The first time I had any reason to know about Ben Shapiro was when he appeared on the Piers Morgan show to talk guns. For those who may not remember, CNN had imported a British popinjay to host an evening chat show. Americans tend to associate the British accent with sophistication and erudition, so CNN thought having a British guy read from the Progressive catechism would lend credibility to their lineup. Morgan quickly revealed himself to be an insufferable windbag with a British accent and his ratings tanked.
The only time I had a reason to watch the show was after Shapiro’s appearance and clips were floating around social media. The Boomer Cons were out in the streets, waving their pocket Constitutions and throwing their tricorn hats in the air. To my untrained eyes, the whole thing looked like a setup. Everything on TV is staged, after all. This exchange just looked like two very bad actors reading lines prepared for them by others. Whether or not it was on the level, it started Shapiro off on his path to become his generation’s Bill Safire.
In the age of mass media, it is hard to imagine a time when political commentary was limited to three TV networks and the newspapers. That meant there were very few spots for the professional pundit. Getting one of those gigs was like hitting the lottery, except it required years of apple polishing in the news business and politics. William Safire figured out how to create a position in the commentariat that only he could fill. That’s the spot for the housebroken conservative, who would jovially defend Republicans among liberals.
When I was a kid, Safire was the only non-liberal voice on television chat shows. I no longer recall the network or show, but after 40 minutes of Progressive dogma, they would have Safire on, along with three liberals, to give the other side. This was what passed for balance in those days. It made Safire rich and famous, because he was the only guy on television who would dare speak for the other 80% of the country. Even by the standards of the day, he was a total cuck, but he was the only non-Prog on television.
Safire paved the way for George Will, who performed the same act on the David Brinkley show for years. Every newspaper in the country eventually had a housebroken conservative as a columnist. The explosion of conservative talk radio in the 90’s made the role less valuable, but it remains a feature of the chattering classes. The Fox News Channel is essentially a whole network based on the same premise. They criticize the Left in an approved manner, never going too far or committing any mortal sins.
The trouble these days is the legacy media has an audience that is very old. The audience for Fox News is close to 70. The young and hip Rachel Maddow is popular with menopausal cat ladies. The Sunday chat shows have a similar demographic. Gen X was probably the last generation to engage with newspapers and TV chat shows. Even there, most people under 50 are getting their news from on-line sources. Increasingly, those on-line sources operate in opposition to the legacy media, politically and culturally.
That’s where a guy like Ben Shapiro is seen as the millennial Bill Safire. None other than the New York Times has declared him “the voice of the conservative millennial movement” and “the cool kid’s philosopher.” Shapiro is described as a rock star on the college campus, meaning his audience is not on blood thinners. The piece quotes National Review’s David French, who gives Shapiro his blessing. This suggests the kept men of the legacy Right are on board with making Shapiro the new media version of Bill Safire.
The trouble is we no longer live in the age of three tightly controlled TV networks and newspapers delivered by trucks. In a world where the choices are standard issue liberals and obsequious cuckservatives, the cucks looked pretty good. That’s not the world in which we live now. It’s not so much that there are alternatives to the mass media. It’s that there is so much mass media. Even if they can cultivate a guy like Ben Shapiro into a millennial house Negro, he’s just another voice on a giant stage full of megaphones.
The bigger issue though is the rise of alternative media. I can hear what Ben Shapiro has to say on talk radio, cable news or read it on any number of official websites. I’m not going to get quirky ethno-libertarianism from anywhere but Stephen Molyneux. The TRS guys are a unique media presence that speaks to the issues of our day. For truly intelligent commentary, I can go to Steve Sailer or J’Onquarious. The point is, there are lots of people smarter, more inquisitive and more daring than Ben Shapiro in the media now.
What’s probably going to kill the Progressive house Negro role is what’s happening on social media. Facebook and Twitter have a problem. They need to keep the heretics off their platform, but they need to keep their audience. Their solution is verification. They think by eliminating pen names and anonymous commentary, they will get rid of the serious threats to the orthodoxy. They are probably correct, but they are creating a whole new problem for themselves and their model of controlled opposition.
It is really hard to pitch a Ben Shapiro as the edgy critic of the orthodoxy when he has that seal of approval next to his name on social media. That’s what the blue check mark now means. It says you have been declared safe by the people in charge. That means all the house Negroes of Conservative Inc are branded with the mark of their owner. The only thing left to do is pass a Fugitive Pundit Act. If a faux right-wing pundit gets red-pilled and runs off to the alt-right, we’ll be required to return him to his media masters.
The best comparison I can think of is boxing. Don King rarely outright rigged fights. Usually, he would spend months hyping just the right opponent for his champ to beat. Sometimes the challenger had the self-awareness to get it. Other times they bought into their own false hype. I see the NY Times doing that now. Ben Shapiro buys the false hype.
The links in your articles for the last several days don’t work.
No, they all work fine. It’s you.
As usual, Occamberg’s Razor explains why Ben Shapiro is being pushed onto us as the Next Big Conservative Thing. He is Jewish, and so is the media pushing him. Why do Jews do something? Because it benefits the Jews.
How? Easy. Ben Shapiro, like George Will before him, is just the right slice of bread of the Kosher Sandwich.
That slice is provided for the goyim who won’t swallow the Left Liberal Jewish cultural & moral programming coming out of the universities & media.
These Right Wing Jews give the goyim a way to oppose leftism while:
1) Never EVER thinking of white people as a group who deserves to advance their own interests.
2) Never EVER questioning supporting Israel.
3) Never EVER noticing the extraordinary influence of Jews in our nation’s hateful & parasitic elite.
George Will is not Jewish.
You are right. George Will is an Israel supporting atheist married to a neocon Jew, but not technically Jewish himself.
Sub in William Safire then. The point remains.
The Jewish run media pushes forward these “respectable” conservatives to channel anger away from noticing inconvenient patterns about Jewish influence.
I thought this post was going to be about the addition to the royal family..
Ben Shapiro… hmmm… oh, the guy that quit Breitbart b/c of Michelle Fields accusations… “arm gate “. I liked Sharpiro… up until that . Clarifying moment that was.
For fucks sake when will ignorant Americans stop talking about “The British accent”?
Are you so stupid that you cannot distinguish between the Scots accent of say Billy Connolly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30IOKP2GcjY&pbjreload=10
The speech of these sheepshaggers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDayU9lAuJA
And this Scouse accent from my native Liverpool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A05OjKCAOsg
?
The accent you refer to is that of the Home Counties that abut London – particularly those to the South and West.
The phrase is Received Pronunciation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
I am unaware of any country that has such diversity of accent (and vocabulary in many cases) is such a small place- twenty miles can made a big difference.
Sorry for the bad tempered rant.
I’m heavily scouse accented and enjoy my conversations with the locals when in California, on occasion they even guess the right continent…..the Queens English it certainly ain’t.
I always call English people “British,” refer to British accents, etc. I mainly do it because I know it pisses them off. It’s similar to them calling all Americans “yanks”; this is annoying (and inaccurate), but that’s the point.
The problem the lefties and proggies have is that they are inherently self defeating. When they take over an organization they typically run it into the ground, and they take their house negroes with them when they go.
The mainstream media’s a dead man walking. If you moderate your platform to suit the homosexuals, Marxists, feminists and other degenerates – they are the only ones that will use it or patronize it. Consider the last election when all you deplorable racists, gun nuts, religious zealots and miscellaneous cretins – refused to vote the way the Cloud People told you to. Many of you unwashed swine even made political mileage on giving your intellectual and moral superiors in the media – an upraised middle finger. Did you know that ‘inappropriate laughter’ is a hate crime too? All your hateful laughter is deafening when Trump goes on Twitter to troll the the Clod…errrr…’Cloud’ People. Newspapers can’t sell a paper or a subscription to save their lives, and rollbacks and cutbacks are getting deeper all the time industry wide. Looks good on ’em if you ask me.
You are absolutely right about this being a generational divide too. My elderly boomer parents are furious and horrified when I laugh at their day time TV heroes like Dr. Phil and Orca Winfrey, and the clucky harridans of The View. It’s tough for me because I have to accept one of two distasteful scenarios: either my parents are idiots – or they’ve gone off the deep end and are old and stupid the way seniors can get to be. Three weeks ago my own mother called me a fascist – which are fighting words for me. I told her I wasn’t impressed with her either, or her (and I quote myself verbatim) ‘femcnut/chitlib politics’. The old bird melted down and I haven’t heard from her since – and I am not going to apologize to her either. Mine is not the only family where this stuff is becoming personal.
Ben Shipero does not speak for me as a conservative, nor does Jonah Goldberg or Dave Fwench or any of the other leftist house negroes. If the media wants to be taken seriously they need to confront the real political right in honest and forthright debate.
Glen, the left, in all of it’s various elements, does not wish to debate you, they only want you to die, quietly. Then and only then there will be paradise and harmonic convergence.
Glen, that sucks. I no longer argue with liberals I otherwise like, because it’s so frustrating to have them acknowledge the logic of my position, but adamantly not allow it to alter their view. Two of my favorite quotes: 1) “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It’s a waste of time and it annoys the pig.” 2) “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
Did you know that ‘inappropriate laughter’ is a hate crime too? All your hateful laughter is deafening when Trump goes on Twitter to troll the Clod[s]
You mean like with “Pocahontas” yesterday?
Old people sit in front of the TV too much. It rots what’s left of their brains and destroys any ability they ever had to distinguish reality from the fiction being pumped into their heads.
My elderly former civil rights activist mother watches Rachel Maddow avidly, and is troubled by the fact that I possess more than one firearm. I quit trying to talk to her about politics years ago.
But it’s not just her. All my friends from college and my youth are the same way. I joined Facebook just to hook up with some of them a while back, only to find that they’re still saccharine lefties and now reinvigorated enthusiatic Trump bashers. I’m on the verge of just nuking the account at this point, since the entire feed is nothing but shitlib agitation and apology.
It is a generational divide, but it’s also a cognitive divide.
Most people do not think. Maybe more people did in the past, but one thing that’s struck me in the last few decades is how many people now preface their obserations about politics, or anything really, with “I feel that..”. You even see this with politicians and pundits on the idiot box.
I think this is an intentional result brought about by the lefties in the schools. I’m convinced that they indoctrinate kids to refer first, and primarily, to their feeeeeelings, as Michael Savage would say, rather than come up with some chain of plausible evidence to infer what they would then state as their thoughts.
I may be recalling a rosy past that never existed, but it seems like it wasn’t that long ago when “I think” would have been the favored way of introducing one’s opinion.
That said, some boomers are realistic and empirical enough to see reality well into late middle age. Most can’t. I find I have much more in common politically speaking with “the kids” than with anyone of my own generation. Of course, it helps that I reeducated myself by moving deep into red state territory.
As for Shapiro, I’ve never been able to listen to more than 10 words out of his mouth without closing the tab on my browser.
He always looks and sounds to me like the completely insincere president of a college fraternity doing a little PR to drum up support for the chapter’s annual muscular dystrophy fundraiser
Ever watch the movie “They Live”?
TV has always been a very poor information medium and more of a entertainment medium. Smart people avoid watching lots of TV, only poor people on the dole watch a lot of it. See Neil Postman’s “Entertaining ourselves to death”
Though addiction to Social Media is replacing TV viewing among younger peeps. it’s far more addictive that TV ever could be due to it’s interactive nature.
In general most people don’t think because they were never taught to be active learners and thinkers. Our schools are fine for churning out obedient drones for Herman-Miller cube farms and “do you want fries with that” type of jobs. Jobs which don’t require thinking and just being there for the most part.
You don’t see public schools teaching the basics of Socratic logic or S.I. Hayakawa’s “Language in thought and Action” how language is used as a propaganda tool to manipulate people. Or a lot of other topics that get neglected. because they were not intended to be included to begin with.
You see our system was never meant to produce citizens in the Athenian sense. Just consumers and worker bees.
Glen – Honor thy mother and father. Tell her you forgive her and love her. You can rant here because this is the right place to rant. Estrangement from your parents is something leftists do. Have you ever met a dedicated leftist who wasn’t estranged from their parents? Now shape up.
That’s your mom, dude. You only have one.
Please, she can’t do anything.
I’ve always hated Shapiro. A shill for the Iraq war but somehow could not be bothered to sign up for a tour of duty. Vox Day has challenged him a time or two to a debate but somehow ((Ben)) can’t be bothered. Shapiro is an armchair warrior who makes bank writing worthless drivel.
I don’t care if he is a hairy arsed groid as long as he upsets the other side, small minded I know but I’ll take my victories and allies wherever I can get them.
The last line says it all.
But gee, are we also supposed to not notice that the approved conservative is Jewish?
Wasn’t it you who came up with calling Shapiro the hobbit? Really is the perfect nickname.
That was me. He does look like he just left the Shire.
I thought Tolkien envisioned the Dwarfs as the Jews in those stories?
The elite always try to cover all their bases, there is a lot of money to be made in being the Kosher Conservative.
Key tactical question: Even if BenShapiro is an idiot, is he useful_?
I’d have to say that he’s taken some hits for the team, even if he’s dislikable personally. On the latter I’m agnostic. Not a few of us here have their moments. Maybe even me 😉
Some people make the argument that Shapiro opens the door to the Right. Maybe. My sense is he is more of a life boat for those who just can’t cross the river to our side. I have a buddy who is my age and loves Shapiro. He knows I’m right about the world, but he really, really wants Shapiro to be right, so he clings to the “ideology uber alles” dingy, hoping it reaches shore.
At least Shapiro’s tides are slightly to the Right .
maybe your friend will get it together enough to get off that leaky raft and get onto a real ship. The crew of the .Alt Right is a bit cantankerous but she’s a fine ship who’ll get you where you need to be.
It may take a long time, especially for boomers, to cross over into the land where the order of precedence is biology, culture, politics
Shapiro’s standard college-talk spiel included a bit about the Putnam study and how racial diversity destroys social capital, from which the Dissident Right is a mere stone’s throw away. It’s part of why I’m here now, for example. Having made the shift I only go to Shapiro for legal analysis.
It could be an age thing. People who (want to) think they know how things work probably will let slide Shapiro’s refusal to address obvious questions in order to protect their opinions, whereas younger guys like myself see that evasion as an enticement.
Safire was a regular guest on Meet the Press.
Think what you will of Ben Shapiro or Milo Yiannopoulos or Ann Coulter and the very, very few others like them, but the fact remains that these three are just about the only conservatives that ever get onto a TV screen outside of a Fox TV channel AND can actually make plain and clear their version of a conservative agenda.
For whatever reasons, liberal progs have no problems elucidating their policies (and excoriating those of their opposition) that even poorly educated college kids and inner city blacks will give them their vote. Of course, the liberal progs are always welcome and/or promoted all over TV and other mass media.
Contrast this to the “message” of your typical dumb-publican (e.g.,Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, any Bush, Romney, Boehner, etc. ) that you hear.
Don’t know about anyone else, but I still have not figured out what the F*ck their message is. These guys literally must have a speech impediment of sorts or are just total morons; they are incapable or explaining anything at all; they are simply inept, and incompetent.
Even the Alzheimer’s suffering, besotted Nancy Pelosi can get her point across with greater ease than any republican.
Progs know how to reach the masses on an emotional level and are effective in assigning the neo-Nazi, fascist label onto anyone they oppose.
The dumb-publicans can’t even pull off their knickers before they defecate.
So, kudos to Shapiro and the very few like him; if not for them, there would be nobody at all on (ex-Fox) TV attempting to counter the liberal progressive, hate America first agenda.
Shapiro’s purpose is to keep you a tame member of the loyal opposition, and to relish in it. I would say he is a traitor, but more accurately he is an infiltrator, and you are the mark.
Yep. I read Shapiro when he was on BB. He was very careful on not talking about certain issues like trade, globalization and open borders, importing foreign workers, etc. Basically all the stuff that people care about.
He finally got the boot after he openly sided with Cruz and that female extortionist. It showed people a unethical POS he is.
Maybe, maybe not.
But he sure gets the ANTIFA, BLM. LGBT and other assorted libs/media/academic/commie groups all lathered up just by showing up.
If he was a phony, why would they get all out of sorts when he speaks ? His presence even leads to rioting by the ANTIFA peacniks.
He may not have the “correct” views on every single issue (who does?), but those groups certainly find him to be obnoxious, irritating and downright offensive.
So, at least he is doing some things right.
Bullshit is only effective in proportion to the degree of truth it contains. That is how neocons took over the Republican Party, National Review, and anything no longer worth reading or doing.
John… I hear what you’re saying, but I think he is playing the Fox News game. Gaming us with culture war jabs, predictably provoking the left, and the right in turn, all the while avoiding the hard themes of who controls the money and the power, and avoiding the issues that the big donors really care about. Tim
I find Shapiro as annoying as 115 decibels of fingernails on a chalkboard. But Tyler is right, he’s willing to get behind enemy lines and stir things up. And he is good on his feet. Spoke at one of my kids’ schools last spring. SJWs were so lathered up you couldn’t even “like” the event page on FB to get ticket updates since they would hunt you down for harassment. Got the blow by blow of the lead up from my son, the SJWs were like a sack of rabid cats over the fact that the university president grew a pair and was going to let him speak. He managed to get a ticket (and I watched about half of the livestream) To Shapiro’s credit he gave ample time to the SJWs to ask questions. For the most part he just let them walk into a “L” ambush and annihilated them. It was hilarious. House negro or not, that’s a positive in my book.
His job is to be the straw man, the phony target, the bad guy.
Boo! Hiss! The mustachio-twirling villain!
Talk about job security…
Being on tv disqualifies a pundit from serious consideration, for me. Only tools are allowed on — and keen to be on.
That is a one hundred percent reliable b.s. detector. Someone who wants to be on the networks, or interviewed by the Post or Times, is someone who warrants skepticism.
“I still have not figured out what the F*ck their message is”
Same as the Progs but slower.
The was a time when leadership in any venue was earned via deeds, and followers could not easily be hoodwinked because the value was obvious to the eye. We now live in a world in which words largely substitute for deeds and we are forever being duped by charlatans. I do not know this Shapiro poser, but I ask . . . what has he done?
Vox Day had his number way back in 2001-2003. Shapiro (via nepotism) got an opinion column World Net Daily when he was in high school. He banged the drums to invade Iraq. VD and others asked, “Why don’t you enlist?” Shapiro demurred and let the goyim bear that burden while he went to college and law school.
And thus was born “The Littlest Chickenhawk.”
Open his mouth. I.e. diddlysquat.
Found a cache of old Life magazines from the 60’s and 70’s last weekend. No wonder the magazine went away. Pages upon pages of breathless blather about the minutiae of the Democrat election strategies and people in the ‘68 (Humphrey) and ‘72 (McGovern) campaigns. Nixon may as well have been a ghost or nonexistent, as far as Life was concerned. Carefully calibrated slightly laudatory comments on the likes of Angela Davis. Midwesterners consistently treated like alien beings living on another planet. Pollution about to destroy the Earth in a matter of months or a few years—that is what had the young’ns shook up in ‘72, according to the mag. Overall, American life was described as a malaise, the American Experiment was an awful thing, the Republicans were the devil, and the world was about to end.
All of the stuff we see today is old, old, old. Just the players have changed. Near as I can tell, the political players back then were just as bad as they are today, but with a tighter press cocoon to protect them. The faster we burn down the (really) old media, the better.
“Life” and “Look” magazines were some of the first media to tank because they got too out of touch with their base demographic. My parents were they type of people who subscribed to those magazines; FDR-Truman Democrats, deeply opposed to both Communism and Nazism, moderate liberals but also somewhat race-realist in practice. In the late sixties, the media went full New Left, and lost people like them. My mom ended up a full-on Reagan supporter, while my father may have even voted for Nixon in ’72. It was a sign of the times, as we said back then.
I picked up a copy of “The Week” in my opticians office on Wednesday:(11 AM on the day before thanksgiving is a great no-wait time.)
The Week looks like National Review for none-geriatrics- All ultimately funded by the Kochs and their ilk.
The Angel of Death will get them at some point.
George Will had to finally leave the Republican party to keep his seat.
Remember way way back when Joe Sobran had a nationally syndicated column? He touched that rail with the JQ on it and was gulaged. That was the lesson for the rest of the kept conservatives. They all know how to navigate and sound controversial or bold when they are neither.
God, I’m old enough to remember Agronsky and company. They had James Kilpatrick as the token then. It is better now by a long shot.
I remember Petey Green’s Washington. “Now I want all you little niggers to listen to the big niggers.” On channel 5.
Slightly tangential, but germane enough: For those who aren’t aware, in the UK, Piers Morgan has long been commonly referred to as Piers Moron. 😀
Private Eye magazine invented the sobriquet, I believe, but that’s how most people now refer to that puffy-faced chancer.
I’m just sorry that he was ever foisted on the American public.
His name is an anagram of: Romping Arse. He is an odious turd and up to his neck in the phone hacking scandal.
This site has a lot of blogs about him. hat4uk.worpress.com
I remember watching his show a couple of time, his way of thinking was so foreign to me I wondered if I was watching inter-dimensional cable or something.
The only positive thing I will say about Piers Morgan is his willingness to treat President Trump with respect and a bit of loyalty even at a social cost.
“The first time I had any reason to know about Ben Shapiro was when he appeared on the Piers Morgan show to talk guns. ”
I never heard of him before 2016 election Twitter and even then it was mostly because he was being raked over the coals by the accounts I was following for being NeverTrump.
“That’s where a guy like Ben Shapiro is seen as the millennial Bill Safire.”
I barely paid attention to Safire back in the day and Shapiro is pretty much off the radar for me completely but I’m not the audience. He’s being geared to be right of center left background noise for the general public and a respectable outlet for those trying to work their way into the elite but aren’t comfortable with the current progressive agenda of tranny kindergartens and mosques on every corner. Even with more choices than three networks these days, he’ll probably make a good living from it.
“The bigger issue though is the rise of alternative media.”
The young are definitely more online but I think that a lot of people overestimate social media (basically Twitter) and underestimate TV. The online sources have replaced newspapers mostly but most people will still tune into the local news on TV if they want to watch it. TV is still everywhere. When something big happens, most people will still turn on the TV to take a look.
And on top of that political junkies who do go to get news are split – a lot of those youth going online for news aren’t going to right wing sites. Plus I’d guess that the whole of the political world online is dwarfed by stuff normal people prefer. I don’t have numbers but I’d guess that the whole of the online political sphere, both left and right, are probably dwarfed by celebrity news.
In the 80’s, I had coevals who were really into the music of the 60’s and early 70’s. They embraced the radical politics of the New Left. It was a form of apple polishing. Our Boomer teachers loved it. It was validating. The rest of us just though the suck-ups were pussies, because they were pussies.
I suspect some of that with guys like Shapiro. The Boomer Cons want to believe their ideas are timeless and nothing validates that like seeing their kid’s ape their styles. That’s why he can go on campus and get treated like a star.
I’d like to know on just what fucking campus Ben Shapiro is treated like a rock star. I’ve done tours of duty at State U and Directional Tech, and trust me, the College Republicans don’t have a deep enough roster to have a pickup basketball game. Throw in the College Libertarians and you’ve got maybe three more Cheeto-stained asthmatics. He’s paid to book a gig at Berkeley, which then gets shut down for security concerns, at which point his bosses say “see? Told ya!” and get to pretend they’ve still got it.
I agree with what you’re saying, Z Man, but to be fair, the rock music that came out of 1970’s America is something the world has never had anything like before and never will again. Unique and ass-kicking wonderful. Before music was taken over by bean-counters packaging boy bands.
Shapiro is nothing, he’s just a professional speaker and writer. He’ll say whatever you pay him to say. He could just as easily go lite-lib as he goes lite-con, if you wave enough shekels in front of him. He’s the pol pundit equivalent of easy listening music or lite rock 107.5
When a man like John Derbyshire becomes too controversial for The Bastion of Conservatism Yclept National Review, you know it’s an empty publication with nothing left worth saying.
Mark Steyn, who was the most talented writer they had, was also pushed out for quoting a Dean Martin gay joke.
And for quoting the founder of National Review!
Yes, the purging of Mark Steyn from NR was genuinely astonishing. Firing one of the few decent writers that they had left for, not even really opposing gay marriage, but for speaking less than reverently about it, at an allegedly “Christian, Conservative” magazine was when Conservatism, Inc. Jumped the Shark.
Steyn got the last laugh. He’s a regular on Fox now. And more popular than ever.