Ben Shapiro vs. The BBC

I really don’t know where to begin on this one. It shows how depraved the discourse has become.

What sets Ben Shapiro off is Andrew Neil’s repeated description of Georgia’s proposed partial ban on abortions as “a return to the Dark Ages.”

This supports what I have always believed: that abortion is at the core of our current social discord. Until we can honestly discuss that issue, we cannot honestly discuss anything. And the current demand for censorship and blacklisting is at base a no-holds-barred attempt to prevent us from discussing that issue.

Neil does not explain why he sees a connection between opposing abortion and being barbaric. He simply declares opposition to abortion to be self-evidently wrong.

This is not legitimate political discourse, let alone legitimate in a supposedly impartial interviewer on a publicly-funded network. In the effort to avoid the abortion issue, all other morality is jettisoned.

Shapiro is apparently wrong in his assumption that Neil is a doctrinaire left-winger. But that does not matter nearly as much as Neil's position on this one particular issue. Because this is the fundamental issue. If you want to support abortion, in the end, you are in irreconcilable opposition to morality itself; and you must be in unprincipled opposition to anyone, like Shapiro, who advocates morality per se.

Neil goes on to try to convict Shapiro of hypocrisy in calling for more civil discourse, by quoting damning examples of harsh language from his old tweets or columns.

This is a standard tactic by those who want to discredit any moral teaching. And it can easily be used to discredit any moral teaching. But it is not legitimate. Quite simply, the whole issue about sin is that people commit them. If they never did, sin would not be an issue.

That someone does not always live up to their own moral standards is not therefore an argument against those moral standards. It is, rather, simply the reality of being human and not God. The hypocrite is not the person who claims there is a right and a wrong, but the person who claims he never did anything wrong. If there is a hypocrite here, then, it is Neil, for this would seem to be his own implicit position.

All Neil is really doing is, in debating terms, going ad hominem, and in an especially vicious way: trying to attack the reputation of Shapiro in order to avoid addressing his argument.

And in order to accomplish this objective, Neil is prepared to resort to bullying and abusive behaviour. Neil has the texts he excerpts quotes from in front of him. Shapiro of course does not, and cannot guess what is coming. He must work from memory of things written years ago. This is obviously not fair play, and obviously not an effort to arrive at the truth of Shapiro’s views, or what he actually said. Instead, it is purely an attempt at character assassination.

And Neil is now being celebrated for this on the left.