Ben Shapiro Is Getting Dunked On For Claiming Obesity And Not Getting A Vaccine Are Similar (They’re, Uh, Not)

Today’s conservatives love false equivalencies. They love to derail debate by comparing two things that may share some similarities but aren’t meaningfully alike. A good example arrived Monday, and of course it came courtesy of repeat dunkable tweeter Ben Shapiro. He was none too happy to learn that 75 doctors in Florida had taken a stand, protesting the out-of-control numbers of unvaccinated people flooding their hospital, creating preventable chaos and death. And the only way he could attack, it seemed, was by likening it to something with a lot of differences.

“If this is the new standard — that failure to take measures to alleviate your own health problems are punishable by doctors refusing treatment — the extension of this logic to obesity will certainly be something,” Shapiro tweeted.

This wasn’t just a false equivalency. It was another conservative-approved argumentative trick: It was a slippery slope argument. That’s where someone brings up a far-fetched end game that will almost certainly never happen. That often involves invoking false equivalency, because it’s a sleazy move.

When Shapiro fired off his latest self-owning tweet, people online were happy to point out his argumentative hiccup. The main problem: COVID is a highly transmissible disease that is overwhelming hospitals. Obesity is doing neither.

https://twitter.com/kazweida/status/1429871740843282433

https://twitter.com/BMReedLaw/status/1429869471464837123

Perhaps next time Shapiro will think before he tweets. But his fans wouldn’t love him if he did that.