Sure it is lol
"a type of people or things"
Progressives are a type of people.
The key difference is Ben waited until the exact details were released to make the critique, as to where the left-leaning commentators pounced on tariffs before he got to "tari"
But the sentiment you expressed here...that's one of the reasons democrats are losing.
I can listen to an Ezra Klein or Robert Reich and at least acknowledge that they have interesting viewpoints, and are sharp guys who raise valid points (even if I don't agree with them on everything)
Whereas the progressives (who claim they wish conservatives were more intellectual, but their actions say otherwise) will immediately balk at the prospect of engaging in the content of more intellectual conservatives like Ben Shapiro, a George Will, or a Michael Savage... but will gleefully engage with (and respond to) the content of the "fringe" characters. (I presume, because they find their arguments easier to refute so they can engage in a lazier form of debating).
Often times, I notice that people will arbitrarily assign the title of "huckster" to the conservatives of that ilk. "Huckster" has just become a replacement word for "I can't beat this guy in a debate, so I'll just pretend that their points are so far beneath me, that it doesn't even warrant a response, and it'll appear that I have the high ground"
Who are you talking about in those last two paragraphs who dodges intellectuals like Shaprio (a sentence I never thought I'd write) while "gleefully engaging" the content of more fringe characters? Because it sure sounds like you're talking about me,
especially given your calling out the word "huckster."
You may recall that when you posted that video of Savage recently, my comments were based on my experiences with him when he
was a nutty fringe figure. When I listened to him, ages ago, he was the wacky basement-dwelling doomsday prepper to Rush Limbaugh's cigar-smoking socialite. When you pointed out that he's now more sane than a lot of the current crop of right-wing commentators, I dropped it.
Regarding George Will, when was the last time anybody around here posted anything from him? Here are the search results:
www.christianforums.com
The most recent one I can find (a post, not even a whole thread) is from
April 2023.
Lest you think I dismiss him, here I am in Sep 2023, giving to another forum member a whole list of podcast episodes feature prominent intellectually-minded conservatives (including Will):
As I mentioned in another thread, I’m a big fan of the Know Your Enemy podcast, which is a long-running deep dive in the history of the intellectual wing of the Right, particularly in the US post WW1. Through them I’ve become aware of another podcast, In Bed with the Right, which covers similar...
www.christianforums.com
Regarding Shapiro, I generally don't hold him in high regard because he's not as insightful as you or the rest of his fan base seem to think. I listened to the video you posted and... so what? He's not wrong in any of it, but all of what he said on the subject of general tariffs is pretty elementary. As another poster commented, what good is he as a commentator if he waits to say anything until after bad policies have been enacted when most of the fallout was easily foreseeable? It’s not like most of this was out of the blue. The only surprises here were the severity of the tariff rates on each specific country and the exact formula they used to arrive at those rates - but those are just the icing on the cake. We all knew that something like this was coming, because Trump has been signaling both his desire to levy high tariffs and his pathetic misunderstandings about trade deficits
for years. (
Here's me making fun of his notion of trade deficits back in February). And the rest of us outside the MAGASphere have been talking about how bad
those sorts of policies are (even if we didn't yet know the specifics) for just as long. It's good that Shapiro points out the absurdity and dishonesty of the formula being used, but on the general point of high tariffs, if this is his first foray into the subject, he's very, very late to the party.
