Photo by Gage Skidmore
Ben Shapiro is a loudmouthed, obnoxious young aspirant to the hotly contested title of kingpin among right-wing demagogues. Like others in the thickly crowded and highly competitive field, his actions indicate that he is most concerned about boosting his ego and raking in the bucks. And he knows that a quick way to do that is to smear liberals/progressives/the left/whatever, because he’ll find a ready mob of bigots to applaud him.
He’s quickly built a loyal following of people who mistake swift-tongued glibness for accuracy and substance. And even the New York Times, which he has christened “the official outlet of the American left” (despite its stable of right-leaning columnists), published a bizarre fawning paean to him (unlike others in his tribe, he “reads books”!), dubbing him the “Cool Kid’s Philosopher”. If you actually pay attention to what he says, however, you quickly see that the philosopher has no toga.
For one thing, he doesn’t feel the need to be bothered with a piddling little thing like consistency. On the one hand, he avows concern over the big bad guvmint’s unwarranted intrusion into citizens’ private lives — he’s railed indignantly against “gun control” and even against government bans of phone use while driving; yet he also declares that pornography should be outlawed because… well, just because; and that it can’t be defended by the “silly” argument that something should not be criminalized if it does no harm.
He also doesn’t feel the need to draw distinctions between the grossly dissimilar things he lumps together. Continuing his peculiar and frankly rather disturbingly obsessive denunciation of pornography, he notes that if we’re going to legalize it, we might as well legalize murder. In other words, he’s a master of false equivalence.
And he doesn’t feel the need to offer any rational justification for his dogmatic pronouncements. Atheism, he proclaims, is not only “morally bankrupt” but totally incompatible with the concept of free will. (He also conflates belief in God with belief in the soul.) Free will, he says, comes from God — our will is free only if it’s under the total control of an outside force. Why? Because religious people believe so, and that’s good enough for him. It is because it just is.
The latter type of circular reasoning is a fallacy known in Philosophy 101 as begging the question (a term almost everyone misuses, by the way); and it would likely net you an F pronto. No matter; Shapiro is one of the high priests of the Cult Of Anti-Intellectualism, which casually dismisses college knowledge as “liberal indoctrination“. They can always obtain their alternative facts at PragerU, where Shapiro is one of the “lecturers”.
Left hooks
Real universities, however, are vital venues for his favored schtick for self-promotion: playing the provocateur game. First, he makes idiotically bigoted utterances that he knows (or at least hopes) will arouse disgust in anyone with a shred of decency. (e.g., “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage”), Then he gets booked to speak on campuses where he knows there are bound to be many folks who find him repulsive, and some will be foolish enough to play into his hands by raucously protesting his appearance. Then he tries to provoke the protesters even more with puerile taunts. (“Hard-left morons”; “uncivilized barbarians”; “pusillanimous cowards”; “You guys are so stupid”; “You pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses”; “You can all go to hell”.)
Ultimately, he achieves his goal by stirring up such a hornet’s nest that he is disinvited from campus appearances; then he can proclaim triumphantly that The Left is being intolerant, and squelching his First Amendment rights. Cute, huh? Like other right-wing demagogues, he works on the assumption that the First Amendment grants him — but not necessarily anyone else — the right to say whatever he wants, wherever he wants, without repercussions.
As if programmed by some malicious cosmic geek, Shapiro and his fellow right-wing polemicists all closely follow the same playbook, and often even recite the same soundbites. This includes marginalizing victims of various kinds, and ridiculing empathy for victims. They claim that The Left makes a “virtue of victimhood” — even as they try hard to paint themselves as virtuous victims of The Left’s supposed totalitarianism and that legendary chimerical “political correctness”.
Living in a smug bubble that they constantly strive to reinforce, Shapiro and his cohorts tend to have the attitude that if a particular problem does not affect them personally, directly and immediately, then it must not exist. And like schoolyard bullies, they try to make themselves feel stronger by spitting upon the downtrodden, the disadvantaged, or just The Others (immigrants are a favorite target). Most important of all, there is the fact that those on the left generally sympathize with, and try to help, the oppressed and abused; and for right-wing fanatics, the most urgent imperative in the whole universe is to oppose them librulz at every turn. Accordingly, they have made social justice warrior a term of ridicule and contempt.
There are essentially three overlapping tactics they use in smearing victims. Shapiro dutifully pursues all three.
First, they simply deny, no matter how overwhelming the evidence, that persecution and discrimination exist at all — except against themselves, of course. (It’s an article of faith among many privileged white males that nobody is really underprivileged except privileged white males.) Thus, while Shapiro believes that “white men are presumed guilty because they are white men” he also believes that LGBT Americans are rarely the targets of discrimination. In reality, not only is it legal to discriminate against them in many places, but they are more likely to be targets of hate crime than any other minority. He’s also declared that there is no evidence that the killer of Trayvon Martin was racist. In fact, there is a mountain of such evidence. He merely chose to ignore it — if he was even aware of it at all.
He wanted to cast doubt on the gunman’s presumed motives, of course, to suggest that Martin was responsible for his own death. And that’s the second tactic: blaming the victim. Perhaps his ugliest manifestation yet was his response to the vicious murder by terrorists of journalist Jamal Khashoggi after they chopped off his fingers. Let’s repeat that so it’s perfectly clear: terrorists murdered Khashoggi after they chopped his fingers off. Perhaps because he was a Muslim, and/or because he was a genuine journalist as opposed to a demagogue, the right-wing punditocracy immediately began blaming him for his own vicious murder, claiming that he was a radical Islamist who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. These smears had already been debunked by the time Shapiro decided to run with them, but he compliantly parroted them anyway. Which doesn’t speak well for his professed desire to unmask fake news. (We’ll get to that in a future discussion.)
The third tactic is just to try to change the subject, often by introducing red herrings. After Oprah Winfrey called out sexual abusers at the Golden Globes, he irrelevantly mused that she was speaking to “an entire town filled with sexual abusers and harassers” (What town isn’t?) and claimed that she’d never spoken up about it before — which presumably would render her comments on the subject invalid (hey, she must have brought it on herself when she was raped at age nine). In fact, as any survivor of sexual abuse will tell you, it’s a very difficult and painful topic to broach, and victims often remain quiet about it for years if not forever. Furthermore, Shapiro was dead wrong: Oprah has been an outspoken activist against sexual predators, citing her own experience, for literally decades.
These facts were all readily available to anyone willing to do a modicum of research before mouthing off. But who need facts when you have an ideology and an enthusiastic fan base?
Facts, feelings and fantasies
Shapiro likes to proclaim that “the facts don’t care about your feelings”. He’s used it as the title of his public appearances. He’s uttered the phrase so much you’d think he trademarked it. But it’s an utterly ironic mantra for a guy who routinely pulls things out of his ass and brandishes them to whip up an irrational emotional response in his impressionable fans — e.g.;”Walk into virtually any emergency room in California and illegal immigrants are the bulk of the population”; socialism is tantamount to racism; homosexuality is a disease; “monitoring mosques is the simplest and most effective way of preventing terrorist attacks”; Obama is “philosophically fascist”; Obama is anti-Semitic; etc. etc. He even promoted a false rumor that Chuck Hagel accepted a donation from a group called Friends Of Hamas — when in fact there is no such group. The latter is another especially interesting lie to be spread by someone who presents himself as being concerned about weeding out fake news.
His slogan about facts and feelings is homage to a trendy right-wing straw man: that, because liberals/ progressives/ leftists are compassionate and humane, they are guided by feelings alone, without recourse to thought or information. This profoundly stupid myth gets smashed flat on a daily basis, and yet right-wing fanatics still gulp it down without chewing — thanks in no small part to having it dished out to them by unscrupulous manipulators like Ben Shapiro.
Not only do people like him ridicule “the left” for the unspeakable offense of caring about people, they preach that non-caring is The Way Things Are And Ought To Be:
Nobody, by and large, cares enough about you to stop you from achieving your dreams… No one cares about you; get over yourselves. I don’t care about you; no one cares about you.
Presumably, he’s even unaware that there is a growing mob of neo-Nazis who very much care that Jews (like Shapiro himself) are living in the U.S. and want them expelled if not killed.
Even when he gets his facts straight, Shapiro often cherry picks them to construct a false narrative. A few examples of his cranium-up-the-rectum syndrome appear over at Current Affairs in a piece by Nathan J. Robinson (who’s even younger than Shapiro, but has his shit together to an infinitely greater degree) thoroughly demolishing the idol Shapiro has constructed to himself:
First, [Shapiro says] Asian Americans are wealthier than white people, which would be impossible if racism determined economic outcomes. (Shapiro doesn’t mention that the vast majority of Asian American adults are immigrants, and they are disproportionately from the wealthier and more highly-educated segments of their own countries.) Second, he says, people of any race who work full time, are married, and have high school diplomas tend not to be poor, meaning that poverty is a function of one’s choice not to do these things. (In fact, this theory, widely cited by conservatives, turns out to be vacuous: of course people who have full-time jobs usually aren’t in poverty, the problem is that black people disproportionately can’t get jobs.) Next, Shapiro says that because black married couples have a lower poverty rate than white single mothers, “life decisions” are what creates poverty. (Actually, even when two black people pool their wealth in a marriage, “the median white single parent has 2.2 times more wealth than the median black two-parent household.”) Finally, Shapiro says that the disproportionately black population in America’s prisons say nothing about racism, because black people simply commit more crimes, and “if you don’t commit a crime, you’re not going to be arrested for it” because “the police are not going around arresting black people for the fun of it.” (I have some black men in Louisiana I’d like Shapiro to meet so that he can explain his theory that people do not get arrested for crimes they haven’t committed. But I’d also like to hear him explain why black men receive 20% longer sentences for the same crime as white men with similar backgrounds.)
In short, Shapiro has demonstrated over and over that he has a very hard time distinguishing fact from feelings and fantasy. But he has plenty of company; the U.S. is currently engulfed in a reactionary plague. It has enabled the 45th White House Occupant to seize power. And it’s making people like Ben Shapiro filthy rich.
Hey, if you subscribe to the premium version of his website, he’ll even throw in a “free” cutesy souvenir tumbler labeled “Leftist Tears”. No doubt the proceeds go to a worthy cause. Like protecting the threatened Privileged White Male.
