They confound many leftists because they destabilize popular notions of what conservatives look like they’re young, and that throws a wrench in the (now dying) pipe dream that the United States population will simply age out of conservatism. But how do they retain this attention? Anyone can shout fire and get a room to stand, but Shapiro, Kirk, Owens, and Bennett are able to shout fire, get half the room sprinting for the exits, and draw the rest to them like moths to a lamp. Shapiro and his ilk initially attract the attention of young leftists because they demand it, making regular well-advertised appearances at college campuses across the United States. He, along with Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Kaitlin ‘gun girl’ Bennett are some of the red names the young left knows best, outside of, say, Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Shapiro, though by no means a household name, is well known among leftists and especially among leftists on social media. Despite what I am about to argue, I cannot help a nagging feeling that the “WAP” reading was ultimately just as effective on me as it was on the liberals who felt compelled to edit it into remixes it has kept Shapiro on my mind, and if it was not for the sharpening of an idea I’ve had since his May tweets about Alex Jones eating ass and his own penis size, I might have followed the meme all the way back to his Twitter profile. Neither Shapiro’s reading nor the left’s reaction to it surprises me, and it is perhaps because of this that I’ve had trouble laughing along with the crowd. If you can still remember, last month there was an internet frenzy over far-right figure Ben Shapiro’s dramatic reading of a Cardi B song, “WAP” (“Wet-Ass Pussy”). Because of this, I’ve been lingering on the things I see online more, less concerned with the immediate emotional flashes social media posts are designed to provoke, and more with the larger questions of where they lead us to. I feel less like I’m standing in the middle of a highway while cars whip by me at deadly speeds, and more like I’m watching the interstate from a hilltop, far away. The endless liminal space of quarantine feels more manageable, I’ve found, when trekked slowly.
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