I’ve never liked Ben Shapiro.

It’s not because he’s of a particular ethnic persuasion.  I honestly don’t care about that, at all.  I don’t think badly of people for that, but I don’t think highly of them either.  It’s just a fact of birth.

It’s not because he’s smart.  I mean, I’m probably just as smart (a lot more damaged in some ways, perhaps) but I tend to respect people more when they’re intelligent than when they’re stupid, or virulently stupid.  So I actually respect that, a little.

It’s because he’s a crap person.

More accurately, he seems like one of those types of people who has always had everything handed to him, has always been one of the – if not the – smartest people in the room, and he never learned how to actually interact with people.

One of his most famous sayings is “facts don’t care about your feelings”.

He’s right.  It’s also one of those statements that kind of makes you a jerk for saying it.

Facts don’t care about your feelings.  But personal relationships tend to have pretty much nothing at all to do with facts.

Ben Shapiro used to be known for “starring” on YouTube videos that had headlines like “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS woke idiot with facts and logic”.  And if you watched the video, that is, in fact, pretty much what happened.  He was standing at a podium, some woke idiot with piercings and a rainbow shirt comes up and asks him a stupid question, and he blew that rainbow-shirted skittle-haired person out of the water.  And that rainbow-shirted skittle-haired person walked away, sat down, and just thought “man, what a jerk.”

Even if the thought “maybe he’s right” flitted through their head, it didn’t matter.  All they came away with was the impression that he didn’t give a crap about them, all he cared about was talking fast, destroying their worldview, moving on to the next, and making his appearance fee.

That’s all I got the impression of.  Even if I thought he was right, even even if I thought the video title was completely accurate.  You don’t win hearts by destroying people.

Ravi Zacharias was an Indian (not American Indian, actual Indian) Christian apologist who was in some ways very similar to Ben Shapiro…  As was Tim Keller. They got up on stage, did Q and As with rainbow-shirted skittle-haired people, and somehow managed to not come off like a jerk.  Ravi got repetitive, but you got the idea that both of those guys actually cared about the people they were answering.  Maybe they didn’t give the answer they wanted, but the answers were well thought out, delivered with some compassion, and you got the impression that they actually were interested in the well-being of the questioner.

Maybe they weren’t universally well-liked, but they didn’t rapid-fire destroy people and then vanish off into the sunset.

Maybe their facts didn’t care about their feelings, but they did.

And recent events have borne our my opinions on Ben Shapiro.

I don’t like Candace Owens.  I think she’s a grifter who found out there’s money to be made by being a conservative black woman, and is going to ride that gravy train until there’s no more gravy train left to ride.  But I don’t like how Ben Shapiro has been treating her.  I don’t really have a dog in that fight, I don’t like either of them, but his true colors are showing, and they’re not pretty.

I really don’t like conservative media at all, anymore.  Just a bunch of grifters who have figured out that conservatives are walking, talking, sometimes praying wallets full of cash who are desperate for anyone to give them a community, after they’ve been driven out of most of the mainstream ones.  A pity they don’t realize they’re being played by the conservative media, too.

Just tell people transgender doesn’t exist, gays are deviants, don’t burn a flag, and Israel can do whatever it wants, and people eat it up.  These things may or may not even be correct, that’s not the point.  The point is, it’s a ripe environment for grifters, and I can’t think of one popular conservative pundit (or whatever Ben Shapiro is) that hasn’t figured out how to ride that gravy train on the backs of rubes who don’t know any better.

That’s why I don’t like Ben Shapiro.