I love a good argument. Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro (no relation to PA AG Josh Shapiro) can be likened to a pair of heavyweight prize fighters of the intellect. In their most recent rematch, Harris (on a podcast called Triggernometry) led with his left hook, and Shapiro (from his own podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show) hit back with a bunch of right jabs. Both men were impeccably trained: Harris attended Stanford and obtained his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA. Shapiro hails from UCLA undergrad and Harvard Law School.
Shapiro’s vlog was a soliloquy in response to Harris’s dialogue with the hosts of Triggernometry, and in it he plays part of the Harris clip that he wants to attack. The vlogs are both quite long. Shaprio’s is 17 minutes and the entire Triggernometry discussion with Harris lasts 1.5 hours (much of which is focused on human cognition, rather than politics). The relevant commentary by Harris lasts about 8 minutes (from the 33:34 mark to the 41:38 mark).
Readers may want to listen to the entire Shapiro video to see the brainpower he brings to bear on the subject. He uses words very cleverly, but at the end, you still have a gut feel that he is missing something important. Apparently, Shapiro and Harris have debated face-to-face about God and religion, and Shapiro (a devout Jew) appears to have a healthy respect for Harris (a polite atheist). Sadly, Shapiro’s podcast audience doesn’t care whether his arguments are both logical and free of straw men — and Shapiro knows who butters his bread.
Let me start with Ben Shapiro’s very first sentence:
Well it’s been labeled the Big Lie — the idea that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election thanks to voter fraud and the attempt by the Left to create an almost global conspiracy to deny him the presidency. The folks who suggest that Donald Trump won the 2020 election — one of the reasons they suggest that is because they say, well the Left had the motive, the means, and the opportunity.
Shapiro knows Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election, yet in this one sentence, he lays out tidbits for his most loyal viewers: (a) the Big Lie isn’t real, it’s just been “labeled” as such; and (b) even if it’s just an “idea” that voter fraud was responsible for denying Trump the presidency, the Left nevertheless did create a global conspiracy to attempt do so.
The rest of his monologue is basically an argument that Sam Harris (in his Triggernometry discussion) admitted that the Left indeed had motive, means, and opportunity to tilt the playing field in Biden’s favor — and that power brokers on the Left (specifically the New York Times and Twitter) did conspire to conceal negative information about Biden that could have tipped the race to Trump. Yes, here comes Hunter Biden’s laptop again.
So here is where we must decide whether to give Shapiro some rope and watch to see if uses it as an escape tool or if he just ends up hanging himself. Hunter Biden’s laptop is a joke to may people on the left, but some of its contents have been corroborated as being authentic to Joe Biden’s wayward son. I vote to follow the facts, but Sam Harris actually conceded the hypothetical possibility that Joe might have been compromised by dirty cash that had Hunter’s fingerprints on it:
… It’s like a coin toss to me, the Hunter Biden laptop. I do understand how corrosive it is for an institution like the New York Times to show obvious bias and inconsistency and dishonesty …
The way I would frame it is “Listen, I don’t care what’s in Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
… Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is … if we could understand that he’s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine, or … China — it is infinitesimal to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.
And this is exactly what Ben Shapiro ignored — the magnitude of Trump’s demonstrated attempts to dismantle the Constitution from 2017 to 2020 (not to mention his continuing lawlessness from December 2020 to August 2022).
Harris is arguing that while The New York Times and Twitter may have dishonored free speech by their actions to squelch the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, that infraction pales in comparison to the horrific damage Trump has done to our nation and our government for the past 5+ years.
Shapiro, goes on to assert that there is one possible argument in favor of the Big Lie that is plausible.
The best that you can say, in favor of the idea that the 2020 election was rigged is that it was sort of informally and generically rigged, in the sense that the media denied people the access to the information they would have needed to change their votes.
...the argument that is, I think, the most strong and convincing argument from the right, from those who argue this point of view … is that the Left has the motive, means and opportunity to steal elections, so why wouldn’t they?
Whoa! How does a question, “why wouldn’t they?” rise to the level of a valid argument that is supported by facts? Shapiro is pandering to the low-information MAGA crowd instead of using real logic here.
He’s basically saying that it’s ok to acuse an opposing baseball pitcher of putting a foreign substance on the ball just because he struck out a lot of batters. As long as he he has the motive (striking out lots of batters), the means (hiding the substance in his mouth) and the opportunity (concealing the crime by sleight of hand) — then it’s perfectly ok for opposing partisans to believe that pitcher is a cheater. This then leads natural to a conclusion that it’s also ok for them to encourage their side to use whatever fradulent means available to “get even”.
With this line of argmument, Shapiro is actually encouraging the Republican base to revolt against the rule of law because (he claims) the other side has already perfected their own forms of corruption and “our side” needs to catch up fast or it will be too late to save the game of baseball.
Yep, what he’s really saying is that it’s ok to corrupt the game of baseball to save our team. It’s ok to break the law to save our tribe.
But then Shapiro gives examples of times in history when it was generally agreed that democratic nations should get together (i.e. “conspire”) to stop a dangerous anti-democratic force (e.g. Soviet Communism or German Nazism). This sounds like he genuinely understands that some rules may be overlooked in desperate times.
But without saying it explicitly, what actually trying to do is to exonerate Republicans who favor cheating in elections because they have a just motive for doing so — they truly believe Joe Biden and Democrats are so evil that their policies will ruin America (...and by the way, why wouldn’t Democrats cheat in elections? How else can they be sure they will have the power to implement their nasty policies?) Post hoc ergo propter hoc, indeed!
And this is where Shapiro comes back to the argument against Sam Harris. He uses Harris’s acknowledgement that Trump’s actual corruption so far exceeds any reasonably possible, yet undocumented corruption that might be associated with Biden, as a wedge to claim that the Left has dangerously corrupt motives.
Increasingly, as we have seen in recent years, the feeling, on both sides of the aisle, but particularly on the Left side of the aisle, is that anything necessary to prevent Republicans from gaining power is justified.
… and if we have to subvert elections by suppressing information, then we will.
I’d like to forgive Shapiro for accidentally poor sentence structure and give him the benefit of the doubt that he meant to say “opposing party” instead of “Republicans” — but he pivoted so thoroughly that I believe this is a deliberate language error used to fire up his listeners. I believe his intent is proven in the next line, where he uses “we” to refer only to Democrats.
And now, Shapiro gets back to his assertion that proper journalism about Hunter Biden’s laptop would have shifted the 2020 election away from Biden and towards Trump. What nonsense! Hunter Biden’s laptop actually contained no information about Joe Biden. It may have contained salacious photos of Hunter and it may have contained information that showed how large Hunter’s Burisma earnings were, but voters are smart enough to know: (a) Hunter’s corruption does not implicate Joe; and (b) Trump’s minions are proven fraudsters, so we have no good reason to trust the veracity of 100% of their accusations against Hunter, or even 1% of their accusations against Joe.
This is the point Sam Harris was trying to make — Trump has proven himself to be a criminal and a narcissist. Permitting him to have another term as president truly would be catastrophic to the nation and the world.
If Trump had been more like Ronald Reagan, Shapiro would have a stronger point about the 1st Amendment infractions committed by NYT and Twitter. But Trump never wanted to be another Reagan — his only ambition in life was to become a ruthless mob boss who enjoys the company of foreign dictators.
We all must hope that Americans continue to come to grips with the fact that Trumpism is on the same path that Nazism and Stalinism were on at their early stages — and that Sam Harris understands politics better than Ben Shapiro.
If any of you have red-hatted friends who consider themselves intellectuals, you might want to consider sharing this diary with them — especially if they like to tune in to Shapiro’s vlog from time to time. Shapiro might be fun to listen to, but he has drunk far too much of the Federalist Society’s Kool-Aid and he now seems to believe that another Donald Trump presidency would be a right-wing policy success, while doing only inconsequential damage to the Constitution and the rule of law in America.
Surely, Trump’s motives and actions should be proof enough that Shapiro (and the Federalist Society) are wrong. We must convince our red-voting friends that nearly all Republicans want to subvert voting but Democrats have no desire to do so.
I’d love to ask Shapiro (about Democrats) — “Why would they cheat? They have a massive edge in popular vote totals on their side! Who needs to cheat with that type of advantage?”