Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator who’s garnered a reputation for challenging people to debate him, stormed out of a BBC interview when he didn’t like the questions being posed.
Shapiro accused the interviewer – Andrew Neil, the chairman of the conservative magazine The Spectator – of being a “leftist” after a question on abortion and then abruptly ended the conversation.
But Shapiro was particularly annoyed with Neil’s suggestion that a harsh new antiabortion law in Georgia would take the US back to the “Dark Ages” and repeatedly harped on that point throughout the interview. Neil said that under the law a woman could get 30 years in prison for having a miscarriage or 10 years for traveling to another state and having an abortion, describing these as “extreme, hard policies.”
“You purport to be an objective journalist,” Shapiro said. “BBC purports to be an objective, down-the-middle network. It obviously is not, it never has been. And you as a journalist are proceeding to call one side of the political aisle ignorant, barbaric, and sending us back to the Dark Ages, why don’t you just say you’re on the left.”
Shapiro was on the program to promote his new book, “The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great,” which Neil said focuses heavily on upholding Judeo-Christian values.
Neil pointed out a number of Shapiro’s controversial statements and tweets against certain groups, including Arabs, and suggested that the conservative commentator had turned his back on the Judeo-Christian culture he’s sought to defend.
Read more: How ‘owning the libs’ became the ethos of the right
“I hope you’re having fun,” Shapiro said, accusing Neil of engaging in “gotcha questions.”
At another point, Shapiro accused Neil of trying to make a “quick buck … off of the fact that I’m popular and no one has ever heard of you.”
“I am not inclined to continue an interview with someone as badly motivated as you,” Shapiro said before abruptly ending the discussion.
“I am not inclined to continue an interview with someone as badly motivated as you”
US conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro ends spiky interview with @afneil
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) May 10, 2019
Shapiro, who’s well-known for saying “facts don’t care about your feelings,” later apologized over the interview and said he’d been unprepared.
“Just pre-taped an interview with BBC’s @afneil. As I’m not familiar with him or his work, I misinterpreted his antagonism as political Leftism (he termed the pro-life position in America “barbaric”) – and that was apparently inaccurate,” Shapiro tweeted on Thursday. “For that, I apologize.”
The interview went viral on Friday and Shapiro, who has more than 2 million followers on Twitter, further tweeted, “Broke my own rule, and wasn’t properly prepared…it’s Neil 1, Shapiro 0.”
This content was originally published here.
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