Ben Shapiro is a stupid twerp* who’s wrong about everything but superficially good at arguing. We’re better off ignoring him, but sometimes he’s just so wrong you have to talk about it so here, unfortunately, is one of his tweets:

Yeah it’s from 2011 fuck off I’m positive he still holds this opinion. Rap has historically been problematic, sure, but the degree to which its problematicism reflects a genuine problem or problems is debatable. I majored in Classical Languages, I know more about Greco-Roman classical antiquity than any conservative motherfucker who talks about “Western Civilization,” and I’m here to tell you that the closest modern analogue to the Neoteric Poets, the group that included Catullus, is not Mozart or Bach or any of those dead, boring honkies. It’s Lil Wayne. Culturally, thematically, and stylistically, the closest equivalent to the Neoterics are the Young Money rappers. It’s also incredibly ignorant and just plain racist to associate African American Vernacular English (AAVE) with stupidity. It’s a dialect that makes English much more workable in poetry and music and often finds itself on the cutting edge of the general evolution of the English language because it’s incredibly flexible and generative. As for the problematic aspects of rap—toxic masculinity and “criminality”—you’d have a hard time proving toxic masculinity is unique to rap as a genre rather than a symptom of our music more broadly and, well, it’s kind of racist to think Black rappers talking about lawbreaking is “thuggish,” but Robin Hood isn’t. But that’s not an unfair comparison either! When American whites have a downright fetishistic, nationalist vigor for “law and order” bluntly designed to suppress Black society and culture, what happens? “Thugs” become folk heroes. Rappers are tapping into a spirit of resistance with the outlaw characters they play. It’s very rare for any of these rappers to be actual gangsters and yeah, the influence of trap and its syrup has kind of numbed rap currently, but that spirit of resistance so often expressed by faux “criminality” is still there. But after typing this I hope you see the problem with debating conservatives. They get to spew succinct inanities and it takes us paragraphs to show they’re full of shit. It really is better to ignore them unless they’re millionaires or billionaires and then idk maybe we can talk about table etiquette when we eat them

(*Ben Shapiro has the unenviable position of being Jewish among his fellow conservatives and gets a lot of anti-Semitic hate from the people who agree with most of what he says. It sucks he has to put up with that and the tokenization he experiences even if he, like Dennis Prager, is complicit in it. “Self-hating Jew” is an anti-Semitic canard with a lot of bad history and we should be mindful not to descend into bigotry when we engage with conservatives or conservatism.)