Certainty

Ben Shapiro is the former editor of Daily Wire, a far-right website which he co-founded, as well host of his own podcast and author several books about the supposed liberal menace that is supposedly destroy America.  Like some people who like to relentlessly tell you how incredibly smart they are have been from a young age, he seems to have formed his political opinions in his teens and haven’t budged or matured from them, added substance with the perspective of time and knowledge.  (Shapiro skipped two grades and graduated college at 20, before going to Harvard Law. That’s pretty good – but from the way he promotes himself, you’d think he was Doogie Howser M.D. on steroids, and passed the bar at age 12.  Not a year or two early.)

There's a point to all beyond just "Ben Shapiro," but it's important to put it all in proper perspective.  Bear with me.

A repeated part of Shapiro's biography is his having written a nationally syndicated column at age 17, which is impressive, He had signed a contract with Creators Syndicate – a well-known organization, which 10 years earlier had taken over the news syndication for the far-right The Heritage Foundations, and later bought the Copley News Service, which had been outed as a CIA front, and went out of business in 2008.  For all the self-praise about having a syndicated column, there doesn’t appear to be mention of how many publications actually carried his column.  For all I know it’s a lot, though generally that would be noted, especially by someone going out of his way to relentlessly tell you he had a syndicated column.  Still, it’s an accomplishment.

But a notable indication of the pomposity and certainty of his 17-year-old locked-in thinking is that one of his books is about the “true story” of how The Left Took Over YOUR television!!! (No, I didn't read the book.  After reading articles praising the book, though, I didn't have the heart -- or stomach.  Considering that it was praise, if that was the high points, the lows seemed too scary.)  In the book, Shapiro he makes that point that TV supposedly aggressively promotes this apparent leftist agenda through its primetime schedule – missing the reality that people who actually work in Hollywood know that networks and movie studios are the least-courageous entities on earth, who wouldn’t make a decision unless it was researched into oblivion and confirmed by all their bosses – who only confirmed it because it was confirmed by others -- and tend to program their output based on the success that others have first had.  It’s the kind of adventurous thinking that blanketed TV with Westerns in the 1950s and spy shows in the 1960s.  And brought you such sitcoms as My Mother the Car, The Flying Nun, The Hathaways (about performing chimps), O.K. Crackerby!, Captain Nice, Hello Larry, Cavemen,  and Run, Buddy, Run. And fired the Smothers Brothers for being too politically liberal.  And never mind that during the McCarthy Blacklist, it was liberals who were blacklisted by TV and movies, and whose lives were ruined.  But Shapiro makes a Big Point in his book about how open the producers of M*A*S*H were open about being pro-pacifist, anti-Vietnam in the series.  But of course, though this may have been a revelation to Ben Shapiro, M*A*S*H being anti-war and anti-Vietnam should come as a shock only to people who watched TV with the sound off.  Further, the two reasons a show like M*A*S*H was even able to be on the air at all, let alone for 11 seasons are because a) there was a huge portion of the country that was wildly anti-Vietnam during that era when it began in 1972 and caught the mood of the country, and b) people loved the series so much that it was a Top Ten show for its last seven years, and nine years in all.  When it went off the air, still #3 in the country, the final episode was seen by 125 million Americans, the most-watched episode in TV history, with an audience of 77% of all television sets that were turned on.  So, yeah, TV is liberal.  (By the way, if TV was so great at indoctrinating people, that all the little kids who grew up watching the Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Bachelor Father, Ozzie and Harriet, I Love Lucy and all the bland family sitcoms of the 1950s should have become good conservatives in college, rather than the hippies and protestors.  Against the Vietnam War.)  So, yeah, how The Left Took Over YOUR television!!!

(P.S. Shapiro also notes how the producers of one other show were open about being pro-pacifist, anti-war.  It was Happy Days.  Yes, really.  That hotbed of anti-war politics.  Because a show about teenagers whose big interest was girls and cars should have been about more about those kids gung-ho on war.  And after all, producer Garry Marshall was well-known for all his lefty TV shows like Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy, Blansky's Beauties, Joanie Loves Chachi and Angie in his effort to Take Over Your Television!!!)

So, that’s the insightful thinking of Ben Shapiro, who wrote a column at age 17.  It brings us to yesterday, the morning after Trump’s indictment in Georgia, his fourth.  That’s when ace analyst Shapiro posted the following tweet --

My immediate response was that willful myopia is never a good way to fly. Most rational views are that one thing is certain -- if you try to foment Insurrection, subvert democracy and overthrow the government, you will be investigated and prosecuted -- whoever you are. Furthermore, contrary to it being a total break in tradition, in fact many hundreds of politicians – federal, state and local -- have gone to prison throughout U.S. history.  Because, as we’re all taught as children, no one is above the law.

But then the longer I thought about it, I realized that perhaps more than all cries we’ve heard about Trump’s four indictments that were voted by Grand Juries made up of cross-sections of U.S. citizens, Shapiro’s mournful whine is actually the quintessential representation most-indicative of the disingenuous Republic Party.

To start with, it knowingly closes its eyes to crimes, evidence, the loss of 61 court cases, an Insurrection mob riot where people died, and a phone call recording begging for election fraud.  Furthermore, it feigns ignorance and instead knowingly and conveniently ignores the basic realities of U.S. history (and current events) where corrupt politicians have regularly been convicted.  And then, to top it off and but the mound of whipped cream and cherry on top, this “outraged” cry about how the sacred court system was used to indict a politician who was just charged under the RICO Act was squawked out by someone (are you ready?) who wrote an actual book about how the RICO Act should be used against President Obama!  ​

If you made this stuff up and pitched it as a TV series to the people who made My Mother the Car, you'd be laughed out of the office as too unbelievable.  But it's real.  It's Ben Shapiro.  Still thinking like an ace 17-year-old conservative star.

Ultimately, as much as this has been about Ben Shapiro, this is not about Ben Shapiro.  It's about that one, historically-ignorant, disingenuous, egregiously hypocritical tweet by Ben Shapiro is the poster child from social media thinking by today's Republican Party.