Ben Stein: Michael Brown Was ‘Armed With His Incredibly Strong, Scary Self’

FILE -In this Nov. 12, 2007 file photo, Ben Stein is interviewed in New York. Monotone TV personality Ben Stein has been stripped of his Sunday New York Times business column because of his work as a pitchman for a ... FILE -In this Nov. 12, 2007 file photo, Ben Stein is interviewed in New York. Monotone TV personality Ben Stein has been stripped of his Sunday New York Times business column because of his work as a pitchman for a credit monitoring company. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, file) MORE LESS
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Conservative pundit Ben Stein appeared on Newsmax on Tuesday to discuss the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and challenged the use of the term “unarmed” to describe Brown.

Stein was discussing the shooting with host Steve Malzberg and said the use of the term “unarmed” to describe Brown, who was “apparently on marijuana,” was akin to “calling Sonny Liston unarmed or Cassius Clay unarmed.”

“He wasn’t unarmed,” Stein said. “He was armed with his incredibly strong, scary self.”

Later, when discussing Attorney General Eric Holder, Stein made a guttural noise and said Holder wasn’t concerned about there being a fair trial, aiming instead for a “lynching jury.”

“It’s a very sad state of affairs,” Stein said. “I mean it used to be, there was a time … when lynchings of African Americans were not that incredibly rare. Now the lynchings are the police and it’s just an outrage.”

Stein finished by claiming that in Brown’s case, as well as Trayvon Martin’s, “it’s the very large, so-called victim attacking the policeman who winds up dead.”

“I mean if they didn’t just, would not attack the policeman, if they would just talk to the policeman in a reasonable way instead of attacking the policeman, nobody would be dead,” Stein said.

In fact, Martin was shot by a neighborhood watch coordinator, George Zimmerman, not a policeman.

Watch the video below, courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

Latest Livewire
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: