If you don’t know who Ben Shapiro is, God bless you. He’s the young right-wing “intellectual” who has made a name for himself like many pseudo-libertarian-intellectuals in the mainstream of America by telling the aging right-wing bigots and hoodwinked masses that Fox News is right, the left is brainwashing American children. He has a similar pedigree to other “alt-right” “intellectuals”: educated at a reputable higher education university, but clearly didn’t have a fun time dealing with all of those other educated people that didn’t agree with his half-baked and intellectually dishonest positions. As a result, places like Fox News love to have Shapiro on to give them something resembling a patina of intelligence. Shapiro is articulate and fast-talking, and in the world of Fox News, that means “smart.”
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Martha MacCallum had Shapiro on to discuss the nationwide student walkout on Wednesday. How do you explain to your Fox News watchers that all of the images and video of thousands and thousands of children demanding what the majority of Americans want, meaningful gun control reform, are not what is happening in the world? You say that there are kids who are having their First Amendment right to want to be shot in school upheld! Cue Ben Shapiro.
I have been getting probably 100 messages since yesterday of students who are disappointed at the way they have been bullied into joining the school walkouts. I suggested walk out with your friends and hold up signs that say things like "standing with children" or “standing with the 2nd amendment” or “protect our lives, arm law-abiding people.” The media has put forward this message, and they’ve been doing it for years, but I think it’s really accelerated the message in the last few months, and particularly in the last few weeks, that if you disagree with them on gun control, you don't care enough about the kids. And now they’re activating these kids and putting them out on the front lines and putting them in photo ops so they can essentially use them as political human shields.
No. People like Ben Shapiro who want to stifle action on gun control by deconstructing the semantics of gun control debates are using the children and the millions of Americans affected by gun violence as “political human shields.” Shapiro, as with most pretend-intellects, enjoys smothering discussion and progress in a love of the lyric. It’s the trick of the debate trade: rhetoric. Sadly, these men and women are stuck in the very infancy of intellectual growth, style over substance. They can only poke holes in arguments and ask that nothing change around them. It’s a very easy way to make money in our country for people smart enough to know better.
Most of the “libertarian” right have made their jumping-off point into money-making on a conceit of American educational institutions being havens for “political correctness” run amok. Too many “safe spaces,” and more importantly, smothering of the First Amendment. The right to free speech! All you need to know about these “intellectuals” is that they can fill hours and hours of podcasts and blogs up with how “liberals” are attacking their right to spew falsehoods and turn men into women and cats into dogs, but they are surprisingly mum when it comes to the obvious civil rights, civil liberties, human rights violations going on via our ICE detainment and exportation programs. Just so quiet.