Post by Deleted on May 10, 2019 12:23:24 GMT -5
Ben Shapiro is often touted by people on the right as an intellectual wunderkind, a champion debater, unfailingly civil and unbeatably logical and informed. Um, yeah, about that (watch the whole thing--it's not long):
Ben's famous debating tactics come down to this: When asked a question he can't answer, he shunts off into a different direction or talks over the interviewer/other person with his own questions. If the other person persists in the question, Ben accuses them of being a biased leftist that no one's every heard of who is being intellectually dishonest for his/her own financial gain and/or career advancement, and then stomps away. (Fortunately for Ben, people very often allow him to fluster them with this technique, and his fans on the right never question it.) That's never been more nakedly obvious than in this interview with obscure leftist Andrew Neil of that left-wing rag, The Spectator.
Except that Andrew Neil is a well-known British conservative, and the Spectator is a conservative publication. Womp womp.
This also starkly illustrates another fact about Ben: He's completely happy to throw out unsupported statements that he plucks out of his ass when he doesn't know what he's talking about, and he does so just as assertively as he would if he had a team of scientists and a set of stone tablets from God backing him up. E.g., his assertion that Neil is an unknown leftist. But I knew Ben did that -- what boggles me here is that it demonstrates that (a) Ben, Mr. Conservative Wunderkind, never heard of a quite well-known fellow conservative person and conservative publication, and (b) didn't even bother doing the most cursory google search about the person and publication interviewing him.
He's a fraud. He's just a smarter, faster-talking fraud than most, and manages to keep up a civil demeanor -- right up until he's been successfully challenged.
Ben's famous debating tactics come down to this: When asked a question he can't answer, he shunts off into a different direction or talks over the interviewer/other person with his own questions. If the other person persists in the question, Ben accuses them of being a biased leftist that no one's every heard of who is being intellectually dishonest for his/her own financial gain and/or career advancement, and then stomps away. (Fortunately for Ben, people very often allow him to fluster them with this technique, and his fans on the right never question it.) That's never been more nakedly obvious than in this interview with obscure leftist Andrew Neil of that left-wing rag, The Spectator.
Except that Andrew Neil is a well-known British conservative, and the Spectator is a conservative publication. Womp womp.
This also starkly illustrates another fact about Ben: He's completely happy to throw out unsupported statements that he plucks out of his ass when he doesn't know what he's talking about, and he does so just as assertively as he would if he had a team of scientists and a set of stone tablets from God backing him up. E.g., his assertion that Neil is an unknown leftist. But I knew Ben did that -- what boggles me here is that it demonstrates that (a) Ben, Mr. Conservative Wunderkind, never heard of a quite well-known fellow conservative person and conservative publication, and (b) didn't even bother doing the most cursory google search about the person and publication interviewing him.
He's a fraud. He's just a smarter, faster-talking fraud than most, and manages to keep up a civil demeanor -- right up until he's been successfully challenged.
