Monsters Everywhere

It didn't start out being about Ben Shapiro, but it's about Ben Shapiro.

This is going to be a strange piece, dear readers of this Circus thing that I’m doing here. I mean, as you know, I’m not one to be short of words to speak. I have endless opinions on many things. But I have to admit to you that I am overwhelmed. No, not at the workload. I’m fine. Rested. I just finished petting my cat and listening to some Bruce Springsteen.

It’s more that I have completely lost track of everything that’s going on. And not for lack of trying. Not because I’m disorganized. But because the whole world is in complete chaos. And it has all been brought about by the extremely poor judgment that Americans showed last November in trusting Donald Trump to assume a second term as President of the United States.

Let’s just lay it out for you. The broad stakes, if you will. A worldview upon which to gaze back at the world from.

The world is on fire. The Trump Administration is blowing up boats in international waters, committing apparent war crimes with reckless abandon as the world looks on in horror. There is an international trade war destabilizing the global economy. Wary middle-power countries balancing between the West and China are being pushed in Beijing’s direction in the service of stability. Vladimir Putin continues his imperialist march westward to conquer Ukraine—a violent death throe of a declining ancient empire, pathologically obsessed with the extent of its borders.

I am in communion with Antonio Gramsci in this place. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” he wrote while sitting in prison, a political prisoner of Mussolini’s fascist regime. “Now is a time of monsters,” he added.

Abroad, dictators update their power calculations as America’s security posture collapses inward from its defense of the liberal order. At home, men whom Roosevelt would recognize as economic royalists and Progressive-era reformers would recognize as robber barons—this time with iPhones and Wi-Fi—are selling off the American people’s inheritance for scrap, paid in crypto, and funneled into the private jet, yacht, and real-estate empires of a politically entrepreneurial oligarch class.

Everyone knows this is all true, including the subjects of my derision. The useful idiots and the parade of pretense-for-hire miscreants from Benny Johnson to the faux intellectual veneer of Ben Shapiro—seemingly an actual genius mind, mind you, but serving evil in a way that I think puts paid to Kant and wins Hume the Nobel Prize for normative physics.

I told you this was going to be a strange essay, so let me take an odd detour.

Ben Shapiro. As an admirer of the intellectual arts, I cannot understand the corruption that must be present in the soul of a man blessed with such cognitive gifts, that he would have wasted them by setting his brain on: “Support Republican candidate no matter what, and then continuously generate the most persuasive apologetics for convincing people to support them too, against their interests and values.”

Ben Shapiro’s brain is set to this mode. Trust me. It’s true. I’ve watched him with some amount of care. Just watch how the LLM-like entity in Shapiro’s argument changes its prompt to “what’s the most politically salable argument that will convince others to vote for Trump” the moment DeSantis conceded the primary race. This happened. It was dramatic. Such tonal shifts in the character of my normative expressive thought far exceed anything I’ve experienced. I think it’s called character and integrity.

This minor observation of Mr. Shapiro might prompt someone to question whether the man has any. From my vantage point, he’s chosen to make his brain a weapon—serving the interests of Republican Party power far before it participates in adding to the collective human conversation examining our lives to reveal truth. He calls himself religious. Puts a yarmulke on his head. I guess so.

Fuck it. I’m going to keep talking about Ben Shapiro.

Going back to the abrupt phase transition in his mind—that moment where the cognitive resources were re-tasked into Trump apologia—you have to think the guy realizes that he and everyone in his media sphere knows he’s lying to the poor working-class schmucks who are just looking for a guiding light to make sense of a hard-to-understand world. Surely he knows he’s abusing their trust by lying to them, right?

Ben, how do you lie with such ease? How does it not trouble you that you are confusing people about what is true?

I am so much your opposite, Ben. People accuse me of being long-winded, of over-explaining things, of being given to expatiation. But I have these qualities because I actually care about spreading truth to people. I simply cannot understand why you do what you do, without regard for harm. And you claim to fear a God.

I told you this was going to be a weird essay. I am just thought-streaming. Because like I said at the beginning: I’m just completely overwhelmed by the state of the world.

Anyway, back to Ben Shapiro. I’ve heard him defend himself on these charges from various angles. He has a justification, you know. Do you know what it is? It’s that the left is worse.

The left is worse.

Okay. The left is worse. Whatever. I don’t care. I don’t want to argue with you, Ben. Fine, the woke leftists are nuts. Whatever. I want to talk about your apologia, Ben. You’re a propagandist for an evil man.

I accept that you’re telling the truth about thinking the left is worse. But here’s the thing: you’re participating in lying to the American people to reify this political preference.

You’re not a liar, you say?

Well, okay, I won’t call you a liar. But I will call you a distractor. You may not tell your audience that Trump left all the cookies in the cookie jar when in fact he took them all and left garbage inside it. But what you will do is focus on whatever leftist excess tickles your reactionary interest at that very moment.

I think that’s dishonest, Ben. I just do.

I think it’s intellectually corrupt, and shameful that you do that. Even if you think the left is worse. I still think that’s shameful. Even if I take all your normative commitments on board—and I certainly don’t—you reveal yourself to be a practitioner of intellectual fraudulence in service of keeping Democrats from winning elections. I know you think you recover some modicum of principle in that. But no—it’s still morally abhorrent behavior. Because the people who look up to you, to understand how the world works, because they need some light in the dark, don’t know that.

They’re following your spotlight in the world. And while Trump is robbing the bank right behind you, you shine your light toward the purple-haired girl with a nose ring in Portland having a woke freakout. And you think that’s intellectually responsible. Really?

That seems dishonest to me. It just does.

Anyway, those were just some thoughts I had. Mostly about Ben Shapiro. I told you it was going to be strange.

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