Remember this guy? Some call him ‘Talcum X’ because he’s the palest black activist you’ll ever see. I think the last time I wrote about him was back in 2018 when he was one of the leftists sharing images of “children of immigrants” being “held in cages” by the Trump administration. “It’s an abomination,” Shaun King wrote in a since deleted tweet.
There was just one problem with that outrage. The images he and others were angry about were taken in 2014, during the Obama administration. Oops!
And before that I wrote about another story where Shaun King accused police of sexual assaulting a woman after a traffic stop. Except, as the body-cam video of the incident showed, no such thing had ever happened. Oops!
King eventually had to write an entire post apologizing for being an idiot over that one:
On this past Sunday evening, after being contacted by family, friends, and attorneys for a Texas woman named Sherita Dixon-Cole, I was told that she had been sexually assaulted and violently threatened by a police officer while in custody. I was horrified. Sadly, these things happen way too often in our country…
Earlier today I was able to review nearly two hours of body camera footage provided by the police department. The footage appears to be authentic and trustworthy. At no time does it show any of the horrible allegations originally made by Sherita Dixon-Cole. The officer never threatens her or her fiancé as she described. No sexual assault of any kind takes place. From all indications the officer, Daniel Hubbard, was very professional and patient throughout the ordeal. The whole thing was rather routine and painfully normal…
We were right to fight — the system requires us to fight for every ounce of justice we ever get — but someone truly abused us in this circumstance. I’m still so genuinely baffled.
All of this is relevant today because Shaun King is once again jumping on a left-wing bandwagon without knowing what he’s talking about. I wrote about this story yesterday. The AP eventually covered it.
About 70 Palestinian men were found hiding inside a garbage truck by Israeli police as they attempted to cross into Israel from the occupied West Bank, apparently in search of work.
Israeli police released footage showing the back of the truck when it was being opened late Monday, revealing the men tightly crammed inside the truck’s waste compartment. Police are seen in the video, some with their weapons drawn, surrounding the truck.
Some of the men inside raised their hands in the air or put them behind their heads as they were discovered and pulled out of the truck, one by one. Occasionally, a voice in Arabic can be heard commanding: “Eskot,” or “Be silent.”
That’s what happened, but here how the “anti-Zionists” on X wrote about it.
60 Palestinians were being transported by the Israel Defense Forces in a garbage truck; Israel is oppressing innocent Palestinians, and the world remains silent.#Pakistán #امن_کا_سفیر_پاکستان #IranWar #Węgry pic.twitter.com/dQuubjBZai
— Rizvana Raza 🇮🇷 (@Rizvana_Raza) April 14, 2026
It’s the complete opposite of the truth but this has been seen 1.2 million times already. Somehow it doesn’t even have a community note yet.
Yesterday I pointed this out and also noted that a Game of Thrones actor with half-a-million followers had helped spread it.
This is Zionism https://t.co/Mo7wfpyOAE
— liam cunningham (@liamcunningham1) April 14, 2026
A few hours after that, Shaun King must have seen it. Here’s his take:
Do you know what would happen if Muslims put 60 Jews in a filthy nasty garbage truck, closed them in it, and dropped them off?
Sanctions. Maybe war.
You’d be permanently cut off from the world. https://t.co/imHCeJkbYA
— Shaun King (@shaunking) April 14, 2026
Several points to make about this. First, by the time King saw this post about the garbage truck, there were already dozens or hundreds of people (myself included) saying this was a lie. There’s simply no way he could have missed all that.
Second, King is Muslim and he isn’t as careful to phrase his hypothetical in terms of “Zionism” or “the IDF.” He just says we should imaging the reaction if “Jews” were in the truck instead of Muslims.
Of course he’s taking the dishonest framing of the tweet for granted, i.e. that the IDF was using a garbage truck to transport Palestinians. That didn’t happen though which really ought to matter to him at some point.
Third, there are now lots of people telling King he got this wrong and, so far, he doesn’t seem to care. There’s no post admitting fault or claiming he was lied to. Instead he just sends this to his nearly 1 million followers and never corrects the record. He wants to lie about this.
As the older stories above indicate, this is not something new for Shaun King. He’s eager to spread a false story if it serves his purpose. Maybe he’ll eventually delete the false tweet or maybe not. The point is to stoke the anti-Semitic outrage while he can, just as the point used to be to stoke the anti-police outrage.
Anyway, it has been 8 years since I wrote anything about Shaun King and he hasn’t changed a bit. He’s still out there using his platform to lie to people.
Not what happened. This is fake news.
The real news is these Palestinians tried to illegally sneak into Israel for work. The driver of the truck wasn’t even Jewish; he was an Israeli-Arab.
Trying to imply that JEWS stuffed 60 Palestinians into a garbage truck is more of the…
— None (@Nexadmirer) April 15, 2026
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