A perfidious Swampling

I told you Benny Shapiro was a) a made man and b) bad news. Believe it or not, he's now openly defending the Deep State's shocking interference with the U.S. electoral system:

Ben Shapiro attacked the President and defended the Deep State spy embedded in Trump’s campaign.

Shapiro tweeted: Why? If campaign aides were meeting with Russian cut outs and then bragging about it (see Papadapolous), why would it be scandalous for an informant to meet with him?

Why? If campaign aides were meeting with Russian cut outs and then bragging about it (see Papadapolous), why would it be scandalous for an informant to meet with him? https://t.co/hj3AsSuHCk
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 18, 2018

Shapiro slammed Trump again saying the FBI would have been remiss not to investigate.

Several things can be true at once:
1. There was no collusion.
2. There was willingness to collude by Papadapolous, Trump Jr., and possibly Manafort.
3. FBI would have been remiss not to investigate, even if it eventually came up empty.
4. Post-election leaks are scandalous.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 18, 2018

Ben Shapiro is defending the FBI informant who used cash to entice Papadopoulos to London. Ben Shapiro is defending Obama’s FBI even though they were spying on Trump before they opened the investigation.

As appalling as it is, Shapiro's reaction is more than a little informative. Given the way in which his only consistent guiding principle is what he believes to be beneficial for his particular identity group, this defensive reaction gives us some idea of who Shapiro believes to be behind the very interference he is defending. That does not, of course, mean that he is correct.

It does, however, indicate that Shapiro is very likely a Swamp creature himself. That's the connection that many people have failed to grasp: NeverTrump is a creation of the Swamp. It was a last-ditch attempt to derail what they were too late to realize was a threat. That is why all those self-proclaimed "principled conservatives" still refuse to support Trump despite all of his objectively conservative accomplishments. Trump is their enemy and they know it, even though most of the President's supporters don't.

This recent expansion of the special counsel's investigation may help explain Swampy Shapiro's bizarre outburst.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe is looking more closely into Middle Eastern involvement during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, as it is now exploring the role of an Israeli entrepreneur with ties to a Gulf monarchy, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Mueller has been conducting interviews about the work of Joel Zamel, an Australia-born Israeli businessman with experience in social media and intelligence gathering. Mr. Zamel is the founder of several private consulting firms—including a crowdsourced analysis firm called Wikistrat as well as the Psy Group, a secretive private intelligence firm with the motto “shape reality.” 

UPDATE: The DOJ has just complied with the President's public demand:

“The Department has asked the Inspector General to expand the ongoing review of the (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) application process to include determining whether there was any impropriety or political motivation in how the FBI conducted its counterintelligence investigation of persons suspected of involvement with the Russian agents who interfered in the 2016 presidential election. As always, the Inspector General will consult with the appropriate U.S. Attorney if there is any evidence of potential criminal conduct,” DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told Fox News. 

UPDATE: Swamplings of a feather flock together.

Great chat between @benshapiro and @JonahNRO and I'm only tweeting this because as Jonah mentions, "In ten years we're all going to be working for Ben." 

Only because no one else will have any need to employ dishonest, talent-free fake Right media whores.

UPDATE: Yes, Jonah Goldberg is a confirmed Swampling.

On another front, the great fight to prove that either President Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election or that the “Deep State” conspired to in effect frame the president is really just an ugly contest of two groups of storytellers desperate to definitively print the legend — their legend.

SCARE QUOTES MEANS IT ISN'T TRUE!

Jeff Bezos's favorite fake conservative

You guessed it, it's the New York Times-endorsed controlled opposition figure, (((Ben Shapiro))).

Alexa Names Her Favorite Conservative Pundit: Ben Shapiro.

The responses by Instapundit readers demonstrate that conservatives are finally seeing through the little fraud. These are all just from the initial page of comments.

Basil Makedon
This endorsement is enough for me to banish Shapiro to the outer-darkness. I don't actually see the fascination with him, honestly. He's not nearly as clever as he (and his fans) believes. I went to Law School with at least a half-dozen short, Jewish guys who were twice as smart, more conservative and talked at least as fast. Most of his "debates" are with half-witted children who have had indoctrination rather than education. The whole "Intellectual Dark Web" thing is such a farce. All of those people -- save Shapiro -- are Leftists, shivved by Blessed Hussein's children. Shapiro is the lone exception, which of course makes me suspicious.

jubadoobai
Alexa likes the chipmunk on helium? Fix her taste buds, Bezos. Sigh. I used to like him, too. Once upon a time.

Carey J
It’s only because Shapiro writes for NeverTrump Review.

 Kyle Smith
The highly politicized Alexa answers mean that someone works full time politicizing Alexa and is paid to to do that. They hate average Americans and cannot help themsevles. Every “power” they get they turn to politics and hate.

Botched_Lobotomy
You could make an argument that Shapiro is a classical liberal based on his defense of free speech as long as he likes the person who's speech is being restricted. You'd be wrong but you could at least make a good faith argument. In no way is he a conservative.

WanderingWonderer
Ben Shapiro has publicly stated that "racists" should be hunted down and hounded from their places of employment. Naturally he's all about Israel staying jewish by any means necessary but 'doesn't care' about America's demographics. Ben Shapiro has also defended James Gunn's "jokes" about pedophilia. It just goes to show who he likes and whose side he is on.

BillyS
Ben is the controlled opposition. They have to have some opposition, but they reign him in very well. He was just defending a pedophile recently after all!

Richard Warren
No surprise that the Approved Opposision (TM) is the approved opposition, except perhaps to that Driscoll guy.

JimboFlex
A member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” is Jeff Bezos favorite conservative? How can this be? We couldn’t possibly have been sold a false bill of goods!

jckluge
Ben is a complete putz who would run conservatism as a completely ineffective opposition if he could. I think Alexa is just following orders here.

willbest
Why would Alexa need to go to reeducation camp for picking one of the NYT approved voices of the conservative movement?

Vizzini
No, Bezos smiles. The Littlest Chickenhawk is the controlled opposition. All is proceeding in accordance with Bezos' plan.

dougf43
Well of course Benny is her favourite. Why would he not be. Seemingly a combative worthy adversary, but in reality, under the surface, nobody to worry about at all. Because what Ben really approves of is Ben Shapiro, and his exquisite better than you morality. All sound and absolutely no fury, signifying ---nothing.

The Chickenhawk squared

Some of the newer Ilk are learning to trust my instincts:

I doubted Vox when he predicted that Shapiro would eventually come out in defense of Jewish Hollywood rapists. But here we are.

It's really not that difficult. Everything a tribalist does will be in defense of his tribe, even if that requires declaring that 1+1=2 one minute, then turning around and declaring that 1+1=fuchsia the next. I have known that Ben Shapiro was a dishonest little snake since 2005.

When are you all going to understand that you can NEVER give a snake a pass just because he happens to mouth a few words that you like every now and then? NEVER! Once someone reveals their snakish character, that means you cannot trust a single word that he wrote, said, or implied, either in the past or in the future.

That's how I knew Jordan Peterson was an evil and corrupting influence before I'd watched any of his videos or read either of his books. That's why I have never had any respect or regard for Ben Shapiro, even before his star ascended in the usual conservative circles and the New York Times anointed him a leading figure of the Approved Opposition. It's just a matter of time before pictures of both of them with black eyes appear.

The following are the words of a snake. Compare and contrast the two statements.

I think @JamesGunn is an a**hole, as my exchange with him earlier this week made clear. I also think that firing him for vile old joke tweets is bad precedent and a mistake. There is no limiting principle to the outrage mob.
- Ben Shapiro

Of course there are legitimate racists and we should target them, We should find them and we should hurt their careers because racism is unacceptable.
- Ben Shapiro

So, racism is unacceptable, but pedophilia is just fine with the Littlest Chickenhawk. Quelle surprise.... Anyhow, it's beyond stupid to claim that any "precedent" is being set here. There is no dearth of well-established precedent for people being fired for a single tweet, let alone dozens of seriously sketchy ones.

A reader points out another snakish juxtaposition.

And by the way, I don't give a good damn about the so-called "browning of America.
- Ben Shapiro

If Germans, who had a centuries-old connection to the newly created Polish territory, could be expelled, then surely Palestinians, whose claim to Judea, Samaria and Gaza is dubious at best, can be expelled. It's time to stop being squeamish.
- Ben Shapiro

The Palestinians have a much stronger historical claim to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza than the Jews do to any land from Maine to California. Shall we take this to mean that Ben Shapiro would support the expulsion of the Jewish people from the USA?

Fake news, fake Right

The cucks are really, really desperate to keep the Littlest Chickenhawk viable:

I spend a few weeks every year teaching high-school and college students, and in my interactions with young people in and around universities I have noticed a trend. After class, at meals, and in walks around campus, the politically engaged students invariably ask me the same question: What do I think of Ben Shapiro?

Nor am I alone. Recently Eliza Gray had a similar experience while reporting on young conservatives in the age of President Trump. “Oddly enough,” she wrote in the Washington Post, “the person who appeared to be doing the most to shape the thinking of the new generation of Republican leaders was not the president of the United States—but Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old anti-Trump conservative pundit who came up unprompted in more than a third of my conversations.” Again and again, students turn exchanges involving politics and ideology into discussions of Shapiro, his media presence, his ideas, and his mode of discourse.

As it turns out, I happen to think well of Shapiro, and admire not only his intelligence but also the way he is modeling political debate for an audience of millions. (We’ve corresponded once or twice but have never met.) More important, though, is what Shapiro’s celebrity tells us about the changing nature of media, the emerging sensibility of conservative youth, and indeed the future of American conservatism itself.

Shapiro owes a lot to social media. His appearances on Fox News Channel are not the cause but the consequence of his fame. It is by searching YouTube that teenagers come across his debates with campus lefties, his speeches, his appearances on like-minded podcasts, and his extended interviews with friends and other members of the so-called intellectual dark web.

The idea that Ben Shapiro is shaping ANYONE'S thinking, let alone the coming Republican leadership, is downright hilarious. The trend is clearly moving well away from his outdated open borders, free trade, Israel-first nonsense. Ben Shapiro may well be "the future of conservatism" because conservatism is dead. The cuckservatives fantasize about Generation Shapiro, but what they will get is Generation Zyklon.

As with the dog that didn't bark in the night, what is significant is the fact that they have literally no one else. All of the genuine intellectual energy is on the nationalist Right. Jordan Peterson is a propped-up fraud. Sam Harris is a recycled, propped-up midwit. Shapiro has been propped up and pushed on conservatives since he was in junior high despite this being the quality of his political analysis.

Mailvox: chickenhawks and other 11-letter words

GT expresses a veteran's view:

Thank you! I am a veteran who shares your sentiments regarding Boy Shapiro. I had even considered sending an email. But now I don't have to since you have done so far more effectively than I could have. Not to mention the fact that the said email would only been seen by Boy Shapiro, while your excellent rebuke is there on WorldNetDaily for all the world to see.

All of your points were excellent, but it was the first one that cut to the heart of the matter. If Boy Shapiro is so in favor of Bush Wars, why doesn't he join the military? As a college graduate, I'm sure he could find a position replacing the many junior-grade officers who are making an exit.

I suspect one of the reasons that the pro-war commentators have gone so astray on this chickenhawk thing is not only because so many of them feel personally defensive about it, but also because they simply are not acquainted with many individuals serving in the military. In my personal experience, I've usually heard the word "chickenhawk" preceded by an adjective that starts with the letter F.

Although the results of Friday's little poll are completely unscientific, I don't think they can be easily dismissed. Blackfive's readership tends to lean fairly heavily pro-war, and while the veterans and active military there were less supportive of my position than the veterans and active military here, a substantial majority still agreed nevertheless.

CH recommends the road less travelled:

I wonder too about defending people who we know will stab us in the back at their first opportunity (Shiites, Afghans). I am not there being wounded and killed along with the other volunteers. I am too old. But did you really have to deliver that very low blow about the San Francisco bathhouse sex? If the guy is a pervert, and you can back it up, then do so. If you can't then debaters know what you are doing, calling names for lack of an opposing argument. You didn't win this one, you diminished your credibility. Stick to the high road.

Yes, yes I did, because it was funny and it amused me. In any event, CH didn't read the first paragraph closely enough as I was merely giving Mr. Shapiro an out, (so to speak), against the charges which otherwise appear to apply so very well indeed. What's ironic is the way that CH somehow manages to completely miss the substantive arguments which completely demolish Shapiro's five previous points because she's so hung up on something that isn't even an accusation!

Meanwhile, BH is a man who would fight for Ben's honor. He'll be the hero Ben's dreaming of. They'll live forever, knowing together, that he did it all for the glory of love:

Vox, with all due respect to your ostensibly prodigious intellect: Screw you. No, Ben hasn’t seen combat – just look at him; he’s a baby. I have seen combat, both in Desert Storm and as a civilian police officer, and I’m telling you the ad hominem attacks have got to stop. First you rake Michelle Malkin over the coals for taking a fairly reasonable position on the internment of American citizens of particular ethnicity during WWII, and now you’re going after Ben Shapiro for supporting the substance of the Iraq war. But the problem is you’re full of shit. It doesn’t make a bit of difference as regards the merits of his argument whether or not he has, does, or ever will serve in the US military. I’m no Bush cheerleader, but clearly the invasion of Iraq was eminently justified, and while I don’t support its continued occupation, I don’t agree with your position that to do so is tantamount to empire building.

If you were as intelligent as you think you are, you would understand that, as a student at Harvard Law School, Ben Shapiro is swimming upstream in a sewer, and you would attribute his rhetorical excesses to his youth and perhaps to a conditioned response to the vehement, caustic, knee-jerk liberalism that assaults him on a daily basis. Some of your writing has a positively pugilistic air, and if in the final analysis that’s all you respect, I’ll kick your ass as a service to you – free of charge – that may provide you with a modicum of humility that is becoming to a Christian man and absent in some of your columns.

1. Malkin didn't dare stand up for herself. Why do you bother?
2. What is ad hominum in responding directly, (and, some would argue, ad infinitum) to the question of military necessity for internment? What is ad hominum about in directly to the five arguments Ben Shapiro raised in his two previous columns?
3. Ben Shapiro is not merely supporting the Iraqi war and he obviously disagrees with BH on the empire-building aspect of the situation.
4. I've gotten my ass kicked hundreds of times. In the unlikely event BH was able to deliver, how would that prove whatever point BH is trying to make? And by the way, the last Marine to take me on tapped out in less than 10 seconds. Linsel daidar is a bitch!

Breitbart and the Armageddon Hoax

First, Mike Cernovich notes how politically widespread the anti-Trump campaign hoax was:

Consider how deep this media hoax goes.

Michelle Fields, a “conservative,” fabricated a story with Ben Terris, a “liberal.”

Jabin Botsford of the Washington Post lied about being at the event, and then hid evidence that would have exposed the hoax.

Lloyd Grove of the liberal Daily Beast made up conversations to support Fields’ story.

Ben Shapiro, a “conservative,” used these fabricated sources and false accusations to demand that a man lose his job.

And everyone in the media kept running with the story, attacking skeptical readers like us. Moreover, a journalist who asked to see a video of the hoax was fired from his job.

The media is rotten to the core. Can you believe anything you read?

And there are some speculating just how deep the rot runs. A reader writes:

Suffice it to say that in the specific context of internal controls, my alarm bells went off when Fields' non-event appeared on the front page of Breitbart, accompanied by a glamour shot and the title, "Michelle Fields, In Her Own Words," or something to that effect.  It struck me as odd - basically, my "crap detectors" started to tingle. The first question that popped into my mind was, who made the editorial decision to print this? Failure #1.

Oddly, many Breitbart reporters began to publicly and vociferously back her up.  I say "oddly" because to any honest and rational person, there were a lot of unanswered questions, and given the venue, it would be normal for people to be bumped and jostled, highly unlikely that no one saw the battery that she alleged, and that there would be no Secret Service report on it.  This public commentary, much of it personal and emotional, was unprofessional and ill-advised.  Don't they have an internal policy on this? If they do, why was it not enforced? Failure #2.

During this time, Joel Pollack, a Breitbart editor and in-house counsel, posted video as it came in, being very careful not to read too much into things. Personally, I think he did a pretty good job with this.

Breitbart suddenly suspended a reporter, Patrick Howley, who quite reasonably called for video of the incident, alleged to have occurred at an event filled with dozens of cameras and journalists. Fields and others spun this in her favor. Failure #3.

Breitbart publicist Kurt Bardella publicly and messily resigned, citing Breitbart's handling of the situation as his primary reason for doing so.  Once again, Fields and company used this to bolster her story.  Failure #4.

The very next day, internal Breitbart emails from Joel Pollack were leaked to and published on Buzzfeed. Pollack was doing exactly the right thing in those emails - telling staffers to send him information and to stop commenting on the story.  That is just basic risk mitigation 101. I have no idea what was going on behind the scenes, but I suspect that Breitbart was getting more information about Fields, et al, from other sources, and may have been contacted by legal counsel for other parties. Nevertheless, SOMEONE leaked those emails, which were then used by Fields and her supporters to give her credibility and in the process to attack Pollack and Breitbart. Failure #5.

Late Sunday night, Shapiro and Fields "resigned."  Here, I disagree with some of the comments I've seen around the internet regarding Shapiro's future prospects.  He'll be just fine, at least for as long as he can be of service to certain parties.  Shapiro wanted to leave Breitbart a couple years ago to focus on his new venture, The Daily Wire, but Breitbart allegedly bent over backwards to give him what he wanted so that he would stay with them in some capacity.  Yesterday, a blogger discovered that The Daily Wire is funded by the billionaire Wilks brothers who fund a Ted Cruz SuperPac.  It was after additional video and news about the funding behind the Daily Wire was going viral that Shapiro and Fields resigned.

This morning, you posted a Breitbart satire about Shapiro's departure, and once again it gets very interesting.  The original piece was entitled something along the lines of "Shapiro Betrays Loyal Readers," but the link itself was very odd: http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/03/14/futures-markets-wrap-dow-continues-uncertain-climb/. What does that piece have to do with the futures markets? Nothing.  It's almost as if someone hid the piece behind a deceptive URL to get past internal editorial controls.  If you click on the link now, my suspicion is confirmed because the old story is gone, and instead you will find this statement by Joel Pollack:

"The article was written by me as part of an effort to make light of a significant company event, and was published as a result of a misunderstanding without going through the normal editorial channels. I apologize to Michelle Fields, my friend Ben Shapiro, and to everyone concerned."

Failure #6.

Something big is going on at Breitbart.  Before I read SJWAL, I would have assessed this as incompetence, a failure of training and oversight, and the need for more robust internal controls. Now, I don't. and it looks like it could be covert SJW entryism or something along those lines.  This is simply my opinion, but it looks like someone is targeting Joel Pollack, given the leaks of his emails and the latest event.  I also believe that one or more people with editorial control have been making decisions that create problems for Breitbart and diminish the site's credibility.

I'm not sure whether it shows more arrogance, stupidity, or desperation that the perpetrators of the Armageddon Hoax would try to make hay out of such an obviously weak case, but the dishonesty and the repeated doubling-down precludes any possibility of it having been a series of accidents or mistakes.

It does, however, strike me that we might need to develop the concept of a "posture cascade", similar to a preference cascade, in which the sum total of people striking knowingly false poses creates an unintended situation that takes on momentum of its own.

UPDATE: Cry us a river, little guy. No wonder conservatives always lost with "opinion leaders" like this.

Shapiro's father, the writer David Shapiro, also resigned from Breitbart on Sunday evening.

According to the younger Shapiro, his father was hired under the pseudonym to protect his safety since the younger Shapiro said he received so many death threats for his writings.

"Breitbart put this under his byline because they knew I'd have to out him," Shapiro said in an interview on Monday, adding that by linking to his profile with the California State Bar the site exposed personal information, though that information is outdated. "The fact they would use my father’s pseudonym in order to attack me just exposes how despicable they are."

Now, wasn't it Ben Shapiro who said people should be hunted down and lose their jobs for holding opinions other people didn't like? Guess what, Ben? You're fair game for everyone and anyone now.

Darkstream: Saint Chan takes on Hollywood

From the transcript of the Darkstream.

You may recall when David Chappelle inexplicably went off to Africa. I mean here is a guy who was top of his game, making incredible sums of money, who was offered everything in the world, and he turns it all down and just disappears into Africa for no reason that anyone can understand. And he never really addressed it directly, it was portrayed as him having some sort of breakdown or something, but he wasn’t having a breakdown, and he explained it in an interview on Inside the Acting show – I can’t remember what it’s called – but he’s talking to a bunch of acting students and he talked about how important it was to have your price, to know what your price was before you went out to pursue a career in Hollywood. And so it was interesting because he said it’s very important to know what your price is, to know what lines you’re not going to cross, and then he said “hence Africa.” What he was very clearly saying was that he was asked to pay a price that he was not willing to pay for his career.

This is something that is relevant to me personally at the moment because now we have a successful line of comics, now that people are becoming aware of the quality of our books and the potential that they have in various mediums and various media, whether it’s film, whether it’s cable, whether it’s streaming, or whether it’s games, so there are people that are interested and that are talking to us, and one of the things I make very clear is that if they’re interested in trying to offer us success in exchange for compromising our principles, our faith, or our souls, they can just stop the conversation right now. We will do it ourselves, then maybe we won’t be successful – so the fuck what?

Jesus Christ turned down the entire world, what price a TV show? Why would you sell your soul for a TV show, for a movie, for a career as a second-rate movie star? I mean seriously, who has a better career in Hollywood than Tom Cruise, is there anyone you can think of? He’s in all the blockbusters, everybody knows his name, he’s about as famous as you can be, he’s been in a number of hit franchises, he’s been in movies that are part of our cultural language, several of his characters are iconic figures, and how many of you would trade places to live in that guy’s freakish life? Why would you ever why would you ever want to live like that?  And that’s the best that they can offer! That is the Heaven on Earth that they can offer you. What an utter nightmare!

 Are there any other celebrities you believe will be exposed?

Yes I think that lots of people will be exposed. If you go to Neon Revolt, if you go to 8Chan, if you go to Crazy Days and Nights they are all naming names. Now, I’m not going to name any of those names because I have no direct information about any of them. It’s not my world. I’m glad it’s not my world. You know if you want to talk about game designers, I was talking to Derek Smart today. I talk to people in the games industry on a regular basis, and I can guarantee you that we don’t do any casting couch bullshit, we don’t make anybody engage in bizarre rituals so that they can work on games with us. I mean, that sort of stuff would be totally insane.

Do you believe Hollywood’s destructive influence on dismantling Christian culture was intentional or a side-effect of encouraging their own depravity?

It was absolutely intentional: these people hate Christianity, they hate Christians, they hate Western civilization, and they even hate Christmas. It’s really astonishing when you learn to see it, and once you see it, you can’t un-see it.


On a not-unrelated note, Ben Shapiro being a Hollywood Jew with Hollywood values is not news to me. I knew the background of the Littlest Chickenhawk - now there is an unexpectedly dual-barreled nickname - from the start. But Ben Shapiro's background never seemed relevant to my criticism of him until the "conservative" talking head inexplicably leaped to the defense of James Gunn:

Late Thursday night, Mike Cernovich, a centrist social writer-activist and childrens advocate who has aligned himself with right-wing political movements over the past two years, began sharing Gunn’s insidious tweets. Less than 12 hours after Cernovich, who was amplified by One America News’ Jack Posobiec and the film, An Open Secret, which documents the systemic sexual child abuse found throughout Hollywood, began sharing this evidence with the public Disney fired Gunn from the upcoming sequel.

Gunn tweeted these comments in his forties. He is reportedly worth $100 million and the writer-director of a teen film series. These aren’t tweets from a college kid trying to get attention, or a rising standup comedian trying to bombast their way into the public spotlight. This wasn’t a careless retweet, or a foolishly shared comic. These comments should be damning to anyone, like Shapiro, who strategically positions themselves on the most archaic of social conservatism.

Strange, isn’t it? Maybe not. Shapiro grew up, and still lives, in Hollywood. His mother is a power-player within the industry and his cousins are actors Mara Wilson and Daniel Ben Wilson....

• Was Ben Shapiro defending of James Gunn on his Twitter, the Daily Wire blog, and podcast because Gunn had defended him?
• Is this tribal Hollywood protecting Hollywood?
• Was Mike Cernovich’s takedown of James Gunn the reason why Shapiro opposed it?
• Are there any disclosures Shapiro would like to make about himself or his family’s relationship with Gunn, his associates, or Disney or its subsidiaries? 

These are questions Shapiro won’t host a debate on. Why not?

Because Shapiro is an evil little fraud. He's terrified of debate with anyone who isn't a left-wing halfwit. He's a midwit, a gatekeeper, and a media construct who has been relentlessly pushed on American conservatives since he was in junior high. Any Christian or conservative who considers himself a Shapiro fan is a naive fool who has been taken in by the propaganda program. The same thing goes for Jordan Peterson.

These heavily promoted wormtongues do not speak the truth, they do not believe what their fans think they believe, and their objectives are to protect evil by distracting and confusing those who would otherwise stand against it. William F. Buckley. Glenn Beck. Ben Shapiro. Jordan Peterson.... when are conservatives going to stop falling for these obvious frauds?

In attempted defense of chickenhawks

Ben Shapiro's defenders are more than a little sensitive to his hypocrisy and shameless, well-documented cowardice:

Ben Shapiro ‏@benshapiro
Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level. His WSJ piece is written at a ninth-grade level.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
And you went to law school instead of serving your country while calling for other Americans to go to war.

THE Chris Coon ‏@Coondawg68
these PC SJW Trumpkins are now yelling "Chickenhawk!!" "Bu$Hitler lied!!" FFS...

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Now? I observed that the coward @benshapiro was the Littlest Chickenhawk back in 2005

From my August 29, 2005 WND column, The Chickenhawk Clucks

 I – like 62 percent of the soldiers and veterans who frequent Vox Popoli and Blackfive – am in accord with the notion that “chickenhawk” is an appropriate label for a warmongering young columnist who urges others to make sacrifices he has no intention of making himself.

    Most of us realize that during wartime, sacrifices must be made … But taking such a stand requires common sense and the knowledge that we are in the midst of the great battle of our time.
    – Benjamin Shapiro, WorldNetDaily, July 28, 2005

I would be remiss if I did not note that many of these military men and women favored a different 11-letter word that also begins with “chicken.”

The genuine flaw in the use of the “chickenhawk” label is that in most cases it is being applied years, even decades, after the fact, and inherently attempts to equate two different historical situations. However, due to Mr. Shapiro’s precocious position in the national media, this common flaw does not apply. While his peers are dodging sniper bullets and IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Shapiro is bravely urging them to invade five more countries in the establishment of global empire from the safety of his Harvard dorm room.

    Did Iraq pose an immediate threat to our nation? Perhaps not. But toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq prevent his future ascendance and end his material support for future threats globally. The same principle holds true for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and others: Pre-emption is the chief weapon of a global empire. No one said empire was easy, but it is right and good, both for Americans and for the world.
    – Benjamin Shapiro, WorldNetDaily, Aug. 11, 2005

The America Bar Association already boasts more than 896,000 lawyers, America has no desperate need for another one. The U.S. Army, on the other hand, is currently 8,000 men short of its 2005 recruiting goals. I am only one of many non-pacifist, non-leftist Americans who believe that Mr. Shapiro would do well to heed his own words of Aug. 26, 2004. “Now’s the time: Either put up, or shut the hell up.”

And before you ask, on January 18th, 1991, my friend Big Chilly and I went to the Roseville, Minnesota recruiting office and attempted to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. Our enlistments were not accepted, in fact, the recruiter ripped up the papers after reading them over and asking us a few questions, but he also shook our hands and thanked us for being willing to serve our country.

So we never served, but we were ready and willing to do so without being asked. And that is something that Ben Shapiro, for all his hectoring bluster about the pressing need for Americans to die in war, was clearly not willing to do.

As further evidence The Complete List of SJW is effective, several of Shapiro's defenders are extremely intent on having him removed from it. But unless and until he recants his public statement about hunting down and disemploying racists, (and assuming no further evidence of his social justice sympathies is discovered) he quite clearly belongs on it.

Benny gets bitch-slapped

It's no secret to the readers here that Ben Shapiro has absolutely no idea what he's talking about when it comes to economics. That's why it's amusing to see Spencer Morrison kicking him around so easily. The Littlest Chickenhawk knows he's not in my league, which is why he ran away from debates with me twice, but he clearly didn't realize the full extent of his ignorance or he would have kept his mouth shut rather than getting steamrolled on the issue of trade and tariffs.

Morrison addresses Shapiro's inept response to him in a second article that really needs to be read in its entirety to appreciate its contemptuous nature:

Shapiro begins with two rather embarrassing mistakes. First, he misstates the name of this publication. Second, he commits a call to authority fallacy—precisely the error I accused him of last week. Shapiro writes:

The reality is that my arguments on free trade have been supported by every major free market economist in history . . .

This is a tautology: of course most “free market” (read: Austrian School) economists support free trade—just as most American School economists support tariffs, or most labor economists support unions. Does the fact that most Marxist economists support socialism prove that socialism works? No. This is sophistry.

Shapiro is also a hypocrite: did he not make his name by ignoring the so-called “97 percent of climate scientists” who believe climate change is anthropogenic, or the (I imagine) 100 percent of gender studies professors who think biological sex and gender identity are different? Why is Shapiro so willing to ignore “experts” on climate change or feminism, yet treat them like (false) gods when it comes to economics? Shapiro would be wise to remain ever-skeptical, and heed the aphorism: Take not the merchant at his word, but trust only by the skin of his fruit.

Finally, Shapiro says the articles I cited “do not mention tariffs,” and they are therefore irrelevant. This is like saying a paper on Elizabethan England, that never mentions Shakespeare, is irrelevant to studying Shakespeare—really? This is the difference between scholarship and parroting: my sources lend support to a novel conclusion, while Shapiro clearly googled “path-dependency” and cited the first book he could find—a case study of Microsoft.

While the book does discuss path-dependency, it does so explicitly within the context of a single industry, and makes no claim that the findings should be applied between industries. There is a big difference between supporting Microsoft relative to Apple or Google, and supporting America’s entire IT industry relative to foreign competitors. These are different debates, and the nuance is clearly lost on Shapiro....

Shapiro acknowledges that not all industries are of equal value when it comes to economic growth; economic growth depends upon technological development; growth is non-linear in that certain individuals (or industries) generate most of it.

Wait a minute! Shapiro just said that we “cannot tell which sectors will be the most profitable.” Which Ben do we believe? This is a perfect example of domain-specific knowledge in action. When Ben Shapiro has his “businessman” thinking-cap on, he acknowledges that you can tell which industries are most likely to generate economic growth—he even gives us an example. Yet when he has his “economist” thinking-cap on, he denies this categorically. This is what happens when you parrot sources without evaluating them for yourself.

Now that last sentence looks a little familiar, does it not? Perhaps it is merely a coincidence, two parallel observations. Or perhaps not....

Anyhow, it's obvious that Benny was too busy playing the violin and copying Human Events for his weekly WND column to ever play computer games, or he would understand the basic concept of path dependency that every turn-based Civ or RTS player has had to master. The little guy somehow managed to graduate cum laude from Harvard Law School without ever reaching the level of knowledge possessed by the average computer gamer.

The Littlest Chickenhawk melts down

Ben Shapiro white-knights himself into unemployment:

Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and editor-at-large Ben Shapiro are resigning from the company over the site’s handling of Donald Trump’s campaign manager’s alleged assault on Fields, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Fields and Shapiro informed Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon of their decision Sunday night.

“Today I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation,” Fields said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News. “I do not believe Breitbart News has adequately stood by me during the events of the past week and because of that I believe it is now best for us to part ways.”

In his own statement, Shapiro said the episode was emblematic of how he believes the site’s management had sold out the legacy of its founder and namesake, the late Andrew Breitbart.

“Andrew’s life mission has been betrayed,” Shapiro wrote. “Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew’s legacy. In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut his own reporter, Breitbart News’ Michelle Fields, in order to protect Trump’s bully campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly assaulted Michelle.”

I look forward to the inevitable charges that Breitbart is not only the personal Pravda of the God-Emperor Trump, but anti-semitic, mysogynistic, and mean.

And yes, I did laugh when I heard about it. I told you all years ago that Shapiro isn't particularly intelligent. People really need to learn to stop confusing verbal facility with intelligence. The former is a subset of the latter, not a synonym. Some of the smartest people I've known can barely form a coherent sentence in a reasonable period of time, because, I suspect, they struggle to translate their stream of consciousness into something their intellectual inferiors will be able to follow.

UPDATE: This brutal dismissal of Shapiro by William Bigelow at Breitbart borders on sadism, but it is more than a little amusing. Breitbart certainly doesn't appear to be shedding any tears.

Ben Shapiro Betrays Loyal Breitbart Readers in Pursuit of Fox News Contributorship.

When the cat is away

Ed Driscoll will post links to Ben Shapiro on an hourly basis. Sorry, make that BEN SHAPIRO. From Instapundit:

As Ben Shapiro noted, during the Tony Awards on Sunday, “alleged comedian Michael Ian Black tweeted out a bumper sticker that could easily be taken as the slogan for the modern Left: ‘Theater is political. Sports is political. Life is political. Be political.’”
Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 

BEN SHAPIRO: No, Star Wars Isn’t Failing Because Of Hateful Trolls. It’s Failing Because Kathleen Kennedy Has Done A Garbage Job.
Posted at 12:32 pm by Ed Driscoll

BEN SHAPIRO INTERVIEWS JONAH GOLDBERG (Video): “When does nationalism go too far? Is the ‘Never Trump’ movement still alive? Jonah Goldberg joins Ben Shapiro this week to discuss the first 18 months of Trump’s presidency, and how he’s shifted the culture since the election.” Plus plenty of discussion on Jonah’s new book, The Suicide of the West, a great read.
Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 

The Littlest Chickenhawk's masters must be paying Driscoll by the link.

Fake Opposition confirmed

Vox Day Exposes Jordan Peterson And The Left’s Plan To Take Control Of The Nationalist Movement: Vox Day joins Alex Jones live via Skype to break down how Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are puppets of the left, used to take control of the nationalist movement and destroy its potential. 

That is the name of the video that InfoWars posted on May 7, 2018. It inspired the sort of responses that you can probably anticipate by now.

Vox is obviously jealous of Peterson and Shapiro's success. He's trying to be as relevant as they are.

So, about that relevance.... The timing of the video was rather timely, and its title was rather prophetic, because the very next day, May 8, 2018, The New York Times posted an article entitled Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web: An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

The core members have little in common politically. Bret and Eric Weinstein and Ms. Heying were Bernie Sanders supporters. Mr. Harris was an outspoken Hillary voter. Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trump conservative.

But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

Actually, it's not difficult to explain at all. The "Intellectual Dark Web" is the Fake Opposition, the roots of the Conservative Media 3.0. William F. Buckley's Conservative Media 1.0 is literally bankrupt, Bill Kristol's Conservative Media 2.0 lost its last vestiges of credibility due to the failures of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the mainstream media needs a new squad to put on the uniforms of the Washington Generals to go out in front of the public and take a dive.

It is NeverTrump: the media edition.

This is a familiar gambit. Not only are the dramatic portraits of the various Dark Webbers almost identical to those decorating the 2006 Wired piece entitled "The Church of the Non-Believers", but they've even recycled both Sam Harris and Michael Shermer as Very Important Intellectuals du Jour. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that they didn't dig up the corpse of Christopher Hitchens and include him too while they were at it.

Who is a member of the IDW? Anyone who a) is not Christian, b) is not a nationalist, c) is vaguely palatable to the political Right, and most importantly, d) will not upset the mainstream media narrative.

Who put the website up? I would assume Eric Weinstein, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying, three media non-entities who are attempting to put themselves on par with far more recognizable media figures like Christina Hoff Summers and Sam Harris, in cooperation with Claire Lehmann, whose site is hosting the little clubhouse.

More significant figures such as Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Stefan Molyneaux, Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and Ivan Throne are conspicuously absent; one woman, Debra Soh, has less than one-fifteenth the number of Twitter followers that Cernovich has. Needless to say, I'm not exactly surprised by the identities of two of the leading members.

Before September 2016, Jordan Peterson was an obscure psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Then he spoke out against Canada’s Bill C-16, which proposed amending the country’s human-rights act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and expression. He resisted on the grounds that the bill risked curtailing free speech by compelling people to use alternative gender pronouns. He made YouTube videos about it. He went on news shows to protest it. He confronted protesters calling him a bigot. When the university asked him to stop talking about it, including sending two warning letters, he refused.

While most people in the group faced down comrades on the political left, Ben Shapiro confronted the right. He left his job as editor at large of Breitbart News two years ago because he believed it had become, under Steve Bannon’s leadership, “Trump’s personal Pravda.” In short order, he became a primary target of the alt-right and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the No. 1 target of anti-Semitic tweets during the presidential election.

Now do you see? Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are both Fake Opposition, media con artists to the core. In fact, the very event that reportedly made Peterson famous appears to have been based on a mischaracterization of the law by Peterson. So much for the courage of his much-vaunted stand.

Here is my question for conservatives. If it is correct to reject people for their associations, how can any Christian or conservative not reject Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro in light of their membership in this New York Times-approved club? Especially given that The New York Times is very clear about where the line of acceptable opposition is to be drawn.

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

It’s hard to draw boundaries around an amorphous network, especially when each person in it has a different idea of who is beyond the pale.

“I don’t know that we are in the position to police it,” Mr. Rubin said. “If this thing becomes something massive — a political or social movement — then maybe we’d need to have some statement of principles. For now, we’re just a crew of people trying to have the kind of important conversations that the mainstream won’t.”

But is a statement of principles necessary to make a judgment call about people like Mr. Cernovich, Mr. Molyneux and Mr. Yiannopoulos? It seems to me that if you are willing to sit across from an Alex Jones or Mike Cernovich and take him seriously, there’s a high probability that you’re either cynical or stupid.

The Fake Opposition is not even Alt-Lite. They're simply Not Right at all. And they're not being invited to speak at Ivy League colleges, appearing on Fox, CNN, and the BBC, and being featured in The New York Times complete with flattering pictures featuring dramatic lighting because they are on our side.

Does Ben Shapiro belong on the SJW list?

The readers at Instapundit are divided on the subject:

Aigghh
Ben Shapiro? You doing Vox Day's dirty work now Glenn? What's next? Going after Nick Searcy for his kid? Join in with him saying Sarah Hoyt's not an American?

ChicagoRefugee
As the link on SJWList documents, Ben Shapiro has publicly stated that "racists" should be hunted down and hounded from their places of employment. Targeting people for unemployment because you disagree with their views? Sounds like a SJW to me.

Richard McEnroe
Ben walked through a crowd of screaming, cursing antisemites to confront them at CSUNLA. What have you done lately?

ChicagoRefugee
What I haven't done is publicly advocate for a SJW witch hunt against my philosophical and/or political opponents. Which is why he's on the list and I'm not.

Rad4Cap
"Why am I on the list?

You were added to the list because you publicly called for someone to be fired, disinvited, shunned, no-platformed, or otherwise punished or silenced for refusing to submit to the SJW Narrative. The particular incident is linked to your name in the list.

There are three criteria for inclusion on The Complete List of SJW:

• Self-identifying as a Social Justice Warrior
• Publicly advocating the disemployment or no-platforming of an individual for failing to submit to the SJW Narrative
• Being a journalist and publishing articles that support the SJW Narrative or an SJW attack campaign. "

Crawf
Ben is saying people should be anathema for their views. Does he extend that to socialists or just racists? Socialists murdered 100,000,000 or more during the 20th century -- shouldn't being a socialist be as obscene as being a racist?

I have to admit, I don't think of Ben Shapiro as an SJW, I think of him as a cuckservative. The two are entirely distinct specimens. However, given that Shapiro has publicly endorsed the most SJW of tactics for one of the five primary SJW ideals, I think his presence on the list is absolutely justified unless and until he publicly recants his support for hunting down racists, punishing them for their opinions, and excluding them from employment.

After all, the purpose of the SJW List is to inform prospective employers who will be a good little SJW and support the organization's purpose of seeking the highest abstract standard of social justice, and I think it is clear that Ben Shapiro would make an absolutely ideal employee for any converged organization.

That is intrinsically anti-American and anti-Constitutional activity. Regardless of what you think of racists, they have the same right to work and to enjoy free association that you do. One of the reasons SJWism is not merely totalitarian, but will inevitably lead to violence is that they stupidly insist on backing their opponents into a corner from which they must either fight or submit.

Since many, if not most people will never submit to the SJW Narrative or to SJW authority, they thereby seek the very violence they claim to decry and oppose. And if they were more capable of dialectic or had longer time preferences, we might even believe they do so on purpose.

Denying Jesus and America

The relentlessly dishonest Ben Shapiro was quick to publicly deny both Jesus Christ and the Christian heritage of America while taking speedy exception to a rabbi telling Christians the truth about her religion. Shut it down! Unfortunately for the Littlest Chickenhawk, Twitter was well-informed and having none of it. Do not be deceived. Shapiro is a lying, parasitical snake; he is a Fake Right Fake American who has been artificially propped up in the media for nearly two decades in order to lead Christians and conservatives astray.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg@TheRaDR
This might be a good time to note that “Judeo-Christian” is not a thing and we Jews would like you to stop conflating our tradition with your American Christianity.

Ben Shapiro@benshapiro
This is nonsense.

Ben Shapiro@benshapiro
Judaism and Christianity are deeply intertwined. American Christianity has generally had a deeper love for the Old Testament than European Christianity. And the vast majority of religious American Christians see the Jews as the root of the tree of Christ.

Ben Shapiro‏@benshapiro
The fact that America is Judeo-Christian and not merely Christian is a reflection of those facts.

Crew@CarborundumCrew
Ben, there is no Judeo-Christ!

Heather Anne@cler_morgaine
Judaism and Christianity are both *Abrahamic* faiths. The term 'judeo-christian' is used to to fake religious pluralism while excluding Islam, which arguably has more in common with both than they do each other.

Dr. Ramone, Esq.@melvinramone
Judaism rejects the core premise of Christianity. You're making up facts.

Cornelius Rye@CorneliusRye2
It's literally not. It's a very recent invention by YOUR PEOPLE. Jews have very little to do with America pre-WWII.

JOHNMEYER@JOHNMEY28401489
You represent Talmudism. Different thing.

#BroniesForTrump@GWSSDelta
White evangelical Christians' rate Jews 69 out of 100, but Jews rate evangelical Christians 34 out of 100. I look forward to the day when Christians wake up from the "Judeo-Christian" "greatest ally" con and realize that Jews hate them.

Emprah'sFinest@SamHydeShooter
Please tell me which of the Founders was a Jew.

Deplorable Unum 🇮🇹@deplorable_unum
Wrong. America predates the 20th Century, when the "Judeo-Christan"  term first appeared. Stop trying to rewrite America history, little Benny.

The Forgotten Man@_ForgottenMan
As many of the presidents of the past have said, "This is a Christian nation." The Judeo-Christian makes no sense, Judaism and Christianity are two very different religions.

And then, of course, there is the absolute, conclusive proof that America was never "Judeo-Christian" in any sense, as the term in its current form didn't even exist prior to WWII.

However, the rabbi is not entirely correct. It isn't so much "American Christianity" that attempts to falsely conflate Christianity and the post-Temple rabbinical talmudism that presently passes for Judaism. It is self-serving diasporans resident in the US like Ben Shapiro who have done so, in a moderately successful post-WWII propaganda campaign fueled by a poem and a play to deceive Americans about their own Christian heritage and the central importance of Christianity to both America and the West.

If you don't get why I bother to make these historical clarifications, if you don't realize the importance of the understanding the truth of this matter for Christians, I encourage you to contemplate the warnings from the Book of Revelation about the deception of the saints. From what nation will the Lawless One come? From what tribe will the False Messiah hail? In what city will he rule? What group of people are most central to the ongoing attempts to legally restrict the ability of badthinkers and thought criminals to make a living, to ensure that no one can buy or sell who does not have their mark of approval? On behalf of what nation have laws been passed to eliminate the right of Americans and others across the West to freely express their opinions about history and trade? What group of people and what religion relentlessly preach the New Babel and oppose nationalism in almost every nation around the world? Precisely how is the world to be "healed" and what would this healed world look like?

Make no mistake about this: Judeo Christ is another name for pseudokhristos and an ecumenical satanism that includes this anti-Christian, ahistorical, explicitly anti-Biblical "Judeochristianity" is his religion. But you need not take my word for the mythical nature of Judeo-Christianity. Even the early neocons were more honest, as Arthur Cohen attested in his 1969 Commentary article entitled "The Myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition".

It is an apparent truism that the concept of the Judeo-Christian tradition has particular currency and significance in the United States. It is not a commonplace in Europe as it is here; rather, Europeans since the war have become habituated to speak of Jewish-Christian amity, to define the foundations and frontiers of community, to describe and, in describing, to put to rest, historic canards and libels. In Europe they are not addicted as we are here to proclaiming a tradition in which distinctions are fudged, diversities reconciled, differences overwhelmed by sloppy and sentimental approaches to falling in love after centuries of misunderstanding and estrangement. I need not speak at length here of the religion of American secularism, that uncritical Jacobinism which is neither fish nor fowl, and certainly neither Christian nor Jewish. Suffice it to say that such secular religiosity is correctly perceived by both communities to be dangerous; it is the common quicksand of Jews and Christians. And it is here that we can identify the myth. Jews and Christians have conspired together to promote a tradition of common experience and common belief, whereas in fact they have joined together to reinforce themselves in the face of a common disaster. Inundated institutions have made common cause before a world that regards them as hopelessly irrelevant, and meaningless. The myth, then, is a projection of the will to endure of both Jews and Christians, an identification of common enemies, an abandonment of millennial antagonisms in the face of threats which do not discriminate between Judaism and Christianity; and these threats, the whole of the Triple Revolution—automation, the population explosion, nuclear warfare—these are the threats which evoke the formation of the myth.

The threats are real and desperate, but patching-over will not, in the long run, help. Patching-over can only deteriorate further what it seeks to protect. The Judeo-Christian tradition is an eschatological myth for the Christian who no longer can deal with actual history and a historical myth for Jews who can no longer deal with the radical negations of eschatology.

Or, alternatively, take the word of Dr. Jacob Klatzkin, the late editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica:

We are not hyphenated Jews; we are Jews with no qualifications or reservations. We are simply aliens; we are a foreign people in your midst, and we emphasize, we wish to stay that way. There is a wide gap between you and us, so wide that no bridge can be laid across it. Your spirit is alien to us; your myths, legends, habits, customs, traditions and national heritage, your religious and national shrines, your Sundays and holidays... They are all alien to us.

And if Marco Rubio, of all people, is selling the "Judea-Christian heritage" concept, that alone should be more than enough to confirm that it is false.

The debate after #Parkland reminds us We The People don’t really like each other very much. We smear those who refuse to agree with us. We claim a Judea-Christian heritage but celebrate arrogance & boasting. & worst of all we have infected the next generation with the same disease 

The point is that We are not The People, we are now multiple peoples, multiple nations, and multiple religions, all caught up in conflict over who will wield the imperial power over whom. More importantly, there is no "Judeo-Christianity". There is no "Judeo-Christian tradition" and there are no "Judeo-Christian values". You cannot follow both Jesus Christ and Judeo Christ.

Mailvox: unorthodox or enemy?

JD doesn't understand why I identify Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro as enemies rather than unorthodox allies:

I've read your blog and watched your videos related to Jordan Peterson with a great deal of interest. One of the members of a book club I'm in picked 12 Rules and we have been reading it and discussing it. (Everybody in the club seems to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.)  My adult sons have enthusiastically sent me several videos featuring JP debating various people and my kids see JP as a valuable Culture Warrior and I tend to agree.

My question is, how do we draw the boundaries between who is orthodox and who is heterodox when it comes to the Culture Wars? When does heterodoxy become heresy and the person is now an enemy?

For example, within Christianity, historically the non-negotiable is the Word of God- the Living and the Written. To be a Christian, one must believe and follow Jesus Christ as God in the flesh, co-equal and co-eternal with God the Father. The Bible must be viewed as authored by God and authoritative. We have Scripture and creeds that have more or less defined the boundaries of what can be legitimately defined as "Christian."

This, of course, doesn't mean that Christians don't disagree about a variety of things doctrinally, in church polity, and personal practice. This reality, however, doesn't mean it is a free for all and we cannot employ terms like "orthodox," "heterodox," and even "heretic."

Is there similar boundary defining principles and nomenclature in the Culture War? When does someone's beliefs or practices move them from the Ally list to the Enemy list?

Back to Jordan Peterson. I don't believe he is a Christian. I disagree with all of the Jungian psychobabble. I agree that he seems to be unstable in his own mental health and has some delusions of grandeur. (I know for a fact that he is a terrible writer.)

I won't be a bit surprised if "something" comes out about him in the future and the wheels come off the wagon, but for now, I see him as being on "our side" of the Culture War- he is anti-political correctness, anti-identity politics, he believes in biological gender and traditional gender roles, he believes in meritocracy and personal freedom and responsibility, also, he generally makes the right people angry. Is this guy not an ally?

I remain unconvinced that he is an enemy based upon his not knowing the nuances of Jewish IQ studies or the conspiracy theory type arguments put forth about globalism or supporting pedophilia or any of the "controlled opposition" theorizing. Much of that seems tenuous at best- especially when compared to the black and white areas of agreement I do have with Jordan Peterson.

Why isn't it enough to say, "I agree with JP here and here and here, but I disagree with him here and here and here, but hey, he is on our side"? What crosses the line into heresy? (I feel similarly about Ben Shapiro- I get the "chickenhawk" stuff and I wish he supported Trump, but the guy isn't he doing great work in the Culture Wars?)

What makes your Enemy Status for people like JP and Shapiro even more confusing is the people that you don't distance yourself from- I'll take Shapiro over Milo any day in the Culture Wars, and if JP is a nut-job snake oil salesman, Alex Jones is every bit a nut-job who sells literal snake oil on his website. I don't get it.

How do you determine who is orthodox and heterodox, who is an ally and who is a heretic? How much uniformity of belief is necessary for unity in the Culture War?

To which I responded:

You and your kids are totally wrong. Jordan Peterson is a paid up, committed professional globalist. His objectives are directly opposed to the survival of America and the West.

If someone was trying to fix Nazism, you wouldn't say that he's a Jewish ally. If someone was trying to fix Communism, you wouldn't say that he is a capitalist ally. Jordan Peterson is trying to fix globalism. He is trying to destroy nationalism, your nation, and your people.

He is not an ally of any kind.

The fact that you would take Ben Shapiro over Milo just indicates how utterly clueless you are about these things. I'm sorry to be so direct, but it's absolutely true. Shapiro, Peterson, et al are 100 percent enemies. There is literally nothing good about them or their objectives.

And further to which:

A civic nationalist is a heterodox ally. They are, for the most part, merely mistaken, deluded, naive, or ignorant rather than evil. A globalist, an imperialist, or a tribalist who seeks the destruction of the West or any Western nation is an enemy, especially if they wear the false cloak of a civic nationalist to conceal their true objectives. Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Milo, and Mike Cernovich are all pro-American civic nationalists and therefore allies of the nationalist Right even though their nationalism is not orthodox nationalism. Jordan Peterson and George Soros are both globalists who are self-avowed enemies of nationalism. Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin are left-wing racial imperialists and therefore enemies of the Right and of nationalism. Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and a whole host of commentators both "liberal" and "conservative" are tribalists who are seeking to, at best, take advantage of, and at worst, destroy America and the West for the benefit of their particular tribes.

Just as there are Christian non-negotiables, there are nationalist non-negotiables. Anyone who subscribes to any variant of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim that "the contemporary U.S. belongs to all nations" is an enemy of America and the West, no matter how much they claim to love either of them. Our side is not against identity politics. Our side is against having to play identity politics in the first place, but once multiple and competing identities have been permitted to establish themselves in a polity, identity politics are the new reality and playing according to their well-established rules is an absolute necessity. Those who claim to be against identity politics at this point are nothing more than outdated and irrelevant posers.

Binary thinkers tend to have a serious problem recognizing that just because X criticizes the way Y is going about achieving his objectives, that does not mean that X is opposed to either Y or Y's objectives. For example, Lenin tried to fix the economic failures of communism with his New Economic Policy of 1922, which instituted "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control while socialized state enterprises were to operate on a profit basis", but that did not make him either an enemy of communism or a capitalist ally.

Mailvox: Bulverisms and bollocks

GN writes::

"Like I said, Shapiro may indeed be a chickenhawk, but you aren't among the men - or women, for that matter - with the moral authority to level that charge at him."

"No one needs any "moral authority" to do so. A fact is a fact."

This is classic Bulverism - YOUR opinion should be judged on your motives for holding it, whereas MINE must be judged on the facts/issues. However tempting it may be, however true it may be, you simply cannot have an intelligent debate if you resort to Bulverism. We've endured this "Shapiro's motives" thing for over a week now, and it's only lowered the debate to the point where it could only sink lower if Hitler were invoked.It doesn't fit the definition of Bulverism at all. No one, Morgan included, has argued that Ben Shapiro does not meet the definition of chickenhawk as it is commonly understood today. They have merely argued that I should not point out that he does meet this definition for various reasons.

Never mind the Sex Pistols, where did I judge Morgan's statement based on her motives? Alternatively, where have I failed to judge Shapiro's case based on the facts and issues? And show, don't tell.

I'd like to remind those of you who appear to be future Alzheimer's candidates that I was RESPONDING to Shapiro's two columns ON CHICKENHAWKS. If you have a problem with the fact that the topic has entered the public discourse, then go complain to Shapiro. And Lowry. And Goldberg. Not me. All of their columns predate mine and I'm sure they'll be just as patient as I've been listening to you endlessly repeat yourselves. Answer this: how many left-wing columnists devoted columns to the term in the last six months as opposed to defensive neocons to whom the appellation might be applied? Name them.

It is utterly and completely moronic to pretend that I launched an attack on Ben Shapiro out of the blue. Anyone so inclined could have applied the chickenhawk label to him as early as 16 months ago, when in one of his early WND columns the budding young lawyer wrote: "We can ignore the fact that one day the modern-day Nazis – the Islamofascists and their appeasement-minded allies – will storm our gates. We can ignore the fact that the first shots of this war have already been fired.... Or we can recognize that we are in the same situation as the heroes of the ZOB. We can recognize that though the fight is difficult, it is worth fighting."

Right, so now Chamberlain is Hitler too? Whatever. The point is that it was not until Shapiro began repeatedly using his column for egregiously self-serving purposes that I called him out. And that, my dear GN, is a fact.

No one ever objects when I, or any other right-wing columnist, use dismissive names to refer to left-wing political figures or columnists, and, ironically enough, nearly everyone objecting to this supposedly unthinkable evil has called me and other posters names that are demonstrably less accurate in the past. Even the littlest chickenhawk's words suddenly don't look so unusually hypocritical when compared with his would-be defenders.

I don't know if the obstinacy with which some of you are still defending Shapiro stems from an instinct to protect everyone and everything right-wing, (or perhaps supportive of the war), a fear of having the label applied to you yourself (as two emailers admitted), a simple contrarian instinct or simply a liking for tilting at windmills. But as you should all know by now, I have no problem with beating a dead horse, grinding it into hamburger, eating it, excreting it, burying it in the ground to rot then digging it up again to beat the crap out of it one more time.

If you dislike the subject so much, then I strongly suggest you drop it. And you might want to drop a note to Messrs Goldberg, Lowry and Shapiro to do likewise.

An enemy of Christendom

None other than the Littlest Chickenhawk, (((Ben Shapiro))), reveals himself to be an enemy of the West, the Alt-Right, and America, as he tells lies about the Alt-Right:

Sean Illing: Are there any concrete political goals on the alt-right, apart from restoring a kind of cultural hegemony?

Ben Shapiro: They want to destroy the Republican Party from within and take it over. They want the constitutional right destroyed. They actually hate the constitutional right more than they hate the left. They don't actually hate the left. They think the left is wrong about racism but they don't object to big government that takes care of people; rather, they think you should have special privileges if you're of European descent. They want what they call "Christendom" protected from foreign bodies.

VP Reader: And with that last line, I knew that Shapiro was not an ally of the West, even though he claims to be one. He is an ally of the "West" that is most beneficial to him and his tribe while keeping Christianity down to a sufficient degree that it does not, once again, become the culturally dominant worldview of the West. But that kind of an ally is no ally at all.

He's also lying. Four times in six sentences.

1. We don't want the constitutional right destroyed. We want them to come to their senses, stop relying on the magic words "muh Constitution", and start defending the posterity that the Constitution was written to defend.
2. We don't actually hate the constitutional right. We think they are misguided, outdated, and naive, but we don't hate them. We expect them to join us one day.
3. We hate the Left. We know they will never join us and we look forward to relegating them to the ash heap of history. Therefore, we hate them more than the constitutional right, whom we don't hate.
4. We do actually hate the Left.

And while many of us would prefer small government, we recognize that if we do not stop and reverse the invasion, the small government vs large government debate will be rendered moot, because all of the invading foreign bodies prefer large government.

It is all too typical that dishonest "journalists" like Illing prefer to interview enemies of Christendom and the Alt-Right about the Alt-Right rather than speak directly to anyone from me to Richard Spencer to Greg Johnson to Andrew Anglin.

I don't care if someone immigrates here so long as they're willing to imbibe the principles of Western civilization. I don't care what someone's race happens to be. This is consistent with the founding vision of the country. But the alt-right doesn't accept that.
- (((Ben Shapiro)))

(((Shapiro)))'s position is not at all consistent with the founding vision of the country. The Alt-Right doesn't accept that because it is obviously untrue. It is conclusively disproven by the Preamble to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Naturalization Law of 1790. From Infogalactic:

The original United States Naturalization Law of March 26, 1790 (1 Stat. 103) provided the first rules to be followed by the United States in the granting of national citizenship. This law limited naturalization to immigrants who were free white persons of good character. It thus excluded American Indians, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, and Asians. It also provided for citizenship for the children of U.S. citizens born abroad, but specified that the right of citizenship did "not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States."

And if you're dumb enough to cite a five-word sentence fragment of the Declaration of Independence in a futile attempt to prove that (((Shapiro))) is correct, I have six words for you: READ THE REST OF IT, MORON.

Ben Shapiro defends free trade

In which I demonstrate why Ben Shapiro has been running non-stop from a debate with me, particularly one concerning economics. First, this is a link to his piece entitled "Yes, Tariffs Are Still Stupid. Here's Why". Go and read it first, in its totality, so you will understand that I am not making any of this up and I am fairly representing his positions that I am criticizing.

Yes, free trade is good.

On Thursday, The Journal of American Greatness, an outlet devoted to President Trump’s purported philosophy, printed an article by Spencer Morrison, a law student and editor-in-chief of the National Economics Editorial. The article is an attempt to rebut the chief conceits of free trade, and in particular, knock down my objections to President Trump’s fondness for tariffs. It’s titled “Why Ben Shapiro is Wrong on Free Trade.”

The reality is that my arguments on free trade have been supported by every major free market economist in history, but I do appreciate the central billing.

This is a little sleight of hand, as Benny presents a tautology as if it means something. Friedrich List is a major non-socialist economist who strongly favored tariffs, but is he a "free market economist"? What does "free market economist", a phrase that is meaningless in economics terms, mean?  It means an economist who supports free trade. So, the reality is that Benny is cribbing "his" arguments from economists who support free trade. Which is not news.

Morrison’s argument in favor of tariffs begins with an analysis of a three-minute segment of video from my daily podcast in which I talk about the flaws in tariff-based economics. As I’ve actually done full episodes on tariffs, and written extensively about them, I wouldn’t say that the video is my fulsome argument against them, but it’s sufficient for purposes of discussion. Morrison first misrepresents my argument in the video: he says that I’m pro-trade deficit, when in reality, I merely explain in the video that trade deficits are an irrelevant economic statistic (neither good per se nor bad per se) and that some countries that run trade deficits do just fine, while some that run trade surpluses don’t. Morrison takes that to be me stumping for the beauty of trade deficits — which, again, I don’t do, since I think that statistic is irrelevant. 

It's fair for him to criticize Morrison's misrepresentation, since Benny is not pro-free trade deficit, he merely thinks they are irrelevant. But Benny is totally wrong, since a trade deficit is not even remotely irrelevant, as it literally shrinks the economy. To grow the economy and increase GDP, export. To shrink the economy and reduce GDP, import. What this reveals is that Benny clearly does not know how GDP is calculated, nor is he aware of how the trade deficit is a part of the basic GDP formula: C+I+G+(x-m).

As it happens, I address this in the next Voxiversity video, but those of you who understand addition and subtraction should be able to grasp that when (x-m) is negative, there is a trade deficit and GDP is lower. Without the trade deficit, the USA would have a $20.3 trillion economy rather than a $19.7 trillion economy, so it's hardly "irrelevant" considering that 3 percent growth is cause for celebration these days.

Finally, Morrison gets to his central argument: comparative advantage doesn’t work when capital is mobile. Here’s Morrison:

Comparative advantage is an elegant theory, but it too is domain-specific—it only works when certain preconditions are met. For example, capital must be immobile for the theory to apply. Shapiro ignores this crucial limiting factor, and applies comparative advantage to just about everything. This is his root error. … For example, comparative advantage suggests that the key to getting rich is to specialize production, regardless of what you produce. That is, a country with a comparative advantage in growing soybeans should focus on growing more soybeans, while a country with a comparative advantage in manufacturing semiconductors should focus on manufacturing more semiconductors. In either case, this supposes, their relative wealth will correlate with the degree of specialization, as opposed to the complexity of their production. This is objectively wrong.

To support the contention that it is objectively wrong to embrace comparative advantage, Morrison cites two studies. First, he cites a paper from economists Ricardo Hausmann, Jason Hwang, and Dani Rodrik, claiming that countries that manufacture automobiles develop faster than those that grow bananas, and another from Stephen Redding of the London School of Economics stating that economic growth is path-dependent — that if you develop a particular industry that is more sophisticated, other industries grow up around that industry, making for a more powerful economy. The result, Morrison claims, is that the United States should enforce tariffs on behalf of its most technologically advanced/important industries, to prevent other countries from undercutting those industries and reducing us to comparative advantage in nail-clipper manufacturing.

First, literally every economist knows that comparative advantage doesn't work when capital is mobile. The immobility of capital is only one of David Ricardo's false assumptions that are required for comparative advantage to logically hold up. Shapiro doesn't understand that the papers Morrison is citing are not relevant to the capital argument, or that Morrison is simply trying to keep it simple for economics illiterates like him. The immobility of capital is merely the fifth of the seven false Ricardian assumptions intrinsic to the theory of comparative advantage listed by Ian Fletcher, which are as follows:

1.     The comparative advantage is sustainable.
2.     No externalities.
3.     Production factors move between industries without cost
4.     No change in the ratio of income inequality.
5.     Immobile international capital
6.     Short-term efficiency causes long-term growth
7.     Foreign productivity does not improve

There is, of course, an eighth and more important false assumption, the immobility of international labor, that I have identified, but that is well beyond Shapiro's level, so we will simply mention it in passing and leave it at that.

There are several points to be made here. The first is the most important: the argument Morrison makes is for total state control of the economy. If we can simply pick the best industries and subsidize them, we should obviously do that. Why not just embrace mercantilism?

That is a blatant and shameless misrepresentation of Morrison's argument. His argument for tariffs is clearly not an argument for "total state control of the economy". Shapiro is simply being dishonest there.

First, of course countries that develop higher-profit sectors will have higher growth rates than those that rely on low-profit sectors. And of course the decisions you make now have impact on the future development of industry. But this has nothing to do with tariffs. The Hausmann, Hwang, and Rodrick paper doesn’t mention tariffs once. Neither does the London School of Economics paper.

Again, there’s a reason for that. There are two problems with tariffs: first, you cannot tell which sectors will be the most profitable, because you cannot tell the future, which means that government is far more likely to “lock-in” particular pathways than to spur future growth; second, most market “lock-in” is self-correcting — we develop new products on a routine basis that are different in kind than the products that preceded them. Horses and buggies dominated the market, and we built roads in a certain way to accommodate them, and we built houses near those roads. Then cars came along and blew all of that out of the water.

If we could see the future, we could have simply picked which industry upon which to focus. We couldn’t. And in 1947, the smart money would have been in using government to tax all other industries to dump money into manufacturing, for example. That would have been totally wrong. In 1947, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, manufacturing represented 25.4% of GDP production in the United States; finance represented 10.3%; agriculture 8%. If we had been creating tariffs to protect the “most important” industries, we’d have put our money on manufacturing, finance, and agriculture. But we’d have been wrong. By 2016, manufacturing represented 11.7% of GDP; finance represented 20.9%; agriculture represented 1.0%.

The papers may not mention tariffs, but tariffs are the primary way those sectors are defended, when imports in those sectors are not simply banned altogether. I hope Shapiro is being dishonest there too, because his claim that tariffs have nothing to do with how countries develop industries is simply wrong.

And more often than not, you can tell which sectors are going to be more profitable than others. The fact that you cannot predict these things with absolute 100 percent accuracy does not mean that you cannot do so at all, or to a worthwhile extent. Despite some famous blunders, MITI did so very successfully in Japan from 1949 to 2001. Germany still does so today, to such an extent that exports make up 46.1 percent of its economy. Ben completely fails to understand both the way tariffs work as well as the fact that he is begging the question; if we'd put our money on protecting the manufacturing sector, then that sector almost certainly would not have fallen from 25.4% to 11.7% of GDP. Preventing such declines is the primary point of using tariffs to defend a particular sector!

And this is the point. Impoverishing your profit sectors through tariffs in order to dump money into non-competitive industries impoverishes your country as a whole. Economic flexibility requires that the government not impede the free flow of capital within industries. That’s true when capital is mobile as well — if we invest our money in Chinese tech because it’s cheaper and better (even if they’re subsidizing that industry!), that money comes back to the United States in the form of capital account surplus.

First, it's both statistically and historically false to claim that tariffs impoverish countries. Second, money does not necessarily come back to the United States, as the existence of foreign-held eurodollars, the $3.1 trillion held overseas by US corporations since 1986, and the recent decision of Apple and other tech companies to repatriate over $400 billion being will suffice to demonstrate. And third, Ben clearly has not thought through the intrinsic costs of economic flexibility, which when taken to their free trade extreme are absolutely and inevitably lethal to any nation.

I could go into considerably more detail, but at this point, it should be obvious to the informed reader that Ben is doing little more than spouting off free trade rhetoric that he has learned by rote; he does not understand the theory of comparative advantage, its justifications, its assumptions, its flaws, or its inescapable consequences. With regards to free trade and economics, Benny is an ignorant and uninformed fraud, and his position on free trade is completely and utterly incorrect. Tariffs are not stupid, but Ben Shapiro certainly is.

The rapier wit of Ben Shapiro

If you don't grasp that Little Benny is being propped up by the so-called "conservative media" yet, you're not paying attention. 

‘GFY’! Ben Shapiro brutally DROPS blue-check blaming him and other Rightists for mosque shooting

And what was this brutal DROP?

Ben Shapiro@benshapiro
 The shooter is a deranged POS who should burn in hell. If you think I'm responsible for his evil, GFY.  

Brutal is one way to describe it, I suppose, if you're a sixth-grade girl. Remember, this is supposed to be the whip smart and witty aspect of the conservative media.

Russell Kirk wept.

UPDATE: Amazing! The Littlest Chickenhawk has done it again!

'Racist bully' Ben Shapiro has perfect answer for woman who told him, 'Don't ever have kids'

Ben Shapiro@benshapiro
 Sorry, already have two, including a 4-year-old daughter I will raise to believe she is capable of anything rather than a victim in the least sexist society in world history

Wow! I mean, just, WOW! That is just WHIP SMART stuff, man! Perfect answer! Just perfect!

They really should have named it Cringy.

Ben Shapiro is glad you hate him

Or at least he would like you to think so. After all, he must maintain his pose as a brave conservative culture warrior, or people might figure out that he's a fraud.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
My readers really hate @benshapiro.

"Chickenhawk does not even BEGIN to describe this supercilious neo-con asshole."

Ben Shapiro ‏@benshapiro
Good.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
You've always been a fraud, Ben. I still have your emails to me when you were full of self-doubt about being a little parrot.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
I told you to strike out and become your own man. Instead, you chickenhawked and went media whore. It was a foolish call.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
Your problem is that you're a puppet and you know it. Here's the thing. So do we.

What many of you probably don't know is that Ben and I used to be colleagues of a sort at WND. My columns were much more popular, as I was reliably the number three most-read, behind Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. Ben's readership was never more than about one-tenth of mine, but he was a smart little kid and did a good job of parroting the usual Republican boilerplate.

We corresponded a few times and were on friendly, if distant, terms. I mean, what do you talk about with a little kid whose idea of a good time is launching obvious rhetorical attacks at liberals? As he matured, he gradually began to question the ideas he was parroting, and reached the point where he considered quitting the media game.

I'll have to dig out the emails to figure out exactly what I told him, but if I recall correctly, I encouraged him to resist the temptation to become a media whore. I understood the allure, as it was a poisoned apple that was also offered to me, but perhaps it was easier for me to turn it down since I was living in Europe and already established in the game development world.

Ben, unfortunately, couldn't resist the apple, or the easy way forward, writing whatever his backers told him to write. I haven't read him much since he wrote those dreadful, chickenshit columns in 2005, so I don't know how much of what he writes he genuinely believes now and how much he is still parroting. Of course, the human mind being the incredible rationalizing machine that it is, it's entirely possible that he has come to believe what he's been told to say.

What I found most amusing is the way that the Littlest Chickenhawk's supporters alternate between crowing about what a formidable debater he is, and trying to excuse the way he ran away from a proposed debate on free trade with me.

Gone Fishing
LOL! All these Ben haters. You guys wouldn't stand a chance in hell vs him in a debate on social issues. #CryMeAriver

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
Shapiro kicks the ass of real decision makers in this country in debates. He does with facts not feelings.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I will debate Ben on any topic. He's already run away from me on a proposed free trade debate.

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
 😂😂😂😂! Yeah, he totally ran away from you. I mean, you're the SUPREME DARK LORD! There's no way he could beat you, right?

 Valerie ‏@vpak77
yes, you two are definitely not in the same league. That is true.

ryedog™
Totally, it'd be a complete waste of Ben's time.

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
He has to run. He's busy debating important people on major news networks all over the country. #PuttingInWork

Some things never change.