The Daily Wire's conservative host Ben Shapiro has responded to a prank that put him in the rather peculiar position of being the head of an Antifa recruitment website, calling the author of the joke a "piece of garbage" and his act indicative of the modern "radical left" in his latest podcast.
The website was pretending to recruit for the Antifa movement and had Shapiro's name and work email embedded in the site's web code. The news of the conservative host's alleged attempt to "recruit" for the movement, often labelled as radical left, was soon spread by the anti-Trump political action committee the Lincoln Project, and was reportedly spread by "big names on the left", resulting in a surge of hate mail dropping into Shapiro's email inbox.
"So over the weekend, I start receiving all of these bizarre emails [from] people just cursing me out, which is like, kind of a normal weekend, but a little bit more than a normal weekend; and people saying they want to join Antifa emailing me", Shapiro said.
The person behind the prank, Adam Rahuba, didn't hide the fact that he was behind setting Shapiro up as the person behind the website, apparently seeking to catfish potential Antifa supporters. He boasted about the prank going "viral", erroneously alleging that the conservative host would play a "victim" soon and also urged followers to donate money to his web wallet to support similar pranks in the future.
Since this prank is going viral and we know he’ll spin it to play victim:
— Adam Rahuba (Leader of Antifa) (@adam_rahuba) August 10, 2020
- Ben Shapiro did not set up a fake Antifa site.
- I thought it’d be fun to “hide” his name in the source code.
- I am not acting as a part of any leftist group.
- I did it because I think he’s a turd.
Responding to his conduct, Shapiro suggested that Rahuba's ultimate goal was to raise money and annoy him, adding that it was indicative of the behaviour purportedly practised by the "radical left".
"This piece of garbage decided to put my name in a fake Antifa recruiting website to make my life more annoying [...] and then the person tried to raise money off of it. This just shows you where the heads are at for the radical left, and this went around as if it were real. There were, like, big names on the left who were promoting this garbage and it was perfectly obvious it was garbage from the very beginning", the Daily Wire host concluded.
