Talia Lavin smears Ben Shapiro and once again claims victimhood

In her piece headlined, “How the far right spread politically convenient lies about the Notre Dame fire,” Lavin offers the following ridiculous logical train about Shapiro’s completely innocuous comments about the history and civilization represented by Notre Dame Cathedral:

The juxtaposition of Shapiro, who was the single most targeted journalist by anti-Semites on the internet during the 2016 election according to the Anti-Defamation League, with Richard Spencer, a literal neo-Nazi, is on its own patently absurd. But even more disgusting and willfully dishonest is Lavin’s read of Shapiro’s commentary, which he had offered in his podcast and then with a link on Twitter. Shapiro’s assertion on Twitter that the cathedral was a “central monument to Western civilization, which was built on the Judeo-Christian heritage,” had been a rebuke of a sophomoric attack from Briahna Joy Gray, the national press secretary of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

As intellectually stunted as Gray’s contention was, it had nothing to do with whether Shapiro was dog whistling against Islam, a patently absurd contention. Instead, they sparred over whether God and Judeo-Christian values have a direct correlation with Western civilization. (Which they do.)

So, Lavin willfully and shameless smeared Shapiro, not only branding him an Islamophobe but also strongly insinuating that he’s inciting literal terrorism. This is a pattern of behavior for her. It certainly doesn’t pass the threshold of defamation, but Lavin has no journalistic integrity. That the eighth-most-read newspaper on the internet and across the globe deemed her suitable for publication is unconscionable.

Precisely because Lavin’s smear was so obviously untrue and unfair, everyone an inch to the right of Joe Biden and beyond rightly defended Shapiro in response. But the truly aggravating aspect of this fool’s errand is Lavin’s propensity to jump from histrionic attack dog to poor little victim.

First, Lavin’s former employers at Media Matters (yes, surely you’re surprised at that) were quick to grant her the same sort of cover she spent most of the evening retweeting:

Lavin’s playbook is goes like this:

1. Baselessly smears someone without doing a modicum of research.

2. Pretends to be a victim rather than a public figure when rightly called out for her lies.

3. Then doubles down in a tantrum while her allies try to grant her cover.

Again, she literally had to resign from the New Yorker for wrongly accusing a disabled veteran of having a Nazi tattoo. It was actually the symbol of his platoon from when he laid his life on the line for this country in Afghanistan.

Then, when New York University hired her to teach — I kid you not — reporting on the far-right, Fox News host Laura Ingraham rightly lambasted the school for hiring someone so utterly devoid of journalistic integrity to teach journalism. That’s when Lavin broke out stage two of her playbook, whining online that Ingraham would discuss li’l-ole-her on a news segment.

Here’s a little reality check, not just to Lavin, but also to members of the media everywhere: We are all public figures. If you want people to read your work and influence public discourse, clearly, you do not actually believe that you’re unimportant or insignificant.

Our personal lives are off-limits, but what we publish and anything relating to our public work are totally fair game. I have a third of the Twitter followers that Lavin does, and I receive online threats or targeted harassment at least once a week. But even when left-wing media outlets take my writing to task, I would never, ever accuse them of going below the belt unless they deliberately misrepresented my work or literally called for readers to “dox” my personal details or threaten me. This is the contract you agree to when you join the media. If you can’t handle the heat, get out of the damn kitchen.

In the final step of Lavin’s playbook in this latest controversy, the Washington Post updated the piece to include Shapiro’s refutation. Even so, Lavin continued to double down.

There are plenty of left-wing figures, even radical ones like the Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig, with whom conservatives have no problem engaging in meaningful discussions. But Lavin has neither the brains of a thinker nor the ethics of a decent journalist. She is also an immature coward who oscillates between demanding the authority of the Washington Post and then claiming that she’s just a widdle 29-year-old who shouldn’t be publicly scrutinized. People like her are not worth our time or attention, and even when their life drama forces its way into your social media feeds, they are not worth your respect.