Of the grievance grifters who have managed to attach themselves to the Black Lives Matter movement over the past decade, few have grifted so openly or so blatantly as Shaun King.
King has been repeatedly accused of scamming followers out of money for everything from journalistic outlets that never materialized to clothes that never got made. In 2019, BLM activist DeRay McKesson, while claiming King had done good work for the movement, said of him that “the person who paints your house before he steals your car has still committed theft.”
So, yes — when it was revealed Shaun King had allegedly grifted again, it was like finding out today ended in Y, or that President Joe Biden had given a speech where he forgot all of the days end in Y. As any journalist will tell you, “dog bites man” isn’t news; “man bites dog” is.
Here’s the “man bites dog” part: King is now telling his followers that he’s grifting them out of donations because he doesn’t have enough gun rights and the metro area he inhabits doesn’t have a “stand your ground” law. That’s why he needed $40,000 to buy a guard dog to bite men.
In an Instagram post that needs to be read to be believed (and may not be believed even then), King — who has threatened to expose the addresses of his enemies on other occasions — said media outlets sharing his “home and exact location online” has caused “a slew of strangers to show up at our home,” including “white supremacists.”
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On Tuesday, The Washington Free Beacon reported that King’s Grassroots Law PAC paid over $40,000 to a dog breeder in California.
The payments were made between December and February. Days after the final payment in February, Fox News noted, King made a Facebook post welcoming a “new member of the King family,” a mastiff show dog named Marz.
The post has since been deleted.
Grassroots Law PAC’s stated goal is to “elect candidates who are committed to reducing mass incarceration and police violence.” It has, at present, spent roughly as much on King’s dog as it has on political candidates, with only $56,000 going toward those running for office.
Is Shaun King a fraud?
“This luxury dog expense may not be illegal for a PAC, but it shows little respect for King’s donors,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, told the Free Beacon.
For those of you familiar with King, you know the drill: Once the grift is exposed, King always has a ready — if vague and hypocritical — explanation for it. When he addressed the issue on Tuesday, he did not disappoint.
The explication came via the Instagram post featuring his wife and three children. In it, King insisted he was only doing this to protect them because he couldn’t exercise his Second Amendment rights.
“I have to say some things that I’ve worked hard to keep private for the safety and security of my family. But I need you to know this so that you understand why our family not only needs a guard dog at home, but 24/7 security wherever we go,” he wrote.
“White supremacists and people who’ve meant my family harm have now shown up to our last three homes. Multiple times.
“Before you talk about how I should defend myself with guns, New York City won’t even allow me to have a gun. New Jersey doesn’t have stand your ground laws and hardly allows you to even own guns. News outlets have shown our home and exact location online, which then caused a slew of strangers to show up at our home.”
And make no mistake — King is a target. Of almost everyone, it seems.
“I’ve had hundreds of death threats — including from police, military snipers, and white supremacist groups. Even when I file cases with the FBI they’ve done nothing, so we stopped even filing them,” he wrote.
“I spend more time each day now thinking about how to keep my family safe than I do doing the [actual] work I’m called to do.
“So know this, when you see reports about the money it costs to keep me and my family safe, it’s nowhere near enough,” he concluded. “Not at all. Not even close.”
I’m not sure how a mastiff is going to keep a person safe from “military snipers.” Furthermore, an individual without a criminal record can own a gun in New York City and New Jersey.
While a recent Supreme Court decision also means that New York’s strict concealed carry laws have been struck down, they were still in effect when King bought the dog — although I don’t remember anyone ever telling me about concealed-carrying a mastiff.
It’s unclear where King resides now, although the New York Post reported Tuesday that he “appears to have recently moved out of a lavish, lakefront home in New Jersey.”
Beyond King suddenly being a champion of looser gun laws, there are two other things that reek of hypocrisy in his Instagram post.
First, the BLM movement — which has allowed King to live a lifestyle where, among other things, he can afford a $40,000 dog — was launched in response to the death of Trayvon Martin, which brought “stand your ground” laws into the national spotlight. These laws stipulate that an individual has no obligation to retreat in a conflict before resorting to deadly force against an attacker.
The man who shot him, George Zimmerman, didn’t cite Florida’s “stand your ground” law at trial, according to The Washington Post, “opting to mount a more general self-defense case that Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin out of fear for his life.”
“But the jury that acquitted Zimmerman got instructions about the law, and Martin’s killing brought intense scrutiny to a policy that critics accuse of encouraging vigilantism and violence.”
Now, King is apparently in favor of these laws — at least for him.
And then there’s the BLM figure putting some of the blame on the media for sharing the location of his home.
In 2020, after the shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer (who was subsequently not charged with wrongdoing), King began posting images and names of Kenosha police officers on Twitter, signaling to his followers that they were fair game for… well, you fill in the blanks.
Oh, and by the way, the mastiff has since been returned by the King family; the dog breeder said in a social media post that Marz has “got a little too much energy to be a family dog so he came back.”
Thank heavens, else he might have been a target for those military snipers.
