts responded to recent riots compared to how they first approached the threat from the coronavirus.
“Bill de Blasio, five seconds ago, was basically screaming, ‘You’re going to kill your grandmother, if you went out within a 100-foot radius with another person without a mask on,’ and then he says that as long as you are protesting things that he wants you to protest, then you can breathe all over anybody that you can possibly want to breathe all over,” Shapiro, a conservative commentator and editor of the Daily Wire, said Wednesday on Fox News’s The Story with Martha MacCallum.
Protests spread in multiple cities after George Floyd was killed by a white police officer last week. The demonstrations, in some cases, quickly escalated into several nights of escalated violence, arson, and even shootings.
Weeks before Floyd’s death, protests resulted in multiple states, with demonstrators demanding their political leadership to reopen their economies in the wake of the coronavirus.
Health experts raised concerns about the lack of mask-wearing and social distancing amid recent protests.
Many have said they believe the Floyd protests may lead to an uptick of the coronavirus, but they need to be done to create systemic change.
Recently, a number of health experts signed on an open letter supporting the demonstrations demanding justice for Floyd’s death.
The letter by health experts cites white supremacy as a public health issue that predates and contributes to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Shapiro said the letter showed “unbelievable stupidity.”
“These people are scientists like Dr. Nick is a doctor on The Simpsons,” Shapiro said. “This is madness at a high level. This is the wokest virus in existence, and it only kills people who are out protesting against lockdown while preserving people who are out there protesting against alleged systemic racism, or everybody is lying, and they basically have different priorities. I don’t think that the virus changed, I think the priorities changed.”
President Trump also commented on the difference in responses by local leadership between the two protests.
“You notice that all of these places that our problems are not run by Republicans, they are run by liberal Democrats,” Trump said. “There is something into that philosophy, and they are the ones keeping everybody locked up in their apartments and their homes for too long a period of time, so it is very interesting how that changes.”
