Okay, not really. But this televised confrontation between the hard-right American polemicist Ben Shapiro and the conservative British journalist Andrew Neil on the BBC’s afternoon Politics Live show is enjoyable enough as the YouTube celebrity goes into freak-out mode during some fairly innocuous questioning by the former newspaper editor. To make matters worse, Shapiro manages to convince himself that the Scottish-born Neil, a crusty veteran of the political right in Britain, is a rabid leftie, simply because the cosseted internet star finds himself outside his ideological comfort zone. Is this part of the argument for taking the reactionary zoomers in the US and UK out of their adoring echo chambers and subjecting them to some old-fashioned journalistic grilling rather than the gentle fluffing they usually receive from their online fans?
Ben Shapiro Destroyed In Epic Takedown As He Storms Off BBC TV Interview
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
If you dislike Shapiro you are an antisemite!!
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If you claim anyone who disagrees with you is an antisemite, you are a bullying snowflake moron who clearly has no arguments.
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Also a Zionist stooge;)
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You should know who you are talking to. 90% of what he says is not serious or literal.
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I don’t think it’s a comfort zone thing so much. My thinking is that first of all the left-right spectrum only tells part of the story on what a lot of them-including Shapiro-believe. Some what they believe isn’t right-wing at all in the traditional sense so much as wanting a society that’s otganized around homosexual or in some cases homosexual relations while women are to one degree or another secodary-and the degree ranges from marriage being a purely business’s contract and an assumption that most women are better suited to pink collar jobs compared to most men-with noted exceptions-, and only partial restriction of women’s suffrage after the 19th Ammendment is repealed. At the other end some want society where most or all women are slaves. Some version of their ideal society are very right wing indeed, others are almost Communist, except for a free market in pot-some actual want a nationalized brothel system.
Secondly, a big part of the game is to keep anyone who is not in their immediate circle “guessing” at what they actually believe, while at the same time “working the refs”. By working the refs it’s like a coach in a sport who complains to the referee that they are being treated unfairly by a particular call the ref made, even though they weren’t. The idea is that they do that hoping it will pressure the refs to give them a better deal next time.
So they constantly howl liberal bias while at the same time shrouding what they actually believe -which isn’t east to categorize by left vs right to begin with- in a bit of mystery. It’s a game to alter people’s sense of what’s normal.
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Andrew Neil painted as a lefty. Now I’ve seen it all.
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I think you have it in one ASF, these guys are outside their comfort zone, unused to any criticism and therefore of course AN has to be left-wing. What’s stunning is that Shapiro didn’t do his homework about who Neil is and what he represents (hard Thatcherism I’d say, for want of a better term). It’s basic basic stuff. And it doesn’t matter if he thinks he can get away with calling him left wing, any of Neil’s audience will know that he (Neil) is of the right and Shapiro comes out looking like an ignorant guy.
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I believe it’s a psychological game they play. It’s not just a question of falling out of their comfort zone, it’s deliberate and calculated to make themselves look more sophisticated than their adversaries.
It’s not so much about winning one argument. It’s more about keeping people perpetually guessing about what some of them and their fellows actually believe. Like I said, many of them have beliefs that aren’t easy to classify in terms of the traditional “left vs right” scheme or the tradition “social liberals vs families values” etc. in the first place, which helps.
It’s as if you confuse people enough it becomes easier and easier to win arguments.
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The YouTube crowd have certainly had a field-day with Shapiro’s performance. And rightly so. The sycophancy around the YouTube polemicists hides a lot of faults.
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