The hollow bravery of Ben Shapiro

"The difference between them is that Salam is a genuine thinker, whereas the only reason Shapiro isn’t part of the alt-right is that they happen to hate him too. The anti-Semitism Shapiro has endured from neo-Nazis is appalling and inexcusable — no Jew, no matter how horrible I may find his politics, deserves that. But (as conservatives love to remind us) even genuine oppression does not confer virtue, and it’s no accident that the website Shapiro helped build became the alt-right’s platform. In both substance and tone, they are scarcely distinguishable from one another.
read more:http:// https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/...m-1.812520

(Nov 21, 2017 11:32 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: "The difference between them is that Salam is a genuine thinker, whereas the only reason Shapiro isn’t part of the alt-right is that they happen to hate him too. The anti-Semitism Shapiro has endured from neo-Nazis is appalling and inexcusable — no Jew, no matter how horrible I may find his politics, deserves that. But (as conservatives love to remind us) even genuine oppression does not confer virtue, and it’s no accident that the website Shapiro helped build became the alt-right’s platform. In both substance and tone, they are scarcely distinguishable from one another.
read more: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.812520

Association fallacy. And note how you cite opinions without any actual quotes...nor provide any damning quotes from Shapiro yourself.

You're just a mindless leftist zombie...droning "brains" while wishing you had some.

Also from your beloved New York Times:

Ben Shapiro, a Provocative ‘Gladiator,’ Battles to Win Young Conservatives
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/us/be...ative.html

"Mr. Shapiro, conservative thinker, entertainer, trash talker and destroyer of weak arguments, has been called the voice of the conservative millennial movement. He represents the tastes of an emerging political class: If Rush Limbaugh is someone your dad listens to on his car radio, Mr. Shapiro, 33, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is the cool kid’s philosopher, dissecting arguments with a lawyer’s skill and references to Aristotle. He exists in places that young people inhabit — podcasts, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. His podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, is downloaded 10 million times every month. Seventy percent of his audience is under the age of 40.
...
He does not like President Trump and he disagrees with his old boss at Breitbart News, Stephen K. Bannon, that Trumpism is the future of the Republican Party. He likes to point out that Mr. Trump won fewer votes in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney in 2012 and fewer votes in Michigan than George W. Bush in 2004. Most Republicans voted for Mr. Trump not because they loved him, he argues, but because they hated Hillary Clinton.
...
Mr. Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, was one of the first to call out the alt-right movement, denouncing it as racist and anti-Semitic at a time when most people saw it as counterculture and cool. He paid a price. He received 38 percent of all anti-Semitic tweets aimed at journalists in 2016, the largest single share, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
...
His aggressive tone draws in audiences, he said, but he does not attack unfairly, stoke anger for the sake of it, or mischaracterize his opponents’ positions. He even hits his own side, as he did with Sean Hannity for not weighing in on Roy S. Moore, the embattled Alabama Republican, and Mr. Bannon for supporting him.
...
Mr. Shapiro broke with Mr. Bannon last year, saying Breitbart had become a propaganda tool for Mr. Trump.
...
“Trump won the nomination because he was anti-left, not because of any political viewpoints,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. “He was slapping people on the left and people on the right went, ‘Yeah, those people need to be slapped!’”

But Mr. Shapiro does it too. He thinks it’s easy to provoke the left, which he says has become intellectually flabby after decades of cultural dominance. It’s not good at arguing and relies instead on taboos and punishing people who violate them.
...
Mr. Shapiro says he’s about more than tribal polemics. In an age of combative politics, you have to be a fighter to be in the game. And he says he’s willing to defend conservatism against those on the right as well as the left.

“I am trying to militantly defend conservative ideas,” he said. “I’m not going to be anti-left for the sake of it.”"

Lemme guess. The NYT article in the OP is gospel troof, but this NYT article is, what, propaganda?  

The cognitive dissonance is deafening.

(Nov 21, 2017 05:49 PM)Yazata Wrote: Just imagine what New York Times writers would be saying if blacks and gays were systematically excluded from teaching positions, silenced and shouted down by straight whites in classrooms with their professors' active encouragement, and all black or gay speakers were met with violent riots intended to prevent them from speaking or anyone else from hearing them.

The similarity between the behavior of today's dressed-in-black ostensible anti-fascists and and Hitlers 1930's brownshirts is obvious. But the irony goes right over the heads of the New York Times.

We don't have to imagine, history tells us that they were excluded at one time in history. That's why we are where we are, now. It seems there is this notion that blacks and gays never suffered persecution or discrimination, and all of this political hoopla is a conjuring up of social justice warriors. I know you know this, but maybe some people selectively forget that blacks and gays have suffered extreme discrimination...in many cases, brutally. In some cases, they still do. And honestly, straight white conservative men are still running the business world, and the political arena, pretty much.

Women are still being treated poorly too, in many circles, don't need to look much further than any tv news networks right now endlessly running the sexual harassment/assault stories showcasing straight men in high places doing things they shouldn't to show women ''who's really boss.'' Ironically, liberals and conservatives have been caught with their pants down, literally and figuratively.

The conservative right doesn't like that they might get hit in the head, as the pendulum swings back the other way. Unfortunately, that's not the answer, either. No one should be 'silenced,' or 'excluded.' The pendulum should settle somewhere in the middle, but will it ever?

(Nov 26, 2017 07:39 PM)Leigha Wrote:

(Nov 21, 2017 05:49 PM)Yazata Wrote: Just imagine what New York Times writers would be saying if blacks and gays were systematically excluded from teaching positions, silenced and shouted down by straight whites in classrooms with their professors' active encouragement, and all black or gay speakers were met with violent riots intended to prevent them from speaking or anyone else from hearing them.

The similarity between the behavior of today's dressed-in-black ostensible anti-fascists and and Hitlers 1930's brownshirts is obvious. But the irony goes right over the heads of the New York Times.

We don't have to imagine, history tells us that they were excluded at one time in history. That's why we are where we are, now. It seems there is this notion that blacks and gays never suffered persecution or discrimination, and all of this political hoopla is a conjuring up of social justice warriors. I know you know this, but maybe some people selectively forget that blacks and gays have suffered extreme discrimination...in many cases, brutally. In some cases, they still do. And honestly, straight white conservative men are still running the business world, and the political arena, pretty much.

Women are still being treated poorly too, in many circles, don't need to look much further than any tv news networks right now endlessly running the sexual harassment/assault stories showcasing straight men in high places doing things they shouldn't to show women ''who's really boss.'' Ironically, liberals and conservatives have been caught with their pants down, literally and figuratively.

The conservative right doesn't like that they might get hit in the head, as the pendulum swings back the other way. Unfortunately, that's not the answer, either. No one should be 'silenced,' or 'excluded.' The pendulum should settle somewhere in the middle, but will it ever?

We haven't seen this kind of racial division for decades. We have what we do now because of people, like Obama, stoking racial division. Yes, blacks and gays have been persecuted, but unless you intend to find and persecute the actual perpetrators, you are only persecuting more innocent people...and actually causing more racial animus from the new injustice. That is why "social justice" is injustice. It indiscriminately targets the innocent to pay for the actions of the guilty. Assuming a whole race is obligated to make amends, and by extension guilty, for the actions of a relative few, is racism. It's the same thinking as assuming all blacks are criminals.

Success is not a zero sum game, so one race doing better doesn't mean they are guilty of another doing worse...unless they're Democrats, with their demonstrably racist policies.

Women ARE still being treated poorly, in overwhelmingly leftist circles.

I agree with you to an extent, but I never really bought into the idea that Obama manufactured racist tension. People are either racist or they're not. It's always there, bubbling below the surface. Sure, he's tipped things a bit to make it bubble over, but unfortunately, racism can't be controlled by any one administration. It's something that exists in many human hearts.

Obama didn't manufacture racist blacks, he just made them mainstream. Most Americans weren't aware of how racist many blacks were until Obama validated their feelings and misconduct from his bully pulpit. So while the relatively small percent of racist whites had been decreasing in cultural relevance over the decades, the sudden spike in expressed black racism renewed whatever white racism persisted and fostered new animus in non-racist whites who resented being stereotyped as racists.

Obama basically said they were right to hate whites...and America.

It was always a headscratcher to me that Obama fought to be President of a country he hates. lol Or at least that's how he came across, at times.

Well, he did say, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Seems he did...and for the worse.