Ben Shapiro
Article
Ben Shapiro is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 18, 2021 and July 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “it’s dominated by Ben Shapiro, who is pretty much the edgiest right wing person”; “few people this side of Ben Shapiro fall asleep fondling themselves to the free market”. It most often appears alongside IRL, Scott, Trump.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 18, 2021
- Last seen: July 22, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- IRL (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- BLM (1 shared issues)
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- b (1 shared issues)
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- sp (1 shared issues)
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- 2020 election (1 shared issues)
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- 2022 book review contest (1 shared issues)
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- 2122 (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- pol (1 shared issues)
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- Afghanistan (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
People like Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones used to be huge on YouTube. Now they're both gone, as is Milo himself. Often, the most extreme figures serve as a kind of vanguard and give energy to a movement. If the far right gets its most extreme elements purged every once in a while, the natural process from which you go "edgy -> slightly less edgy -> mainstream -> lame" gets interrupted. If you look at the most shared posts on Facebook today, data that's collected on a daily basis, it's dominated by Ben Shapiro, who is pretty much the edgiest right wing person allowed a Facebook account. And Ben Shapiro can never be cool.
Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him? I feel like far-right people can still find lots of far-right celebrities to follow, and Jones and Molyneux weren’t even central examples of far-rightists. Surely there are still enough unbanned rightists to satisfy almost anybody; this makes it hard for me to believe this had too big an effect.
I’ve taken to calling myself a post-capitalist, which is a fancy way of saying that I want a better arrangement but don’t have any better ideas. That may sound like a distinction without a difference from everybody else - after all, few people this side of Ben Shapiro fall asleep fondling themselves to the free market. I guess it just means that I greet anti-capitalists with sympathy instead of snark and scorn, even if I disagree with their proposed solutions. That, and when others offer alternatives, I’m all ears.