Ben Shapiro: The quest to destroy work

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This week, after spending time vacationing in the disease-ridden hellscape known as Florida, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., came down with COVID-19. It was a tragic blow to the irrepressible Instagram star, who was forced to quarantine. But then, like an extraordinarily inaniloquent phoenix rising from the ashes of the dread omicron variant, she returned to her web audience with a message for the ages.

“Welp, so it happened,” she wrote, in truly Tolstoyan fashion. “Got COVID, probably omicron. As of today I am thankfully recovered and wrapping up quarantine, but COVID was no joke. For a while I’ve noted the term ‘mild’ is misleading when the bar is hospitalization and death.” After dispensing with the preliminary medical advice, Ocasio-Cortez got down to business — or rather, to the business of avoiding doing business. She explained, “The idea of forcing people to work just 5 days after symptoms start is sociopathic and 100% informed by a culture that accepts sacrificing human lives for profit margins as a fair trade.”

Now, this is, to put it mildly, dumb as a box of rocks. No one is suggesting that people with significant COVID-19 symptoms ought to go back to work. And nobody is sacrificing human lives by encouraging those with waning or no symptoms to return to the office. Businesses cannot run without employees.

Fortunately for us, the brilliant, “So Fresh, So Face” congresswoman has a solution: community. And by community, she means government. And by government, she means your money. “If you’ve noticed,” she writes, “much of the emphasis on media conversations on COVID are individualistic — if there’s one lesson I think we as a country are repeating until we learn, it’s that community and collective good is our best shot through our greatest challenges — way more than discorded acts of ‘rugged individualism’ and the bootstrap propaganda we’ve been spoon-fed since birth … In a world of MEs, let’s build team WE. (Blue heart emoji)”

So, what exactly is the illustrious congresswoman proposing? Presumably, that businesses pay people to stay home if they are mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic; or that the government regulate businesses into such activity; or that taxpayers pay the freight. This accords with other proposals from Ocasio-Cortez, such as her Green New Deal idea to provide “economic security to all those who are unable or unwilling to work.”

And Ocasio-Cortez’s message is mirrored by even higher-level politicians like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who once proposed that Americans be provided nationalized health care so that they could leave their jobs en masse, thereby freeing them to “be a photographer or a writer or a musician, whatever, an artist.” In the view of the far Left, work is a bad, foisted upon unwilling individuals by a cruel and arbitrary system. If only the system could be run properly, in top-down fashion by great minds like Ocasio-Cortez or Pelosi, Americans would be freed from the tyranny of everyday life.

Of course, precisely the opposite is true. Someone, as it turns out, has to pay the bills. And what’s more, Americans generally like working. They find work fulfilling. Depression rates are twice as high among the unemployed than the employed — and more than three times as high for those unemployed for more than 27 weeks. Most Americans aren’t eager to spend their days locked in their apartments waiting for government checks. And they’re even less eager to spend more money at the store thanks to supply issues caused by lack of production due to labor shortages.

But Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi don’t have to worry about all of that. Ocasio-Cortez can always Instagram Live from her apartment or Zoom into congressional conference calls. And she never has to worry about the profit margins she spends so much time deriding; she can undercut those for others at her leisure.

Democrats used to pose as the party of labor. Now, they’re increasingly the party of those who wish to avoid it at all costs.

Ben Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers.

Ben Shapiro’s sister says posting bikini pics on Instagram is ‘free OnlyFans’

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Ben Shapiro’s sister Abby Shapiro believes that women who post bikini photos to Instagram is just a “free OnlyFans” - and people on social media are confused.

On Wednesday, Abby, a lifestyle YouTuber with more than 100,000 followers, took to her Twitter to share her opinion about the bikini content.

“HOT TAKE: If more than 60 per cent of your travel blogger photos on Instagram are of you in a bikini, you don’t have a travel blog. You have a free only fans account,” she wrote.

It caused an immediate stir on Twitter, with one person jokingly asking what it’s like to live in the 19th century:

Another wanted to know how she came up with the statistic of 60 per cent :

Others wanted to know why she would sexualize bikinis and people enjoying their time frolicking in the sun:

Someone else had mixed feelings about Abby’s take, noting that they believe “women should be able to wear and post whatever they want” but believing that bikini pictures are hypersexualised.

Just for giggles, on guy who often posts shirtless pics asked if he had a free OnlyFans account:

Appearing to support Abby’s opinion, her brother Ben also retweeted the post, presumably agreeing with her stance.

The conservative political commentator and editor emeritus for the Daily Wire hasn’t held back from his opinions about many things, including women and traditions.

In August 2020, when Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s song “WAP” came out, which essentially an upbeat song mainly geared towards women’s empowerment, Shapiro referred to the “bucket and a mop” lyric and said that the women involved should get the “medical care they require”.

“As I also discussed on the show, my only real concern is that the women involved – who apparently require a “bucket and a mop” – get the medical care they require. My doctor wife’s differential diagnosis: bacterial vaginosis, yeast infection, or trichomonis,” he wrote, in part.

Elsewhere, in July 2019, Shapiro made the claim that a woman cannot possibly play the role of 007 in a James Bond movie because it would not “satisfy male wish fulfilment”.

Indy100 reached out to Abby for comment on her tweet.

The COVID-19 Impact of Expressive Individualism, by Ben Shapiro

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Philosopher Robert Bellah once posited that modern Western human beings identify themselves in a peculiar way: as emotional cores, surrounded by baser material. According to Bellah, we are expressive individualists — meaning that “each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.” This mode of self-definition wars with older, more traditional modes, which suggest that our identities lie in how we interact with the world and society around us. Expressive individualism, by contrast, suggests that we are not truly ourselves unless the world confirms all of our feelings and intuitions. As professor Carl Trueman points out, this viewpoint is essentially solipsistic; he explains, “When identity is psychologized, and the pursuit of happiness becomes a subjective, psychological matter, anything that challenges that paradigm is deemed damaging and oppressive.”

We see this phenomenon most obviously in the bizarre insistence by transgender advocates that not only are they men trapped in women’s bodies or vice versa, but that society mirror that incorrect self-perception. But expressive individualism also manifests in other contexts, such as belief in racial essentialism, denial of parental rights, and objection to science itself.

It even crops up in reference to COVID-19.

COVID-19 should be a paradigmatic example of where expressive individualism fails: It is an exogenous shock to the individual, a reality that exists no matter the subjective thoughts or feelings. The data map out individuals’ risk factors; particular actions, like vaccination, can lower the risk of hospitalization or death for most people, no matter the intuitions of individuals who object. All of which mean that we should be able to track that data, and to change our response to the pandemic based on new data.

And yet we have now, as a society, psychologized even COVID-19 in expressive individualist terms. Thus, after Bari Weiss pointed out on Bill Maher’s show that the public health establishment has failed time and again to follow the data, that the vast majority of those who have been vaccinated are safe from COVID-19, and that we ought to consider life returning to normal, a massive backlash ensued — backlash from those least vulnerable to COVID-19, who have now internalized a sense of COVID-19 moral superiority. Thus, Sara Haines of “The View” lamented, “I think some of the things we’ve learned in this pandemic will stay the same. I may never ride the subway without a mask, I may never go indoors to big crowds and feel comfortable without a mask.” Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times explained, “What you can’t do is force other people, whose vulnerabilities might be much greater than your own, to agree with your risk assessments and join you in moving on while the pandemic still rages.”

But that’s precisely what Goldberg and Haines are doing — forcing other people to take measures that the science does not support in order to maintain their emotional comfort. Boosters are not stopping omicron. Nothing short of N95 masks is stopping omicron. The disease is now endemic, which is why Dr. Hans Kluge of the World Health Organization’s European region stated this week, “Omicron offers plausible hope for stabilization and normalization.”

But there will be no normalization for those who have made pandemic paranoia a feature of their identity. That’s because the public health establishment has now successfully cultivated a large group of people who measure their moral value by just how compliant and panicked they remain over COVID-19: Fully 68% of people fully vaccinated with boosters remain very or somewhat worried about getting sick from COVID-19 in the next year, compared with just 39% of those who are unvaccinated. This is the precise opposite of what the public health authorities should have achieved — but expressive individualism has won the day once again, conflating one’s feelings with one’s identity group.

Ben Shapiro, 38, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “How To Destroy America In Three Easy Steps,” “The Right Side Of History,” and “Bullies.” To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Ben Shapiro, Daily Kos and Looney Tunes

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By Caleb Baumgardner

When I was a kid, I watched Looney Tunes most every weekday morning. They came on TNT.

Seems like I remember they came on TNT at night too. They would also come on Nickelodeon at around 6:30 p.m. or so, before Nick At Nite started at 7 with Mister Ed.

I still like Looney Tunes whenever I happen to see one on, though I’m old enough now to appreciate that there are some jokes in those cartoons that are emphatically not for children.

One of my favorite Looney Tunes gags (and one of the most iconic) is the famous “wabbit season, duck season” bit.

I bet most of y’all know what I’m talking about.

Elmer Fudd is hunting Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and they come upon a tree with a poster stuck to it that reads “RABBIT SEASON.” Bugs tears it off, revealing a poster underneath that says “DUCK SEASON.”

So the two of them go back and forth tearing posters off the tree, which alternate between “RABBIT SEASON” and “DUCK SEASON,” yelling each one at each other as they go, until a poster with a picture of a nervous looking Elmer Fudd reading “ELMER SEASON” is revealed.

Bugs and Daffy then turn on Elmer and grin, and Elmer Fudd runs off as Bugs and Daffy pursue their quarry.

That’s the end of the cartoon.

One of the dumbest and most harmful things we find in our political media these days are news stories (the term is used loosely here) aimed at the culture war enemies of whatever political tribe to which we may happen to belong that simply report their misfortune or regret as a cause for celebration.

Political websites and publications make a great deal of money doing this.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Earlier today, I happened to come across an article from The Daily Wire (internet platform of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro) relaying an interview with U2 lead singer Bono where he talks about some of his disappointments with the band.

There was nothing political in the article itself, but in the comments, the readership of The Daily Wire let it be known how much they didn’t like U2, finding Bono’s advocacy for refugees and immigrants particularly problematic.

The people making comments relished Bono’s disappointment.

It’s no secret that Bono has used his platform to advocate for a number of causes, or that the band has written songs with political themes or overtones, going back to their opposition to apartheid in South Africa in the 1980’s and their admiration for the American Civil Rights Movement.

But this article about Bono, which had nothing political to say, got a great many readers of The Daily Wire to talk about what awful leftists Bono and U2 are and enjoy the fact that Bono had regrets about his career as a musician.

It is hard to imagine the ability to conceive of someone like Bono, who has found such great success under capitalism, as a leftist. But then, the word leftist (along with many others) has lost all meaning in American political discourse.

One commenter chimed in that Bono is “the worst human.”

Worse than Mao or Pinochet, even. Wow.

Liberal website Daily Kos also comes to mind. Over the years, I’ve seen a number of stories where the financial woes or marital problems of prominent conservative figures are reported and discussed in a similar fashion.

It’s similar to the Two Minute Hate in George Orwell’s “1984,” where the simple projection onto a screen of the face of Goldstein, enemy of the Party, incites crowds into rage. This is done every day for two minutes.

The purpose is two keep people angry and, more importantly, to keep people angry at any opposition the Party. It keeps people in line, supporting the power structure that needs them to sustain itself.

And it gives people someone to hate. A lot of people want that.

Stories like this are designed to instigate a Two Minute Hate of sorts. Only there are plenty of such stories out there to be read every single day. All day long. So, the hate can last much longer than two minutes. You can make your Two Minute Hate last as long as you’re awake, if you’re so inclined. And those providing the content are more than happy for you to do so. It’s what makes them money.

“What’s this got to go with Lonney Tunes?” you may be asking.

It’s like this, Faithful Reader: We’re Bugs and Daffy, tearing the poster off the tree, angrily shouting “WABBIT SEASON” and “DUCK SEASON” at each other, hoping that the guy with the gun will point it at the other guy and shoot him.

Media like this is designed to keep us doing that and not think about that fact that there is someone pointing a gun at both of us.

The guy with the gun, metaphorically speaking, is “the people who really hold the keys to the kingdom”, as former El Dorado News-Times staffer Jim Patterson once said to me, God rest his soul.

And the ones holding the keys aren’t the politicians you love to hate, Faithful Reader. They’re the ones writing six and seven figure checks to their super PACs. And it’s likely those same people are also writing checks to the politicians you like.

Why do you suppose they’re doing that?

Bugs and Daffy eventually figured out that it was Elmer Season.

It’s past time for us to do the same.

Caleb Baumgardner is a local attorney. He can be reached at [email protected]

Letters: Noncitizens voting in American local elections not so rare

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