Ben Shapiro made a comparison between voting lines and waiting in a line at an amusement park in an attempt to defend Georgia’s new voting laws and the idea went over about as well as you’d expect.
The new laws passed last week add a lot of restrictions to voting, including requiring identification for mail voting and making it illegal to take food or water to voters in line. Hollywood has considered a boycott of filming in Georgia as a result, though Tyler Perry cautioned against such a move.
During his show on Wednesday, Shapiro said of the new law, “Jim Crow explicitly created a separate system of law for Black Americans and treated them as inferior. There is nothing in the law like that … The law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots. Well, clearly that’s racist. I mean, you mean you have to show that you are who you say you are when you go vote absentee. If you can explain to me how that’s racist, I’m willing to hear it.”
Then Shapiro dropped his big analogy, saying, “By the way, voter suppression doesn’t involve long lines any more than long lines at Disneyland are ride suppression. You know what voter suppression is? Voter suppression is where you don’t get to vote.”
Reactions to Ben Shapiro’s comparison came in swift and hard.
“Who will ever forget how civil rights proponents who fought for decades to pass the 14th Amendment, giving Black people the right to take a ride on Magic Mountain?” comedian Devin Green tweeted (from the account of his character, Betty Bowers). “Or how long it took to pass the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to ride the teacups at Disneyland?”
“Ah yes, the 28th Amendment, protecting the right to ride Splash Mountain,” Dab Saltzstein, a deputy editor at the New York Times tweeted.
Many people mentioned the fact that Disney offers a fast pass, which allows people to skip lines, something Shapiro himself even tweeted about in 2018.
And a bunch of people had some variation of this easy joke: “Ben Shapiro isn’t tall enough to go on most rollercoasters, so there’s no way he could understand this.”
Check out the responses to Shapiro below:
https://twitter.com/dansaltzstein/status/1377325133606617097
Who will ever forget how civil rights proponents who fought for decades to pass the 14th Amendment, giving Black people the right to take a ride on Magic Mountain?
Or how long it took to pass the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to ride the teacups at Disneyland?
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) March 31, 2021
You know, the thing at Disneyland where only the Black people wait on really long lines and you can't give them food and water?
(Today's reminder why @benshapiro is the worst.) https://t.co/r51zg7a7TD
— Bill Prady ⚛️ (@billprady) March 31, 2021
Is it possible Ben Shapiro cannot see there is a huge difference between our fundamental right to vote, and a trip to Disneyworld?
— Persistent One (@PersistentOne3) March 31, 2021
https://twitter.com/5five0oh4four/status/1377323818331570187
If they closed all but one or two rides at Disneyland, artificially lengthening the lines for the open rides, then yes, that would be ride suppression, just as artificially creating long lines to vote (and banning providing water for god's sake) is voter suppression.
— Lee 🟦 (@Rngrfan01) March 31, 2021
Disney doesn't have 8 hour lines for poor and minority customers and 30 minute lines for rich white customers.
— The Dread Space Pirate Roberts 🇺🇸🇦🇺🇱🇧🇺🇦 (@SteamboatLion) March 31, 2021
Reason #456,567 why @BenShapiro is a Raging Dipshit.
Voting: is a right.
Disneyland: is a vacation spot
Voting: is not on a day off
Disneyland: is full of Mice, dogs and Ducks that sound more masculine than Ben https://t.co/oQRPXF7JSa— Hal Sparks (@HalSparks) March 31, 2021
The joke here is that Ben Shapiro is not tall enough for the rides at Disneyland. https://t.co/lMh6P5uutx
— Kyle Potter (@kpottermn) March 31, 2021