Ben Shapiro, Keyboard Drone Pilot
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro cheered Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani and the escalation of hostilities with Iran with a simple underlying message — American lives matter in a way that Iranian lives do not.
Ben Shapiro speaks at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 22, 2018 in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
After the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, progressive journalist Emma Vigeland explained why this was such a dangerous and unjustifiable escalation in US-Iranian relations by using a straightforward analogy.
Imagine the Iranian government assassinated Mike Pompeo with a drone, at the direction of the president, and called it self defense.
That’s exactly what the US did by killing Soleimani — an act of war.
The only difference is Iran’s self defense claims would be more legitimate.
— Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) January 3, 2020
The way to respond to an argument by analogy is to point out important disanalogies. (A disanalogy between X and Y is just anything that X and Y don’t have in common.) Right-wing media figure Ben Shapiro tried to do exactly that in his response to Vigeland’s tweet.
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