The cucks are really, really desperate to keep the Littlest Chickenhawk viable:
I spend a few weeks every year teaching high-school and college students, and in my interactions with young people in and around universities I have noticed a trend. After class, at meals, and in walks around campus, the politically engaged students invariably ask me the same question: What do I think of Ben Shapiro?
Nor am I alone. Recently Eliza Gray had a similar experience while reporting on young conservatives in the age of President Trump. “Oddly enough,” she wrote in the Washington Post, “the person who appeared to be doing the most to shape the thinking of the new generation of Republican leaders was not the president of the United States—but Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old anti-Trump conservative pundit who came up unprompted in more than a third of my conversations.” Again and again, students turn exchanges involving politics and ideology into discussions of Shapiro, his media presence, his ideas, and his mode of discourse.
As it turns out, I happen to think well of Shapiro, and admire not only his intelligence but also the way he is modeling political debate for an audience of millions. (We’ve corresponded once or twice but have never met.) More important, though, is what Shapiro’s celebrity tells us about the changing nature of media, the emerging sensibility of conservative youth, and indeed the future of American conservatism itself.
Shapiro owes a lot to social media. His appearances on Fox News Channel are not the cause but the consequence of his fame. It is by searching YouTube that teenagers come across his debates with campus lefties, his speeches, his appearances on like-minded podcasts, and his extended interviews with friends and other members of the so-called intellectual dark web.
The idea that Ben Shapiro is shaping ANYONE’S thinking, let alone the coming Republican leadership, is downright hilarious. The trend is clearly moving well away from his outdated open borders, free trade, Israel-first nonsense. Ben Shapiro may well be “the future of conservatism” because conservatism is dead. The cuckservatives fantasize about Generation Shapiro, but what they will get is Generation Zyklon.
As with the dog that didn’t bark in the night, what is significant is the fact that they have literally no one else. All of the genuine intellectual energy is on the nationalist Right. Jordan Peterson is a propped-up fraud. Sam Harris is a recycled, propped-up midwit. Shapiro has been propped up and pushed on conservatives since he was in junior high despite this being the quality of his political analysis.
