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Ben Shapiro

American conservative, political commentator, and writer (born 1984)
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Benjamin Aaron "Ben" Shapiro (born 15 January 1984, is a American conservative political commentator, nationally syndicated columnist, author, radio talk show host, and attorney.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

Quotes

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Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future (2005)

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  • A man may be judged by his standard of entertainment as easily as by the standard of his work.
  • Nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism are natural results of the chaotic existential subjectivism popularized by the Left. If the hallmark of the baby boomers was rebellion, the hallmark of my generation is jadedness. Nothing really matters—we're cosmically alone.
  • Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents—nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today's teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents—not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there.
  • Real-life teens wish they could live like the teens Hollywood promotes. Everyone has sex, and relationships are deep and meaningful, even if they only last a couple episodes. There are never any consequences to any action, except for experiencing the angst of teenage life alongside the characters. When a generation becomes desensitized to the ramifications of the culture around them, it's natural to seek out any sort of feeling, even angst.

How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them (2014)

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How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument, Sherman Oaks: David Horowitz Freedom Center, 16 April 2014 
  • As a general matter, the left's favorite three lines of attack are (1) you're stupid; (2) you're mean; (3) you're corrupt. Sarah Palin is supposedly stupid; Mitt Romney is supposedly mean; Dick Cheney is supposedly corrupt. Take away those lines of attack and watch the discomfort set in.
  • There will be no conversation in which you call me a racist, and I explain why I'm not a racist. That's a conversation for idiots.
  • When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that's bullying. When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the government shutdown, that's bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification. That's nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.

The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great (2019)

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  • We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in His image, and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God's world. Those notions were born in Jerusalem and Athens, respectively.
  • We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.
  • Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Articles, shows, talks, debates and tweets

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Articles

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  • 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.
 
If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper.
  • The Arab enmity for Jews and the state of Israel allows for no peace process. The time for half measures has passed. Bulldozing houses of homicide bombers is useless. Instituting ongoing curfews in Arab-populated cities is useless. Roadblocks, touch fences, midnight negotiations and cease-fires are useless. [...] Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It's an ugly solution, but it is the only solution.
  • President Obama is, however, a man who embodies all the personal characteristics of a fascist leader, right down to the arrogant chin-up head tilt he utilizes when waiting for applause. He sees democracy as a filthy process that can be cured only by the centralized power of bureaucrats. He sees his presidency as a Hegelian synthesis marking the end of political conflict. He sees himself as embodiment of the collective will. No president should speak in these terms—not in a representative republic. Obama does it habitually.
  • Is Donald Trump the best Republican candidate for president out there? It would be tough to argue otherwise. He's got all the makings of a breakout star; he's got bravado and the cash to back it up.
 
The Jews who vote for Obama are, by and large, Jews In Name Only (JINOs).
  • The answer is deceptively simple: The Jews who vote for Obama are, by and large, Jews In Name Only (JINOs). They eat bagels and lox; they watch Schindler's List; they visit temple on Yom Kippur—sometimes. But they do not care about Israel. Or if they do, they care about it less than abortion, gay marriage and global warming.
    • "Jews in Name Only", Townhall.com, 25 May 2011 
    • This is a pun on the term RINO, which stands for "Republican In Name Only".
  • This is a clarifying election. We've learned that certain media members were willing to sell out long-held principles for ratings. We've learned that certain conservative voters were willing to let conservatism go by the wayside to hero worship a godking. Now we're learning that the Republican leadership is everything we thought they were. We will remember their names. It's time for a new brand of conservative leadership—and those who kowtow to Trump shouldn't be a part of it.
  • This is pure ends-justify-the-means logic. And the means are pushing falsehood. The notion here seems to be that Trump is helping America avoid perdition, and thus must be given leeway to lie; if we didn't allow him to lie, the left would continue to do so, and then they'd win and drive us straight into Hell. But that suggests that truth no longer has the capacity to drive voters or Americans. If that's true, republicanism is finished as a principle—if we can only lie to voters to get them to vote for us, that undermines the decency of republicanism altogether.
  • Very often these days, we hear about the wonderful richness of the international community. Americans are chastised for failing to go along with the international community on climate change; failing to follow the consensus of the international community on health care; failing to mirror the priorities of the international community in foreign policy.
    But here's the reality: There is no international community. There is merely a group of states motivated by self-interest. Sometimes those self-interests overlap. Other times they don't. But let's not pretend that the international community somehow maintains a sort of collective moral standing merely by dint of numbers. In fact, precisely the opposite is often true.
    ..
    Hamas isn't hiding the ball. It is evil. It celebrates evil. It pays terrorists to commit acts of evil. But the international community isn't hiding the ball either when its members refuse to condemn terrorism as terrorism when it is directed against disfavored members of the international community.
  • Here's the truth: Radical Islam is dangerous. The Islamic world has a serious problem with radical Islam. And large swaths of the Muslim world are, in fact, hostile to Western views on matters ranging from freedom of speech to women's rights.
  • So, what would tempt the New York Times to print an illustration directly from the mind of Julius Streicher? The fact that the Times, like many of today's mainstream media outlets, has been completely and utterly willing to cover for and, indeed, engage in anti-Semitism, so long as it is disguised as anti-Zionism.
    ..
    Back in 2015, the New York Times printed a list of lawmakers who voted against the anti-Israel Iran deal—listing them by the percentage of Jews in their districts and noting which ones were Jewish themselves. Back in 2014, the public editor of the newspaper, Margaret Sullivan, advised reporters to cover the Palestinians as "more than just victims," thanks to the paper's insanely one-sided coverage.
    ...
    The mainstream Left has engaged in self-flattering blindness when it comes to Jew-hatred. And all too often, that blindness veers into outright anti-Semitism.
  • A pluralistic democracy requires three factors to function: a shared cultural space; a shared belief in key ideas, largely embedded in the Constitution; and a shared willingness to leave one another alone. As each component erodes, so, too, does the possibility of a united country.

Television shows and podcasts

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The Ben Shapiro Show
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  • If tyranny is going to come in the United States, it's going to come from people who are so fearful of the liberty of Americans, that they believe that the government should shut down all sorts of freedoms that we hold dear.
  • Okay, well, the fact is that if you had to work more than one job to have a roof over your head or food on the table, you probably shouldn't have taken the job that's not paying you enough. That'd be a you problem.
    • "Practicality vs. Moral Character?", The Ben Shapiro Show (839): 45:21, 4 August 2019 
    • Responding to Kamala Harris's assertion, "In our America, we must agree nobody should have to work more than one job to have a roof over their head and food on the table."
  • They're talking about this dumb story that President Trump wanted to nuke hurricanes. Which, by the way, I don't care whether it does anything, I just think it sounds cool. I mean, what if there are sharks in the hurricanes? What if it's a sharknado? What then, guys? Have you thought about that? Just the idea—any time you're talking about nuking a random thing that's not really going to hurt anybody, I'll admit, the 13-year-old boy in me is kinda for it.
  • Meanwhile, the polarization of the American public continues apace with wokescolds doing their best to ruin every aspect of American life. I'm very excited that Merriam-Webster Dictionary has now added the non-binary pronoun they to the dictionary. Because when I look at a book for definitions of words, what I want is a made-up definition of a word that has never been used this way in all of human history: a plural noun, used as a singular noun, to refer to a singular gender. We're gonna use a plural noun, and Merriam-Webster is gonna go along with this, which just demonstrates once and for all that logic has gone out the window. People are tailoring science to meet politically correct demands, people are tailoring language to meet politically correct demands.
 
"I am a Jew." Those have been the words of the Jewish people for three millennia. … And those are my words, too.
Appearances on other shows
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  • There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood who feel the obligation—they have a perverse leftist view of history, pushed by the Soviet Union, that what really destroyed Europe was Christianity. It was not fascism, it was not communism, it was not leftism, it was Christianity. And therefore, the cure for intolerance is to bash the hell out of Christianity.
  • Ben Shapiro: Why are we mainstreaming delusion?
    Drew Pinsky: It's not delusion.
    Samantha Schacher: Why would you call it delusion?
    Ben Shapiro: Because Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner—I'll call him Caitlyn Jenner, because that's …
    Samantha Schacher: No, it's her. You're not being polite to the pronoun. Disrespectful.
    Ben Shapiro: Okay, forget about the disrespect. Facts don't care about your feelings. It turns out that every chromosome, every cell in Caitlyn Jenner's body, is male, with the exception of some of his sperm cells. It turns out that he still has all of his male appendages. How he feels on the inside is irrelevant to the question of his biological self.
  • Ben Shapiro: I don't frankly give a damn what you think of me, since I've never heard of you.
    Andrew Neil: And I've never heard of you before I briefed myself for this, but that's not the issue. You haven't—
    Ben Shapiro: Then why the hell are you interviewing me, sir?
    Andrew Neil: It's an interesting book. But my point is, your book claims that society—
    Ben Shapiro: Well, it would be nice if you would quote it from time to time.
  • And as far as the free speech situation, what I will say is that no company has the obligation to literally pay anyone. The Daily Wire is a publisher, it is not a platform. I have never called for Candace, or anyone else, for that matter, to be banned from YouTube, to be banned from X, to be banned from any platform. That is a different story, obviously, when it comes to any publisher. Any publisher gets to make decisions about what it wishes to purvey and not.

Talks and debates

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  • So the only other reason you should ever have a conversation, or be friends, with anyone on the left is—and not even be friends—if you are in public in front of a large audience, and then your goal is to humiliate them as badly as possible. That is the goal of the conversation. The goal is not to convince the person. The goal is not to make friends with that person.
  • So let's say, let's say, for the sake of argument, that all the water levels around the world rise by, let's say, five feet over the next hundred years—say, ten feet over the next hundred years—and it puts all the low-lying areas on the coast underwater. Which—let's say all of that happens. You think that people aren't going to just sell their homes and move?
    • "Ben Shapiro VS Climate Change", YouTube, 2017-01-08, 5:37
    • On the Lex Fridman Podcast #336, Shapiro has clarified what he meant by this statement: "The argument that I am making is over time. I don't mean that if a tsunami is about to hit your house, you can list it on eBay. That's not what I mean, obviously. What I mean is that human beings have an extraordinay ability to adapt, it's actually our best quality, and that as water levels rise, real estate prices in those areas tend to fall. That over time, people tend to abandon those areas. They tend to leave. They tend to, right now, sell their houses, and then they tend to move. And eventually, those houses will be worthless, and you won't have anybody to sell to. But presumably, not that many people will be living there by that point, which is one of the reasons why the price will be low, because there is no demand."
  • But, what we can't do, is suggest, as the Bernie Sanders left does, that healthcare is an inalienable right and therefore you can put a gun to my wife's head—she's a doctor—and you can force her to provide care at any cost you wanna pay. You can't do that and hope to increase the supply of healthcare.
  • The argument, I guess here, is that would you kill baby Hitler? And the truth is that no pro-life person on earth would kill baby Hitler, because baby Hitler wasn't Hitler, adult Hitler was Hitler. Baby Hitler was a baby. What you presumably want to do with baby Hitler is take baby Hitler out of baby Hitler's house and move baby Hitler into a better house where he would not grow up to be Hitler, right? That's the idea.
    • 2019 March for Life, 2019-01-18
  • Questioner: So, I figure you've probably heard this before, but C. S. Lewis makes the argument that because of Jesus' exclusive claims, that he is either a liar that intentionally led people astray, a lunatic that believed he was the son of God and he wasn't, or he is Lord. Would you put him in one of those categories, or would you put him in another, separate category?
    Ben Shapiro: So, I mean, because I'm a Jew, I'm just gonna, I mean … look, I'm a Jew, so obviously, for those who are not particularly versed in Judaism, the reason we are not Christians is because we don't believe that Jesus was the Messiah or a physical iteration of God. … So the option from within Judaism is to suggest that Jesus was actually a historical figure who was saying a lot of things which Jews would agree with, because if you read a lot of the New Testament, it, as you would expect, mimics a lot of things in the Old Testament; and that he was actually a political figure; and that the Romans crucified him because he was a political figure who was attempting to lead a rebellion against their tyranny. That's the Jewish historical claim about Jesus.

Twitter

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Quotes about Shapiro

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  • Remarkably, neither [New York Times] article mentioned Shapiro’s naked bigotry toward Palestinians and Muslims. In 2003, he published a column demanding that Israel “transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper.” Citing precedents from World War II, he insisted that, “expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements.” Shapiro has since repudiated that proposal, but his view of Palestinians has not changed. In 2007, he declared that “the Palestinian Arab population is rotten to the core” and that since “an entire population is that “Palestinian hatred of Jews is religious and cannot be satiated except via Jewish suicide.” And last year, he personally promoted an article written on the website he edits, The Daily Wire, which called the Muslim presence in Europe a “disease.” Muslim men, it declared, are “uncivilized”...Shapiro isn’t referring to a particular Palestinian or Muslim political party, regime or practice at a particular moment in time. He’s generalizing about the immutable characteristics of an entire national or religious group...while Shapiro opposes Trump, he embraces Trumpism as it relates to Palestinians and Muslims. There are, in fact, fewer and fewer prominent conservatives who don’t.
  • Shapiro has always been deeply conservative and does not pretend to be objective. But he says his market niche is giving cleareyed reads of current events, not purely partisan rants. He is often compared to his former colleague at Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos. On the surface, they seem the same. Both speak on college campuses. Both draw protests. Both used to work for Mr. Bannon at Breitbart. Both are young.

    In fact, they are very different. Mr. Yiannopoulos, a protégé of Mr. Bannon, was good at shocking audiences, saying things like "feminism is cancer." But critics say that he was empty of ideas, a kind of nihilistic rodeo clown who was not even conservative. Mr. Shapiro broke with Mr. Bannon last year, saying Breitbart had become a propaganda tool for Mr. Trump.

  • According to his supporters, and even many who might not support him, Ben Shapiro loves facts. Why? Well, because he says he loves facts. He's not basing his assertions on feelings, and we know this because he says that he isn't. [...] By insisting on this interpretation of his own character, over and over, buoyed by the idolatrous support of his loyal fans and the snarky titles of his clickbait videos, Shapiro conjures into being an image of himself as The Rational Man. Say the magic words enough times, and the spell will be cast over your audience.
  • Yet this uncritical embrace of nationalism has also led some Jews to describe their liberal co-religionists in terms that validate anti-Semitic perceptions of Jews more broadly; the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro has referred to liberal Jews as "JINOs" and "bad Jews" who "vote Democrat" and therefore "undermine [the Jewish people] from within." Shapiro and his comrades seem unaware that by validating anti-Semitic stereotypes about liberal American Jews, who comprise the majority of American Jewry, they are affirming the ideological beliefs of anti-Semites while presenting themselves as worthy exceptions.

    If the vast majority of American Jews are "bad Jews," as Shapiro maintains, then hating them is rational. This is why Shapiro, himself a frequent target of anti-Semites, has drawn the interest of white-nationalist terrorists, including Alexandre Bissonnette and Anders Breivik, and is praised on white-nationalist forums. They may not like Shapiro personally, but he is saying what they want to hear. When the president said that liberal Jews are dumb or disloyal, he was echoing a prevailing theme of right-wing Jewish discourse in the Trump era.

References

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  1. ↑ So, Here's A Giant List Of All The Dumb Stuff I've Ever Done (Don't Worry, I'll Keep Updating It), retrieved on 2021-05-26 
  2. ↑ So, Here's A Giant List Of All The Dumb Stuff I've Ever Done (Don't Worry, I'll Keep Updating It), retrieved on 2021-05-26 
  3. ↑ So, Here's A Giant List Of All The Dumb Stuff I've Ever Done (Don't Worry, I'll Keep Updating It), retrieved on 2021-05-26 
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