After right-wing provocateur and pseudo-intellectual Ben Shapiro made an almost certainly illegal offer earlier this week to donate $10,000 to New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign if she agreed to a public debate on the merits of socialism, Ocasio-Cortez compared Shapiro’s “unsolicited” offer to “catcalling” and argued bad-faith actors like Shapiro don’t deserve a response.
“Just like catcalling, I don’t owe a response to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote after a right-wing reporter accused her of refusing to reply to Shapiro’s request. “And also like catcalling, for some reason they feel entitled to one.”
Here is Shapiro’s request, which prompted widespread ridicule:
While Shapiro has repeatedly demonstrated complete disdain for facts and basic standards of human decency—in one particularly racist moment, the 34-year-old lawyer declared on Twitter that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”—he has nonetheless been touted by such outlets as the New York Times as a master debater and “destroyer of weak arguments.”
“Young people are identifying as socialists, the right has nothing to offer beyond grievance and hate, and the left is actually putting forward serious ideas.”
—Nathan Robinson, Current Affairs
Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan Robinson—who penned a thorough, measured, and must-read takedown of Shapiro late last year—begs to differ with this characterization, and has repeatedly offered to debate Shapiro in a public forum.
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