"Retire at 70" Ben Shapiro has been a lying neocon ferret of great privilege his entire life, but he could at least get his math right

We can all agree that prominent Republicans make terrible arguments despite an overripe array of targets

Ben Shapiro is getting precisely what he ostensibly wants out of life right now. As someone with a massive conservative platform in 2024, Shapiro and his God- (and G-d-) fearing Daily Wire brethren are making a tremendous amount of money just from the multiple social pathologies the Biden Administration is force-feeding deeply addled but generally resistent American normies. But Shapiro has also been funded by wealthy Zionists since his days as the nation’s most foremost up-and-coming neocon pundit, with the conversion of Israel as a Jewish-only state his overriding mission. He therefore gets to whine endlessly about destructive grievance politics while exploiting and monetizing the most unpretentious example of destructive grievance politics in modern history.

And because Zionists completely control U.S. foreign policy—Joe Biden, Junior himself is essentially the personal property of a single old Egyptian-born billionaire cartoon-mogul and Israel fanatic—he therefore knows there is no chance whatsoever that the U.S. will ever stop funding Israel’s violence, justified and otherwise, no matter who is serving as its Commander-in-Chief. Though hopelessly brainwashed by dint of his faith, and conditioned to think that if Zionists don’t have and control everything, then they will soon own and become nothing, he understands that his reflexive posturing about antisemitism is just showboating.

Shapiro also probably knows at some level that he himself, along with “actor” Michael Rapaport, “journalist” Bari Weiss, and shakedown-king Jonathan Greenblatt, are personally responsible for a lot of what they’re calling rising antisemitism. What they’re actually seeing, even if they’re constitutively unable to view anything from a normie perspective, is millions of formerly neutral or even pro-Israel Americans looking newly askance at a bunch of perplexingly paranoid and wealthy actors, professors, hedge-funders, and late-night “comedians” expressing genuine dismay that others disagree with their annihilationist mode of civilizational overhaul. And it irritates people all the more that these paranoiacs are e-shouting this stuff not from within the precariously short borders of their nominal prize-baby Israel but from within security-guard-patrolled mansions right here in the slap-happy, internally shattered, medically worthless, and economically barren United States.

Regardless, Shapiro is in an enviable position. He’s still young, wealthy, popular, and has nihilistic political allies seeded wherever Zionists need them to be, He has nothing material to worry about. Yet like all Zionists—every last one—he seems determined to deny himself a whiff of genuine mirth in life. He’s not happy unless he’s fighting something. And because he speaks considerably faster than he thinks—which would still be the case even if he delivered his nonsense at a normal cadence—he seeks out, and summarily loses, a lot of ill-chosen battles.

Shapiro decided this week to complain that the age for becoming eligible for government retirement benefits should be raised from 65 to 70. His avenue into this was Biden’s budget proposal. the same predictable pile of superficially mollifying allocations, transparent pork, and catastrophic excesses such budgets always are.

Piling on Biden is facile as hell, especially since his audience is almost entirely conservatives, which is why Shapiro does it. Yet even his supporters had to know he was stepping in shit here. They also had to see that “Biden is an utter wreck at 81” in many minds makes precisely the opposite of the case he’s flailing at his usual 1.25X speed to build.

First, his whole rant shows how many people he has known who have done manual labor for their whole working lives—the fuckups who chose their parents poorly and weren’t assured of a Harvard education and who actually build the things he and his lovely wife and children take advantage of. Does he know any 60-year-old ditch-diggers, never mind 70-year-old ones? Does he think America’s public-school classrooms should be filled with old-biddy teachers? (At this point, I rather wish they were.)

Shapiro can’t be excused for relatively trivial errors in addition or subtraction, because on his economic view, every little bit counts, because otherwise there may not be billions more left over for Israel. But in addition to demonstrating his ineptitude at basic arithmetic, Shapiro is also either ignorant or lying about the current, still-falling U.S. life expectancy, which clearly impacts his moronic-at-baseline thesis.

And importantly, as Shapiro doesn't even think women should be in the labor force, the only life-expectancy number of concern here is 73.2. Considering the numerical ranges in play here, that's not even close to, like, "almost 80."

Shapiro is always the same. His overall furtive-yet-impulsive persona, layered over a mantle of irreversible programming, is tantamount to that of a Zionist version of Templeton the rat from Charlotte's Web. He’s a posturing opportunist who has lived his whole life among people who work not with their bodies but as, say, accountants, lawyers, screenwriters, college professors, agents, lobbyists, money managers, and doddering politicians on both sides of the diapers-and-dentures-littered congressional aisle. It’s no big deal to work until you’re eighty when your “tool shed” consists of a laptop, a phone, and a bag of recycled but convincingly growled threats.

But I’m not discrediting any of this white-collar success and largesse at root level—consider the possible alternatives, as this Facebook video wasn’t taken at a synagogue:

It also wasn’t taken anywhere in America that Ben Shapiro will ever find himself in or even near.

Either way, someone needs to fix all of this broken shit—energetic but underutilized young adults, lazy old leeches, Zionist windbags who suck at basic math. Maybe a determined army of 65-to 70-year-old can be recruited for these tasks, or, failing the availability of that demographic, we* can use whatever surviving worn-out Boomer-age Ukrainian soldiers the U.S. Government can import while the spigot is wide open.

(Note: This post has been updated to include an important graphic and link to a STAT News article about falling U.S. life expectancy. Also omitted: Shapiro’s 86 minus 19 equals 65 “miscalculation” was probably owed to his knowing, but not disclosing that he knows, that the actual age for receiving full retirement benefits in the U.S. is 67—the same as the mandatory retirement age in Israel.)