Friday, April 19, 2019

Ben Shapiro Is Unclean

Imagine Ben as a leper under Old Testament rules and you get an insight into why he and his kind are banned from speaking on campus.
The Torah teaches that during the early stages of what seemed to be a serious skin affliction, a sick person would stand before a Kohen (priest) who would diagnose the illness. If it was determined that the person was a leper, he or she would be expelled from the community for the duration of the recovery process.
A primary job of the Secular Leftist priests is to prevent the spread of infection - the infection of the rational thought of Athens and the moral thought of Jerusalem as discussed in Ben's excellent, new book, The Right Side of History. Their attempts to ban Ben, Dennis Prager, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles and Andrew Klavan and the rest is to protect the faithful. It's not "Shut up!" so much as it is "Don't listen!"

In yesterday's post wherein we looked at Tucker Carlson taking on a transgender-rights activist, we saw the futility of a Secular Leftist arguing with Tucker.
Check out his reactions when faced with (simple, logical questions). He gets flustered and emotional and accuses Tucker of "having issues." Why not? That's always worked before. No one in his circle wants to be accused of damaging someone else's self-esteem. He plays the moral superiority card because it's the one that trumps all as far as he knows. When it turns out to be the three of clubs, he's completely at sea.
 You can find all kinds of examples of Secular Leftists trying to stump Ben and others on YouTube and being similarly squashed. It's not just that the conservative speakers are brilliant, it's that the Secular Leftist hasn't encountered the questions they raise.

When you watch #WalkAway videos, you hear one former Secular Leftist after another talk about how they heard a talk or watched a Prager U video and that was the first time they had encountered a legitimate, sensible, alternative point of view. The banning of speakers is an effort to prevent that first encounter. It's like tying a bell around the neck of the leper and clothing him in distinctive rags so that all may see him and avoid him long before any interaction takes place.

No one is trying to convert the unclean, either. As a redneck Catholic, I can guarantee you that no one from the Secular Left sees me as worthy of evangelization. At least I've never encountered it. Instead, I'm one of Hillary's deplorables or one of Barack's bitter clingers. There is no hope for my redemption and so the only alternative is to make sure the faithful close their ears.

Clinton supporters on election night as everything started to go wrong. As they watched the map turn red at the county level, I wonder how many of them thought they should have spent more time listening to the concerns of rural voters and white men. My bet would be not many of them, given the tone of the elites since then.
If you wanted to convert someone, you'd speak to them in their language. When their language is the problem, all you can do is declare them unclean and inform your true believers that any contact will bring the risk of infection.

2 comments:

tim eisele said...

"As a redneck Catholic, I can guarantee you that no one from the Secular Left sees me as worthy of evangelization. At least I've never encountered it."

I can see two ways to interpret that statement. One is the way you are interpreting it, that the Secular Left has written you off and is refusing to engage with you.

The other is that there are not actually that many Secular Leftists, and so you just aren't encountering them in any quantity.

Here in Houghton, I am pretty sure that we have the second case. I have encountered a couple of people that would fit your definition of "Secular Leftist", and they are certainly not shy about trying to evangelize everyone they meet. They are just so thin on the ground that I rarely meet them. Oh sure, it seems like there are a lot of angry leftists online, just as there seem to be a lot of online angry conservatives, but a few thousand people online can kick up a racket that is way out of proportion to their actual numbers. There are about 327 million people in the US, so even 100,000 online loudmouths is still only 0.03% of the population, and it will be a long time before they can get around to arguing with everyone face-to-face.

Foxfier said...

Third option, he encounters them and they're verbally abusive.

Given the number of folks who have mentioned long term friendships that ended because their friend could no longer accept a conservative as a friend? I'm betting that way.