Pretenders, i.e., Phonies Exposed

Does it ever get personal? Sometimes. I remember when Ben Shapiro was enjoying a burst of publicity by joining the National Review Never-Trumpers as if he was defending the Holy Grail of real conservatism. What a crock. He thought he’d found the launching pad for a kind of media stardom that transcended party lines. Thought he was going to become David Brinkley or at least William F. Buckley, Jr., Junior. At the time I expressed a desire to debate him, and one of my few Facebook commenters opined that Shapiro would kill me in a debate. “No,” I said. “Fact. I would tear him apart in ten minutes.” The commenter didn’t attempt a subsequent sally.

He’s always been a phony. His career subsequent to his spectacular failure to take down Trump proves it. From Wikipedia:

He’s supposed to be wunderkind, a kind of intellectual prodigy we should immediately bow down to. I’m the last person to peddle that shibboleth to. I was wunderkind myself. Shapiro graduated from UCLA at the age of 20. Wow. I graduated from Harvard in just three years at the age of 19. Shapiro majored in (yawn) political science, which along with sociology is the junkiest liberal arts degree anyone can get. My own degree was in English Literature with major additions of history, art history, and the Classics (i.e., Latin poetry).

Here’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t write a book right out of the box plagiarizing Buckley’s star-making work called “God and Man at Yale” with a derivative trivium titled “Brainwashed: How Universities Infect America’s Youth.” Then Shapiro went to Harvard Law School, from which he did not graduate ‘summa cum laude’ or ‘magna cum laude,’ but (wait for it) ‘cum laude,’ meaning the bottom half of the class.

What did I do? I went to work for a lawyer who was a Harvard Law graduate. I got to see what that life might be like. All my life people had been telling me what a great lawyer I would make, how inevitable that I would be a lawyer, how wasteful it would be to pursue any other kind of career. So, after a year of internship, I enrolled in the Cornell Graduate School of Business. Where I filled in the blanks of my superlative liberal arts education with courses in micro- and macro-economics, accounting, computer and linear programming, probability theory and statistical methods, operations management, and ‘Business Policy,’ meaning the case study method of pedagogy favored by the somewhat dumber Harvard Business School curriculum.

After which I went into the business world, fought some big battles about microprocessor technology, founded a couple of consulting firms and became by degrees an expert in communications (technological and human), Just-in-Time Manufacturing, Continuous Improvement programs, corporate education curriculums, and finding ways to get my partners and employees paid for their sometimes indifferent work.

I had a big-time partner from the old Big Eight Accounting world (Arthur Anderson, Coopers & Lybrand) who told me a simple fact of life I’ve never seen refuted: “It takes 20 years to get good at something. Doesn’t matter how smart you are. You have to learn by doing good work as hard you can and also making mistakes and dealing with people as they are, not how you imagine or want them to be.”

He’s dead now. I’m still here. Ben Shapiro has written 11 books and has a podcast. I’ve written 20+ books and the first one got published when I was 37. It takes 20 years to get good at something.

But Shapiro even has a novel. Blurbs regale him as “our new Ayn Rand.” It’s called “True Allegiance.”  Wanna see?

Aw shucks, Mommy. He’s got dialog and everything.

Shapiro. He has no career but a podcast. He has no accomplishments but a string of redundant unoriginal books. He’s just a wannabe who didn’t make it, the kind of guy you see standing on the side of the road with his thumb out.

Do I care? Not really. But nobody ever tried to do Ben Shapiro in. He managed that all by himself. Something you can’t say about Donald Trump, no matter how much, and how smugly, you hate him.