Ben Shapiro

I wrote last week that Catholic nationalist ‘groypers’ were beating the likes of Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro at their own debate nerd game. Shapiro tried to return fire on Thursday. His speech at Stanford University was aimed directly at the ‘alt-right.’ I agreed with much of what he said, about the immorality of equating skin color with moral worth and of jokes about the nature of the Holocaust. Shapiro made a good point in saying that ‘irony’ can be a weaselly rhetorical maneuver inasmuch as it allows people to express contentious opinions with the escape clause of insincerity. But Shapiro's speech had serious weaknesses in style and content. Firstly, he refused to name anyone that he was referring to.

The pattern has become familiar: A group of intellectually curious, usually conservative, students invite a speaker to their campus. There is pushback, sometimes from other students, sometimes from alumni, sometimes from the faculty, and sometimes from a combination of the three. The administration then makes the wrongheaded decision to cancel the speech. Last week, Grand Canyon University released a statement explaining their decision to cancel a Ben Shapiro speech that was scheduled to take place on campus. It wasn’t the first time Shapiro had been uninvited from a campus, and unfortunately, I’m absolutely confident it won’t be the last.

Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s Evangelical Christian finishing school, gathers three times a week for “convocation”, a worship service with guest speakers from all backgrounds. Attendance is mandatory, but students say the man delivering today’s sermon would have filled the 8,000-capacity venue regardless. Because today, the Ben Shapiro show has come to Liberty. A lot of people don’t like Shapiro. His critics on the right dislike him even more than his critics on the left - “the alt-right think I’m a cuck Jew,” he tells his podcast audience. A touch of jealousy there, perhaps – Shapiro may be a bit soft for many of his rivals on the internet. What really hurts, however, is that he’s a bigger deal than all of them now. And his fans worship him.