Professional stand-up Bill Burr isn’t taking Ben Shapiro’s comments lying down.
Burr torched the conservative pundit this week for claiming he’s gone “woke” by condemning “greedy” insurance CEOS after the December murder of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO 26-year-old Luigi Mangione stands accused of killing.
“All he knew is if he put ‘woke’ on what I said, he would make more money,” Burr told The New York Times about Shapiro in an interview about his upcoming Broadway debut published Tuesday. “I don’t know who he is, but that guy is a jerk-off.”
Burr slammed the media following Thompson’s death for criticizing those who empathized more with Mangione than Thompson, seeing the late 50-year-old as a symbol of an industry that has often denied people claims for costly or life-saving medical treatments.
“None of these news programs are talking about the incredible lack of empathy from the general public about this because of how these insurance companies treat people when they are at their most vulnerable,” Burr said on his “Monday Morning Podcast” in December.
“I love that fucking CEOs are fucking afraid right now,” he added at the time. “You should be! By and large, you’re all a bunch of selfish, greedy fucking pieces of shit, and a lot of you are mass murderers. You just don’t pull the trigger. That’s why it looks clean.”
“Burr has become woke,” Shapiro wrote in an article for conservative news outlet The Daily Wire in December. “Over time, I think he became embarrassed that many people on the Right thought he was very funny, so he decided he was going to go woke.”
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Shapiro also claimed Burr wants CEOS to “live in fear,” which Burr had already denied by then.
“This is the thing, I’m not saying what happened should’ve happened,” said Burr on his “Anything Better?” podcast in December. “But for [the media] to be like, ‘Oh, why would anybody want to do this?’ It’s like, they’re denying claims and people are dying!”
Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania on murder and terrorism charges after a five-day search in December. He has pleaded not guilty and broke his silence earlier this month while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York.