Ben Shapiro is Officially Deranged

While insulting people for not being conservative enough is a favored pastime around here, I try to lay off those who seem to be part of the left-to-right pipeline. Around here we're wary of cults and their inevitable demands for purity. Cutting off allies for lack of virtue is not our bag, nor is it good strategy when so much is on the line and we are so institutionally outgunned. There are a lot of people to our left who appeal to liberals and plant the seeds that help them break free of the their programming. Look, no one ever transitioned from soy boy to commie slayer because they stumbled upon Unqualified Reservations one day. There are many vital intermediate steps along the way.

Notable in that crowd is Ben Shapiro, a libertarian civic-nationalist who is billed as a rational conservative with college-kid appeal. The people over at r/the_donald really loathe Shapiro, which is interesting because they aren't all that right-wing. A sizable portion are former Bernie supporters, and even more were Ron Paul fans. These people weren't too fazed that Trump spent most of his life as a pro-business Democrat who even ribbed on Republicans at times, because so many were moderate Democrats themselves, but watched that party swing far to the left in recent years. So the pedes on Reddit would seem primed to be as receptive as any audience out there to Shapiro's message of rational civic nationalism. Oh, but they despise him. The see him as a traitor, a con man even. Why? Is it just because he tends to rebuke each side for irrationality, and the pro-Trump crowd are overly sensitive? Maybe, to an extent, but I'm starting to agree that they are mostly justified.

Let's do an ad hoc case study, from his tweets just today, surrounding the bomb threat incident.

It was my first reaction, so I guess he's talking to me. Is this how a rational person talks? I have a pet peeve with abuse of the term officially, which has an air of valley-girl speak to it. It's just like when someone says literally and then proceeds to share a metaphor. Officially should mean that the claim is actually official in some regard. Literally official. Is there an officiating body for derangement? The DSM doesn't even mention the term. Perhaps he means that the behavior is so fitting with the official definition of the term as to be an obvious fit. It is given by the FreeDictionary as

The text reads: suffering from a severe mental illness; insane. 

Is basic pattern matching a sign of "severe mental illness"? The left are the side of fake gang rapes, fake refugees, fake Indians, fake news, fake debates, fake polls, fake outrage, fake dossiers, fake FISA warrants, and fake hate crimes - which have been documented in the hundreds since the election. Those are - and I won't abuse the term - literally false flag crimes. But Lil' Benji tells us it is deranged to assume that the fake bombs that were fake mailed to the fake news likely emanated from the left as well.

This feels a lot like the Jordan Peterson tweet of a couple weeks ago. The strong, even emotional, reaction from his (mostly conservative) followers wasn't that he exposed himself as left-leaning or even that he made a logical blunder. He's openly liberal, and we expect him to be a flawed mere mortal like the rest of us. The problem was that he seemed so eager to pander to his liberal pals in the IDW that he would say something that completely contradicted his message that made him so popular in the first place. The same here. People are suspicious that Shapiro's shtick is to pose as a conservative voice to give him more street cred when he attacks those on "his own side."

The rebuttal, of course, would be that Shapiro has a strong sense of principle, he attacks equally on both sides when principle is violated, and we're just being whiny because we demand perfect partisan loyalty. They would then, probably, direct us to Shapiro's Twitter feed, since he is criticizing hasty conclusion making from both sides.

Oh look, he criticized CNN for making the opposite hasty conclusion, so it's fair. Right? Well, do those look like equal and opposite rebuttals? In response to a liberal news outlet, he first seems to allow that Trump's criticism of the the outlet is "immoral", and then really dresses them down with some mild sarcasm. On the other hand, he responds to conservatives-at-large making the opposite conclusion in no uncertain terms as being "officially deranged." To the left he says "I agree Orange Man Bad but you're taking it too far for a news operation." To the scattered voices of the right, "you are all deplorable and irredeemable."

As it turns out, Shillpiro isn't careful with his words, doesn't actually care about evidence or context, and doesn't dish out criticism equally to both sides. How do we respond to such diatribe? In kind. I declare that Ben Shapiro is officially deranged. If his claim is credible, then mine must be as well.

video reading & discussion: https://www.bitchute.com/video/5ao1vfmh1AM8/
Styx on the subject: https://www.bitchute.com/video/PLpelK3ZsbE/