Ben Shapiro Is Being Dragged After Throwing A Hissy Fit Over People Calling Jill Biden ‘Dr.’

Over the weekend, a controversial piece was published in The Wall Street Journal, in which longtime writer Joseph Epstein took surreal umbrage with the fact that Jill Biden, the incoming president’s wife and the future First Lady, uses the academic title of “Dr.” His beef? That she’s not a medical doctor; instead she holds a doctorate in education. Epstein’s plaint was simply incorrect: Anyone who has a doctorate of her level, namely an Ed.D, can be reasonably referred to as a doctor. But there was one person who ran to Epstein’s defense: far right commentator and frequent figure of social media fun Ben Shapiro.

“Only people with Ph.D.’s in hard sciences and medical doctors should be called ‘doctor,’” Shapiro demanded. He then spoke in his full capacity as a former Harvard law student. “I speak as a ‘Juris Doctor.’ No lawyer should be called doctor. It’s idiotic. In law school, one of the students had a doctorate in a liberal art. When the professor addressed the student but forgot the honorific, another student piped up, and said, ‘You should say ‘Doctor.'”

Shapiro later laid out a scenario: “If you’re at a dinner and somebody introduces himself as ‘Dr. Smith,’ you’d be rather upset to learn that he had a doctorate in musicology if you were to suffer a stroke at the table.”

He also elaborated on his show, where he bragged about how he went to Harvard while Jill Biden earned her doctorate at the University of Delaware.

Shapiro’s pedantic — and often times questionable, to put it mildly — opinions often make him go viral, and not in the way he’d like. This time was no different. Some called him out for his obvious elitism.

Others pointed out that he’s just plain wrong. What’s more, Shapiro, by his own admission, is only a “Juris Doctor,” and while technically he could refer to himself as “Dr. Ben Shapiro,” that’s not professionally appropriate. (Perhaps the worst thing to come out of all this: You could more accurately refer to him as “Ben Shapiro, Esquire.”)

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1338634502713843712

Some who’ve studied Shapiro’s antics far too closely even pointed out one of his typical argumentative strategies.

https://twitter.com/jkass99/status/1338546114375557121

Some pointed to his sly sexism.

https://twitter.com/JRehling/status/1338637513888436224

Others were simply disgusted at the idea of going to a dinner with Shapiro in attendance.

Others mocked his voice, which always sounds like he’s on the 1.5x speed you see on places like Audible.

Some dug up one of his ugliest tweets, to remind people what they’re dealing with.

Some wondered how Shapiro has achieved such a lofty position in conservative circles when he lacks the charm of even a Rush Limbaugh.

And some imagined a utopia where we never learned what Ben Shapiro thought about anything.