Today Ben Shapiro, the mosque-shooter favorite conservative star, went on the BBC to promote his new book about his usual bullshit whose title you can feel free to look up. The interview should have been a slam-dunk for Shapiro, seeing as it was with Andrew Neil—himself a ghoul who denies climate-change and argued throughout the ’90s that heterosexual AIDS was a myth—and for a second it was. But almost immediately something funny happened, both in the sense of being strange and also completely hilarious: Shapiro was asked to defend a single one of his positions in the most straightforward way possible and he absolutely lost his shit, leading to an eventual walkout.
Here’s the moment Shapiro decided he’d had enough basic questioning:
What set Shapiro off so badly to begin with was a question about whether attempts in states like Georgia to recriminalize abortion “would seem to take us back to the dark ages.” (They would.) Shapiro, who is supposed to be the “smart” conservative and the “cool-kid’s philosopher,” apparently is unable to understand the basic concept of a prompt to defend one’s own position. Instead, he repeatedly accuses the man who was once handpicked by Rupert Murdoch to run the notoriously conservative The Sunday Times of being a “leftist.”
“Why don’t you just say you’re on the left?” Shapiro whines, revealing what Shapiro would do if someone ever actually accepted one of his endless challenges to debates. “Wah wah wah wahhhh,” continues Shapiro, essentially, his voice wailing like a tornado siren.
Eventually Shapiro decides he’s had enough, because Neil has the gall to ask him why he tweeted, “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.” (He tweets those things because he generally seems to enjoy spouting racist ideology.)
“I’m popular and no one’s ever heard of you,” concludes the master of rhetoric.
After the interview, which was pre-taped, the rest of the show’s panel takes a moment to reflect very Britishly on how vapid and pseudo-intellectual both Shapiro and the movement he represents are: “The intellectual carapace is so thin... If this is the stellar talent of the right, it’s absolutely going nowhere.”
You can check out the interview in its entirety below:
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