Ben Shapiro is a Jewish person, but the kind of Jewish person who thinks pretty much all other Jewish people in America are bad Jews. In other words, he’s a fundamentalist, and fundamentalists are unpleasant dicks no matter what religion you’re talking about.
He’s also the type of Jewish person who uses the phrase “Judeo-Christian,” which is meaningless on its face. There is no such thing as “Judeo-Christian” morality or “Judeo-Christian” values or “Judeo-Christian” heritage. There are white Christian supremacists who like to give their theocratic visions a veneer of legitimacy, so one day they decided to start slapping “Judeo” at the beginning, as if to say “See? It’s just not just us!”
Again, to underline this: when white Christian fascists, or the Ben Shapiro types who find common cause with them, use the term “Judeo-Christian,” they are just trying to pretend their movement is something more than a white Christian supremacist movement. Never let that stupid phrase pass your ears without pointing out what horseshit it is. Remind them they’re using a phrase that is absolutely meaningless to normal Jewish people.
All that being said, it should surprise no one that Shapiro openly defended Christian nationalism yesterday. But in doing so, he said some words that were so delusional, so nonsensical, that we’re led to think he might have been distracted by whatever feelings he felt in his bathing suit region when he angrily noticed Lizzo holding James Madison’s flute.
We’ll look at the transcript below.
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): This is why when people on the right use the phrase Christian nationalism, people on the left hear, ah, we’re talking about religious fascism.
Correct.
Well, no,
No, not “well, no,” it’s correct.
when people say Christian nationalism typically what they mean is not that the official church of the United States should be the Catholic Church,
Nobody fucking thinks that. Nobody thinks this has anything to do with the Catholic church in Rome, except inasmuch as there are gross fucking conservative Catholics who find common cause with white fascist evangelicals who find common cause with Ben Shapiro. Fuck off.
or that the church of the United States should dictate terms of service in the United States.
No, they do think that.
What it means instead, when people say Christian nationalism is that undergirding the values of the United States are a set of Judeo-Christian values, and when you jettison those values you destroy the United States.
There’s that stupid phrase! The values he says are “Christian nationalism” and “Judeo-Christian,” which he says are the values of the United States, are those predominantly of white supremacist protestant evangelicals. So a better translation of what he’s saying is that if those values aren’t allowed to rule, the country is destroyed.
Again, I think it’s bad branding because I think it’s exclusive in a way it doesn’t need to be. Specifically because, even if you’re not religious, you can agree with the basic idea, even from a natural — I mean, this is Catholic Church doctrine. You don’t have to be Catholic to believe that natural law actually undergirds the idea of family, undergirds the idea of God as an important part of public life.
Actually “natural law” kind of is a specifically right-wing Catholic view, or at least came from right-wing Catholics before it infected greater religious right discourse. It’s one of those things that sounds intellectual until you realize it’s just fancy (and easily debunked) words to excuse bigotry. It is some extreme Bozo T. Clown masturbatory “scholarly” nonsense, and it’s mostly just code for “God hates fags.”
You don’t have to be some sort of crazed conservative nut to believe a country ought to control its own borders and that culture matters. All of these things matter.
Oh, go eat that piece of wood you bought at Home Depot. We are sure you still have it lying around.
There are more words in the transcript, but we are bored by them.
We just wanted to write this post to remind everybody why it shouldn’t be surprising when Ben Shapiro, known Jewish person, gets starbursts in his undies for Christian nationalism. It’s all totally on brand.
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