First and foremost, Ben Shapiro needs to fire his sound mixer — the first four or five minutes of this Matt Taibbi interview show is smothered in loud music. But that aside, there’s an interesting discussion of the wokester left’s “our way or the highway” attitude around the 36:30 mark.
Ben Shapiro: “[There’s a whole side of the aisle that] claims there is a false subjectivity…that there should not be another idea and whatever we say goes, and if you controvert that narrative then you are immediately barred from the club.”
Matt Taibbi: “Yeah, and that’s just a losing argument with most audiences. People implicitly distrust anyone who doesn’t want you to listen to someone else’s argument. That used to be something that attracted me to liberalism…this idea that ‘I don’t care what this person says, I believe what I believe, you can listen to them if you want but [either way] it doesn’t bother me….right? Well, that’s not the attitude any more. The [current] attitude is, we have to do everything we can to stamp out [conservative] disinformation. [This way of thinking and behaving] has a tendency to inspire audiences to swing in the opposite direction.
“This censoriousness, this idea of stamping out the other side completely…in the hope that you’ll be the last opinion standing…that’s a losing strategy, i think, and it’s incredible that it’s been adopted.”