Incoming White House communications director Bill Shine might be most famous for covering up sexual harassment at Fox News, where he served as co-president, and for losing his job when the cover-ups stopped being enough. His wife has a different specialty: Twitter racism.
Darla Shine has deleted her Twitter account, but before she did, Mediaite got screenshots. And wow, Darla Shine is a flaming racist. One of her big preoccupations is how terribly unfair it is that black rappers get to use the N word in their songs, but as a white person she’d look racist singing along. But Darla Shine does not need to sing along to rap to look racist.
Shine shows herself off as a racist in her repeated tweets “where she shared stories about ‘black teens’ killing a ‘white hubby’ and a ‘white woman’ getting ‘beat by a black couple for being in the wrong neighborhood.’” In her racist meme-posting about Africa following Trump’s “shithole countries” comments. In her insistence that Charleston church killer Dylann Roof’s crimes were because of a psychiatric drug, not racism. In her grooming tips: “If white chicks can’t perm their hair – black chicks can’t go blonde.” And in her mash-up of racism and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories: “1 out of 10 black boys has autism.”
Sure, that’s Bill Shine’s wife, not Bill himself. But it’s unlikely that it’s escaped his notice that his wife is a giant racist. He lives with this and doesn’t seem to have made a big issue about it until now—while she deleted her Twitter account once he took a job in the White House, apparently this kind of content was just fine as long as he was at Fox News. So whether or not Bill Shine would himself say equivalently racist things (in public, anyway), we know that he’s comfortable living with and parenting children alongside those views.
It’s probably a sign he’ll be very comfortable in Donald Trump’s White House.