Happy New Year everyone!

I hope everyone is enjoying (or have enjoyed) their holidays.

I was hoping to have this blog post published last month, but unfortunately, I had less time than I expected last week. Apologies for this! As hard as I try to publish at least one post every month, I don’t want to jeopardize the quality of my posts for the quantity of content that I publish. Let’s all just pretend that I published this on December 31st…

In any case, in this post, I will give a few examples of what I see as the simple elegance of some of the analogies that Ben Shapiro uses to illustrate his arguments.

I’m sure this does not need to be said, but I don’t agree with everything Ben says. However, I don’t think one needs to in order to appreciate the simplicity of his analogies and the degree to which this gives him a meaningful edge in a debate.

The first example comes from Politicon 2016, where Ben debated Sally Kohn. Sally was claiming that America was systemically sexist against women and, to support her case, claimed that women were underrepresented in boardrooms and in politics generally. Ben asked her if the fact that the vast majority of people that were incarcerated were men pointed at systemic sexism against men. Here, Ben did a fantastic job at exposing the flaw in Sally’s thinking.

The second one comes from a question and answer (Q&A) session at Ferris State University from February 2017. The student and Ben were having a back-and-forth on transgenderism. To illustrate his point that one cannot claim to be something they are not, Ben asked the student why she wasn’t 60 years old, effectively leaving her speechless.

The next one comes from another Q&A session, this time at UC Berkeley, which took place in September 2017. For context, the question was about abortion, and the student claimed that sentience is what gave a person moral value. Ben then asked him if he could stab the student if he was in a coma in which he may awake, to which the student answered in the negative. The student followed up by saying that he would be considered potential sentience in that scenario, to which Ben replied that fetuses are also potentially sentient. I find that a lot of Ben’s arguments on the topic of abortion use analogies (more examples here).

The fourth one is from the debate that Ben had in San Francisco with Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein, two other members of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, in December 2017 (link to this episode on Sam’s website here). In this part of the conversation, Ben alleges that Sam’s commitment to reason is undergirded by Judeo-Christian assumptions and says, “You’re using my language, then you’re building a house using the bricks that I’m giving you.” This is something that Ben expands on in his summer 2019 conversation with Jordan Peterson (see here at 33:27).

The fifth one comes from a debate that Ben had with Ana Kasparian at the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce in October 2021. Ben was making the point that strong social benefits can lead to more problems than it solves because immigration tends to increase drastically as a result of those social benefits. To illustrate his point, he claimed that if he puts a “Free Donut” sign in his shop, that people will come, resulting in laughter and clapping from the audience.

Finally, in November 2022, while talking to Matt Walsh on his show about gay marriage, Ben addressed a common counterargument to the argument that marriage should only be between men and women because they are the only people capable of bearing children. The counterargument is that some heterosexual couples, including elderly people or infertile couples, cannot bear children. Of course, there are exceptions to everything, but it would admittedly be silly to claim that the existence of exceptions changed a definition that was based on a norm. Ben claimed that this was comparable to saying that dogs definitionally don’t have four legs because some dogs don’t have four legs.

Fans of Steven Crowder may notice that this is similar to an argument Crowder made in 2017 while speaking to a college student, in which he claimed that in human anatomy class, it is taught that human beings have ten fingers, despite the fact that some people have less than ten fingers. He used this analogy to claim that the existence of intersex people did not invalidate the claim that there are only two sexes in human beings.

I think it’s hard to deny Ben Shapiro’s masterful skills in debating. It would seem that using analogies to point out flaws in your opponent’s arguments is incredibly effective.

Anyway, I hope you guys found this post useful or interesting!

Jo