Ben Shapiro, the right-wing “thinker,” baby Hitler-defender, and former toothbrush startup-endorser, rose to fame thanks to his combative, shrill interview style that promised TOTAL DESTRUCTION of any liberal talking point or talking head he encountered. Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, if you live by the SICK BURN you die by the SICK BURN, and today the wheel of online ownage turned for Ben.
Consider this interview today with BBC presenter Andrew Neil, purportedly about Shapiro’s new book. Neil and Shapiro started to clash when Neil read Shapiro some of his tweets and challenged him on some of the things that he has done and said. Shapiro started out relatively irate, which looked particularly silly in contrast to Neil’s dispassionate, vaguely bemused line of questioning. Shapiro’s general argumentative style is to talk louder and faster than anyone he’s speaking to, which didn’t really work when Neil refused to play on his level.
The whole thing fell apart when Shapiro tried to nail down Neil for his “bias” during a pointed discussion over the concept of a six-week abortion ban. Shapiro didn’t have a lot to concretely defend his views, and really didn’t like the line of questioning (i.e…actual questions) that Neil was asking, so he tried to pivot to accusing Neil of being “on the left.”
Neil, for reference, was editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and currently is the chairman of the very conservative British magazine The Spectator. While he’s obviously an incisive, challenging interviewer, calling him “on the left” is, as Neil pointed out, insanely dumb.
The full interview, which was 16 minutes long, led to Shapiro getting more and more flustered, particularly when Neil started reading out all the heinous shit Shapiro has tweeted before, building to this incredible finish:
As Shapiro huffed and puffed and took off his microphone, Neil, for lack of a better word, DESTROYED him one more time. “Thank you for your time, and for showing that anger is not part of American political discourse. Now Mr. Shapiro, we’ll say goodbye.”
