You are not acknowledging the role that these guard rails played in the first Trump presidency – and these guard rails are talking to us. They have names.…They’re talking to us and they’re saying “Don’t vote for this man.”

Basically everything that Sam Harris says in this debate (though there are some additional things that I would say specifically to Christians) is what I want to say. And everything that Ben Shapiro says shows only that he chose the right career. (There are one or two exceptions, points on international policy, that he may be right to at least not panic over but which I don’t want to talk about until I see what happens next week.)

In the 1890s, William Jennings Bryan supposedly said, “The people of Nebraska are for free silver, so I am for free silver; I’ll look up the arguments later.” You will find no better description for nearly everything Shapiro says and makes excuses for, some of which are quite shocking. The difference for Shapiro, and the reason he chose the right profession, is that he is so quick on his feet. I really struggle to see him as much more than an extension of college debate class, where he may have been assigned the defense of the Republican Party and simply never stepped out of that role.

But I’m not just being funny. I think the truth as we receive and understand it, has a very specifc weakness that finds a perfect home in Shapiro.

For a lot of people, maybe most people, I don’t think it’s that they pick the truth and “look up the arguments later.” It’s more that a) they have their regular sources of information, which probably haven’t changed in a long time and which are telling them what they want to hear. Basically, guys like Shapiro do the work for them. And he’s convincing not only because he’s very smart but because so many have chosen to be on, or to remain on, a certain side of an argument. And so b) when they hear arguments against their side, the information goes in one ear and out the other, but when they hear arguments that support their side, those arguments stick.

By “stick” I mean that this information finds a “rational” home. For instance, someone might say to me that when RFK Jr. “explains” Ukraine and Russia, “this makes sense to me.” Any lie I point out finds no purchase, and usually requires some time to explain. During which time, I end up sounding like the crazy one.

That last sentence would have been a parenthetical one, but it’s essential to the point I’m getting at, and it’s the weakness I mentioned above. It’s a point I think endlessly about and one made most succinctly, for me, by Hannah Arendt.

Since the liar is free to fashion his “facts” to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truthteller. Indeed, he will usually have plausibility on his side; his exposition will sound more logical, as it were, since the element of unexpectedness—one of the outstanding characteristics of all events—has mercifully disappeared. It is not only rational truth that, in the Hegelian phrase, stands common sense on its head; reality quite frequently offends the soundness of common-sense reasoning no less than it offends profit and pleasure.

The truth has always been harder to find, easier to avoid. Some make a living making it even easier to avoid. Ben Shapiro is one of the most reasonable sounding, articulate explainers on the right. He does his job really well. Which makes him, in my view, both the least offender “rationally” and the worst offender for being so. Honestly, it might be hard to find someone in whose hands the truth is more dangerous.