Honestly after years of watching Ben Shapiro play the genuine good faith debater so his fans can talk about how smart and reasonable and fair he is before going back to his real persona on his show, it is amazing to see someone tear that shit apart while he could do nothing but grin and take it. He comes into these “debates” pretending to be nice and respectful while not truly respecting a single person he’s talking to, sneaking in insults whenever he can, and fully planning to laugh behind their backs for being so dumb as to think their opinions matter, and people have to take it because otherwise they look like the unreasonable ones. It’s all a con for his outrage grift machine, and not a single word of it is in good faith.
So this guy decided to take one for the team and give back overtly the same disrespect Shapiro was dealing covertly. He flipped the chair around to throw him off his game to start (getting Shapiro to praise his masculinity right before revealing he was trans), ripped apart his charade, gish galloped him into silence, and then topped the whole thing off by faking the handshake that Shapiro had been doing insincerely with every participant. All while Shapiro, because he has to play the role, can’t do a thing about it. Don’t know if he just saw one thing too many and pulled this all off the top of his head, or if he planned to make a fool of Shapiro from the jump and was just waiting for the right moment, but either way go off king.
This is a sincerely important video. He came in knowing EXACTLY how Shapiro plays the game and turned the whole thing on his head. The only way Shapiro could possibly look- not GOOD, certainly, but at least not WORSE- was to sit there and take it. Check fucking mate, THAT is hoe you outmaneuver a fucker. Hell fucking yeah
The thing that gets me about it is that I think you can tell that Ben Shapiro had never met a passing trans man who he knew was a trans man before. He probably has never met a passing trans person who he later found out is trans before, but he definitely had never met a passing* trans dude.
And it fucking broke his brain to realize that there are not just trans people out there where he can’t tell, but specifically trans men. You can see it on his face that he thought he was facing off against a cis white dude, and when he finds out this guy is trans, watch his face change. That shit just breaks his entire bullshit sexist & transphobic worldview.
It really, really fucked with his world view to realize that, no, he can’t always tell, and some of the guys he sees just walking around? Might be trans.
*Passing politics suck, y’all. The point I’m making here is about the satisfaction of watching a bigot experience the disintegration of his personal “We Can Always Tell” in real time. I’m not saying everybody can or even should try to pass. Don’t do some weird “piss on the poor” thing with this.
“Portrait of a frightened man: Mr. Robert Wilson, thirty-seven, husband, father, and salesman on sick leave. Mr. Wilson has just been discharged from a sanitarium where he spent the last six months recovering from a nervous breakdown, the onset of which took place on an evening not dissimilar to this one, on an airliner very much like the one in which Mr. Wilson is about to be flown home – the difference being that, on that evening half a year ago, Mr. Wilson’s flight was terminated by the onslaught of his mental breakdown. Tonight, he’s travelling all the way to his appointed destination, which, contrary to Mr. Wilson’s plan, happens to be in the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone.”
ALT
