Ben Shapiro recently came out to not only denounce and criticize Alex Jones — a fair play for anyone in the media — but to admonish his audience not to listen to Alex Jones because doing so is “not fine" "on a moral and intellectual level.”
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Via The Ben Shapiro Show, July 8, 2025 (emphasis added):
This is a person whose own lawyer made the case in a custody hearing with his ex-wife that he was a performance artist. This wasn't even the Sandy Hook trial where he tried to make the same case. His lawyers claim that this man of integrity is, in fact, a performance artist. Quote, "he's playing a character and is nothing like his online persona, attorney Randall Wilhite reportedly insisted in a Texas courtroom at a pretrial hearing ahead of the right-wing radio jock's custody battle with ex-wife Kelly Jones. Judging Jones by his Infowars performances would be like judging Jack Nicholson by his depiction of the Joker on Batman." That's his own lawyer saying that. His own lawyer is saying that he was a performance artist. OK. That's — his wife was making the case that, actually, he's just unstable. Quote, "He's not a stable person. He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin's neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped." His lawyer was like, no, no. He doesn't mean any of that. He's a performance artist.
OK. So those are your choices. So I'd just like to point out once again, at this point, you can watch whatever you want. It is a free country. You can watch Alex Jones. You can believe Alex Jones. You can think Alex Jones — you're entitled to any of those beliefs. That's fine. It's a free country.
On a moral and intellectual level, it is not so fine because it turns out that people who consistently traffic in conspiracy, it turns out that people who consistently traffic in trash, people who spend your time, your few brief breaths on this planet, filling your mind with stupidity, playing a WWE character — listen, if you wanna watch Alex Jones in the same way that you watch WWE because you know that the WWE is people who are fake jumping on each other and you find it dramatic and interesting, you know, more power to you. But if you're watching WWE and you think it's real, that makes you the stupid person. Don't do it. Don't do it. Seriously. It makes you dumber. It just makes you — in the end, you're responsible for the information that enters your brain and your independent judgment of that information. But if people are consistently being inauthentic*, if people openly acknowledge that what they're saying to you publicly and what they say privately are two different things on the same matters, well, then maybe you ought to take what they say with a grain of salt rather than suggesting that, for example, Donald Trump is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein, or Dan Bongino, with whom I am friends, is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein, or Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein. Because those are your only two choices here. Either Alex Jones, as is usual, blew a conspiracy theory out of proportion and so did the rest of the Internet, or Dan Bongino and Kash Patel and Donald Trump are all lying to you. Those are your choices. There is no third choice.
I am not a fan of Shapiro’s, but I would never presume to tell anyone whom I respect what or whom to listen to. Even if I don’t trust or like him, I sometimes listen to Shapiro just to get a fresh perspective. Hell, sometimes I go wild and tune in to see what Rachel Maddow is talking about on any given day (it’s almost always “Trump bad” catnip for her lobotomized wine mom audience).
Telling people that it’s immoral to listen to anyone — no matter how distasteful or wrong you might find their perspective — is ironically itself, in my opinion, immoral.
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I assume most of you intrepid and informed members of the PJ Media audience are familiar with the concept, but the Streisand effect describes the phenomenon by which trying to hide information from the public has the ironic and unintended effect of increasing public awareness of said information.
Via Britannica (emphasis added):
Streisand effect, phenomenon in which an attempt to censor, hide, or otherwise draw attention away from something only serves to attract more attention to it. The name derives from American singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s lawsuit against a photographer in 2003, which drew attention to the photo she was suing to have taken off the Internet…
Scholars have noted that censorship often backfires when the public perceives an attempt by a powerful person or organization to repress free speech. It can incite public outrage, especially if the story involves an underdog. Moreover, attempted censorship can spur curiosity. The banning of books and websites, for instance, often drives further interest in them. People tend to want to judge for themselves what is objectionable about something that has been singled out for suppression.
Why does Ben Shapiro seem to think so little of his audience? Are they too dumb to figure out whether Alex Jones is the charlatan Shapiro claims he is?
This is how adults operate in the vast modern information sphere: You take in data from all sources of all ideological persuasions, understanding the inborn bias, assess the known facts, synthesize that information, and form a conclusion.
What you don’t do is what Ben Shapiro wants you to do: cover your ears when bad men talk because they’re bad and subjecting yourself to their opinions will pollute your mind because you’re too weak to filter out the BS.
For the record, I understand that Alex Jones is at least partially a performance audience. I listen to what he says critically, as anyone should do with anyone in media. I don’t need people like Ben Shapiro to babysit my consciousness, and you shouldn’t either.
