Ben Shapiro

Shapiro, president of youth who already look like old men.

One of the Pundits

And a dirty dozen more

Bryan Fischer Charles Krauthammer Chris Matthews Christina Hoff Sommers David Frum John Hawkins Larry Pickering Naomi Klein Paul Krugman Pundit Tom Bethell William Kristol v - t - e

“”The immature rantings of Shapiro as a college student weren't something he grew out of. Instead, his dumbest beliefs were reinforced by a right-wing culture that nurtured every nutty idea he had, and pressured him never to stray from a far right ideology. As a result, Ben Shapiro has become a professional idiot.

—John K. Wilson

Ben Shapiro (b. 1984) is one of the more visible and odious welfare recipients of the clogosphere— something of a second-rate, humorless Milo Yiannopoulos. He has written for Townhall.com and WND (which should tell you something right off the bat), but his real claim to fame was his close association with the late Andrew Breitbart, to the point where he was primary editor and then editor-at-large for Breitbart.com. Shapiro has since acrimoniously resigned from the site. Shapiro become more broadly popular among wingnuts for taking the pro-gun side in a "debate" with fellow leech Piers Morgan. Infamously, he has cited Sesame Street as an example of liberal propaganda.

Basically, Shapiro's entire shtick is to mewl about the persecution of conservatives in Hollywood and academia where "east/west coast elites" are hard at work, indoctrinating the unwitting public into communism. Shapiro is himself a UCLA and Harvard educated lawyer who lives in California, making him the very definition of a "west coast elite".

Ben and Breitbart were made for each other. They both take even the tiniest, most irrelevant morsel of "news" and spin it into atrocities committed by the left. They both cry "Anti-Semitism!" when confronted with facts, yet freely insert racist dog-whistles into their articles for effect. They both earnestly use derogatory names like "SJW" and Marxist for anyone not on the far right. Ben has been caught a few times basing news articles on unsourced blogs, which later turned out to be false, yet never retracted them. He tweets barely-literate screeds dozens of times per day. Shapiro was the hero Breitbart.com needed, but maybe not the hero they deserved, as Breitbart.com and Ben split in rather dramatic fashion. When your webshite website has gone so far overboard that a bottom feeding wingnut like Shapiro resigns, it may be time for a little self-reflection.

Scoops

I'm rubber and you're glue

One should be hesitant to read Shapiro for any reason. Whereas the ramblings of other extremists in the clogosphere can be mildly entertaining, Shapiro's sheer smugness and exclusive reliance on straw man arguments pretty much sucks out any potential "fun" that could be had with his articles. As shown below, just getting out of the house once in a while could easily prove how absurd many of Shapiro's claims are to readers at a personal level.

The Christian Science Monitor summarized his book Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth thusly, "Shapiro makes sweeping—and many would say absurd—charges that they promote atheism, sexual perversion (including pedophilia and statutory rape), and rampant environmentalism." It's here we discover Shapiro has this odd habit of engaging in ad hominem attacks against anyone who is perceived to be even moderately left-wing. For instance, he labels a professor's wife "brainless" when she talked about how much she treasures the Constitution, and in the same book he accuses liberal professors of spreading "evil". Said professor later accused Shapiro of grossly distorting aspects of this fairly meaningless event.

He is a believer in some sort of homosexual recruitment taking place at colleges. In full irony mode he gets upset whenever someone accuses the right-wing of homophobia.

The troof is out dere

Shapiro is most infamous for being a conspiracy nut, finding leftist propaganda virtually everywhere. Shapiro got in hot water when he pushed the "Friends of Hamas" manufactroversy, but that's really only the tip of the iceberg that is his madness. He is also the founder of TruthRevolt, a conservative media watchdog group who openly state that their mission is to "unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases."

Shapiro has also written about birtherism and while trying to avoid being an out and out birther, his writings are extremely sympathetic to it. He believes that it is perfectly logical for someone to believe someone as "un-American" as Obama was born overseas, but he concludes that it's more likely that Obama was indoctrinated with Marxism while in an American school. It seems he is willing to float the idea that the location of birthplaces have a possibility to change based on how he feels about them.

Along with his amazing superpower to interpret anything being fed into his frontal cortex as "propaganda", he's even able to trace it back to the source: the (secular) Jews, of course!

I Wanna Be a Macho Man

“”If you pay tuition, you're sponsoring the militant homosexual agenda. If you pay taxes, you're sponsoring the militant homosexual agenda. If your child majors in English, you're sponsoring the militant homosexual agenda. Tell Billy to major in math.

—Ben Shapiro

In 2013, he published a book Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Is Silencing America, basically a tone argument stretched over 300 pages. For instance, Shapiro interpreted a federal judge's 2010 ruling against California Proposition 8 as "using the power of his gavel to justify his sex life."

During a 2015 discussion about Caitlyn Jenner on the HLN network, Shapiro repeatedly addressed corespondent Zoey Tur, a transgendered woman, as "Sir", to which Tur placed her hand on Shapiro's shoulder and replied “You cut that out now, or you’ll go home in an ambulance.” While perhaps not the most professional response to Shapiro's trolling, it is an understandable reflex action when sitting within 10 feet of Ben Shapiro. Benny stated he would immediately file a police report against Tur for battery and that he planned to pursue any applicable charges. As of 2017, no charges have been filed. Strange, considering he also wrote a number of articles about being tough in the face of trans threats.

NEEEEEERDS!

He's a pretty vehement global warming denier, writing a weird article that "mocked" liberals who believe in global warming and then violated Gore's Law. He went even crazier in another article that basically compared belief in global warming to a religion, with Al Gore as the "Prophet".

He is also (unsurprisingly) a DDT denier, pushing the urban myth that Rachel Carson caused less DDT to be produced which led to millions dying of malaria.

Nostradumbass

In 2003 he wrote that Israel should force the Palestinian population out of the West Bank, writing that "if Germans, who had a centuries-old connection to the newly created Polish territory, could be expelled, then surely Palestinians, whose claim to Judea, Samaria and Gaza is dubious at best, can be expelled." A decade later Ben decided that wouldn't work, so he now advocates doing...nothing. Just continue the "occupation" because "the problem is intractable." Genius Ben figures that will cut down on Palestinian violence.

Shapiro also asserted that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, feeling so confident in his victory that he wrote "the ball is in Mitt Romney's court. And the American people know it". Like virtually all of his other predictions and assertions, Shapiro was wrong.

Ben who?

During a stopped clock moment in March, 2016, Shapiro resigned as editor-at-large from Trumpbart.com Breitbart.com following the site's handling of the assault on one of their reporters, Michelle Fields (who resigned at the same time), by Donald Trump's then campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Shapiro cited the site's lack of support for Fields (they went so far as to publicly question the truth of their own report's claims, even in the face of clear video and audio evidence) and its sycophantic relationship with the candidate. Shapiro called Breitbart.com "Trump's Pravda".

The day following his resignation, Breitbart.com published a story mocking Shapiro as short, a "conservative gadfly" and a traitor to the deceased Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart.com gilded the lily of this extreme-but-characteristic pettiness by posting the article with the byline of "William Bigelow"; a pseudonym used by Shapiro's father, also a contributor to the site. Ben's father had resigned with his son before the attack piece was posted. The story was quickly memory holed and replaced with a vague statement by Breitbart.com editor and legal counsel, Joel Pollak, actual author of the original post. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Shapiro has since called Breitbart.com a "feces torndado". Thanks for that image, Ben.

Breitbart's defense of the Trump campaign against the site's own reporter would help to land their executive editor, Steve Bannon, a job in Lewandowski's former position as campaign manager and then Senior Strategist in the Trump White House.

Since this episode, Shapiro has frequently criticized the alt-right.

See also

• L. Brent Bozell III: Shapiro's "media watchdog" crybaby-in-arms; also able to spot liberal propaganda in every facet of reality.
• David Horowitz: Befriended Shapiro in his quest to reveal leftist plots.
• Newsbusters
• Katie Pavlich: His female counterpart.