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The National Review has now weighed into the conservative argument over whether the teenage survivors of the nation's latest school shooting should shut up and just how much they should shut up.
Because all modern conservatives are conspiracy theorists—it has become the central feature of the movement, at a time when things like morality and ethics and email management protocols have been rendered fully transactional, to be traded away the first time a president needs to dodge responsibility for porn star sex or a candidate for past child molestation or an entire administration's blatant disregard for ethics laws that were sacrosanct up until the point Any Republican won, the National Review take is, of course, that the student survivors of the Parkland shooting are merely pawns of evil leftist adults.
Leftists are parading traumatized teens to make an emotional plea about gun control. But we shouldn’t let young people make policy.
The extended version presented is that the left outrageously wants teenagers to be able to choose gender transition surgery but doesn't want them to be able to purchase guns, and how hypocritical is that, but the truth is that we shouldn't be listening to the opinions of young shooting survivors because they're young and emotional and "innocent" so why the hell are they still talking and why are news networks showing it.
Children and teenagers are not fully rational actors. They’re not capable of exercising supreme responsibilities. And we shouldn’t be treating innocence as a political asset used to push the agenda of more sophisticated players.
Now, despite how this looks, this is actually a deeply funny conservative take, if you are the sort of person who no longer presumes any current conservative thinker in the marketplace today has any intention of making a sincere argument. And the reason this is deeply, deeply, deeply funny is because this National Review piece was written by ... Ben Shapiro.
Let me introduce you innocent not-fully-rational youngsters to "The Virgin Ben" Shapiro.
He has written seven books, the first being 2004's Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, which he started writing when he was 17 years old.[2] Also at age 17, he became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the country.
That's right. The generic conservative columnist who penned this column chastising America for listening to teen shooting survivors because "teenagers are not fully rational actors" and who says "we shouldn't be treating innocence as a political asset" is none other than Ben Shapiro, child star of the conservative movement.
That Ben Shapiro. The one who started scribbling out his first conservative punditry book at age 17, the one who was given his very own teen political column that same year, and who was zipped around the country as political child genius by a conservative movement desperate to demonstrate that they were indeed super-very-attuned to These Kids Today. Before he hit drinking age he had published another book, one which required the self-proclaimed "proud virgin" Ben to watch untold hours of pornography as "research" for his then well-researched proclamation that Pornography Was Bad, which was considered by many, many, many "leftist" wags to be among the more hilarious excuses for a professionally uptight teenager to watch porn ever trotted out.
The teen trotted out as political genius is now telling the teen survivors of the Parkland shooting that teens aren't capable of making policy decisions.
Since it's been a while since we've heard from Ben—once he settled down from teen idol status to interchangeable male conservative pundit he has not often risen to any distinction even worthy of mockery—let's have a look to see if he's the same irony-punching bag of other people's talking points that elevated him to conservative pundit status in the first place.
[T]he Left won't stand for such line-drawing. That's because for the Left, status as a rational actor, let alone as an expert, isn’t actually the chief qualification for political gravitas: It’s emotion.
That's right, top-notch conservative thinker Ben is claiming that the "Left" ignores experts in political debates in favor of "emotion." Thank God the conservative movement exists, where top pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and the crew of Fox & Friends can cast aside red-faced emotion in favor of the reasoned expertise of true, nonpartisan issue experts.
But perhaps that’s the point. If we can turn children into our decision-makers, we can infantilize our politics down to simplistic statements like “you’re either with us or against us” on preventing school shootings. And that infantalization certainly helps come election time.
That's right, top-notch conservative thinker Ben is grousing that "you're either with us or against us" is an infantile response to decision-making and that evil "Leftists" want to reduce our political debates to simplistic, emotional blustering. Thank God the conservative movement is finally headed by intelligent, steady thinkers like George W. Bush, who would never do such a thing, or current Republican president Screechy McTweetsALot, our new model of unemotional expertise-driven behavior.
I see reading through the rest of that Shapiro take was a mistake. My apologies. We shall leave the child star Ben where he lies, huffing in a pool of his own sticky contradictions and rhetorical faceplants; perhaps in another ten years or so we will check back with him to see just how old you have to be, as National Review columnist, before you stop premising every argument on the notion that those that do not agree with your own decrees are either "Leftists" or innocent, gullible pawns of those "Leftists." It may be a while.
In the meantime, it appears there is literally nobody in America who has, in the conservative mind, authority to weigh in on the debate over what to do to stop rampant gun violence. The families of the victims do not count, because they are too emotional. The survivors do not count, because they are too emotional. Liberals do not count, because they want to take All The Guns. Experts do not count, because they might come up with proposals that threaten current orthodoxy—if the government did not take explicit steps to prevent them from undertaking that research, which we have repeatedly done. The rest of the world does not count, because although no other nation not enmeshed in civil war has such rampant gun violence, thus suggesting they have solved a problem that we here find intractable, they do not understand that we here have a different notion of freedom that involves being able to murder people if we want to. And for that matter no American citizen or politician or cat or dog or pine tree counts either, because we should not be talking about these things while they are still fresh in the collective national memory, and must instead wait. And keep waiting. And wait longer than that, and then some.
That does tend to limit the argument. Which may, of course, be the whole intent of these declarations.