I always used to wonder if there would be a legitimate and mutually appreciated successor that would emerge for conservatism when Rush Limbaugh was no longer the “big voice on the right.”  I don’t wonder that any more.  Ben Shapiro is beyond capable of filling those shoes, and at least amongst younger generations of liberty-minded conservatives he already has.

Shapiro’s quick-tongued intellectualism is perfect for a culture that now exists completely in the digital age.  His isn’t an entertainment model that incorporates information.  He is all information, all the time, and for the intellectually curious in our culture, left or right, that in itself is entertaining.

While the internet is full of classic Shapiro debate moments, speeches, and sound bites, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him better than his recent conversation with Shannon Bream about the left’s hatred, not of Donald Trump, but of Vice President Mike Pence.   

Shapiro started off by confronting the painfully unhinged New York Times writer Frank Bruni’s assessment that impeaching Trump would only bring about a “bigot,” “liar,” and “self-infatuated holy terror” in Pence.  Exposing the boy-who-cried-extremist credibility problem the left has when it comes to this sort of thing, Shapiro pointed out how McCain was once portrayed as radically unstable, then Romney was a crazy extremist, now Trump is a deranged madman, but there’s always someone worse according to the left…whoever the next person is that the right supports.  It gets tiresome and ineffective politically.

But where Shapiro earned my standing ovation was when he articulated, perhaps better than I’ve ever heard done before on television, how and why it is Pence’s Christianity that makes him such a hated figure to progressives in America – from media to politics to entertainment:

“[T]here’s a baseline level of hatred, really, for Christians, on the cultural Left; it’s most evident in New York and Los Angeles, places where I’ve spent a lot of time. There’s this belief that everybody who deeply believes their faith is actually, secretly a bigot, that the reason they are acting out their religion in public is not because they believe their religion, but because they are using the religion as a cover for bigotry. It’s the same sort of thing that they’ve used with regard to Jack Phillips over at Masterpiece Cakeshop; really, he hates gay people; it’s not that he’s a Christian who believes he has to abide by his religious standards; it’s that he secretly hates gay people and trans people and he’s just using religion as a cover. They say the same sort of thing about Mike Pence; truly there’s a tyrannical tendency among religious people, and then they just use Jesus or the Bible as an excuse.”

I suppose I’ve always known this, but I’ve never heard it explained quite that well before.  One of the biggest reasons that progressives oppose Christian rights to conscience in the public square is because they don’t truly believe that the conscience is real.  They see it, largely, as a cover for bigotry rather than legitimate, personal faith convictions.  While there are many progressives who happily wear the label Christian, they don’t subscribe to a Biblical worldview, and thus divorce Christian teaching on, say, sexual ethics from their public character.  It is unreasonable to them that anyone else would fail to do the same. 

In short, they confuse a deep, abiding love and obedience to God for a deep, abiding hatred of the “other.”

I would have been satisfied with that Shapiro truth bomb, but the next thing I knew, he had reloaded and was dropping another on the left’s panicked fears of Pence and other Christians desiring theocracy in America:

“I find it absolutely bewildering that the same folks who are claiming that Mike Pence is going to run a theocracy also want federal gun control to seize all the guns. It’s truly amazing. It’s also amazing that the folks who are saying that Mike Pence wants to run a theocracy ignore the fact that Mike Pence is a constitutional conservative who wants to limit the size and scope of government. The only theocrats, the only people who actually want to rule from above by instituting their moral preferences on society from the top down, are the folks on the Left, who actually want to invade rights on a regular basis and force people to do things that they don’t want to do. It’s a lot more common on the Left than it is on the Right, so they’re actually using their own theocratic tendencies toward government, which a lot of folks on the radical Left see as a quasi God-like figure; they’re using that own theocratic tendency and then projecting it onto people like Mike Pence.”

Think about it: liberals actually believe that Christians like Pence would compel every woman in America to wear bonnets and red dresses.  They fear it and believe it no matter how ludicrous it is.  Perhaps the origin of that fear comes from the fact that when they themselves have the opportunity to harness the power of government, they are happily compelling non-progressives to participate in activities against their will and conscience.

To people who force nuns to pay for abortion drugs, or Christian bakers to celebrate sexual immorality, it probably isn’t that far out of the realm of their imagination to believe that someone might force feminists to wear bonnets.

This is why the left hates Ben Shapiro.  He’s on to them and exposes them in a way few others can.