Pearl Davis & the JQ
Pearl Davis is one of the more interesting influencers on the Internet. I consider her a men’s rights advocate almost in the same way that Jared Taylor (or perhaps more accurately Jesse Lee Peterson) is an advocate for white people. Thick-skinned, smart, seemingly unflappable, she really likes to dish it out on what she calls “modern women”—especially when it comes to marriage and relationships (and apparently ruining New York City). She’s well researched, well-spoken, and seemingly comfortable in any corner of the Right where people are comfortable with free speech. My two favorite long interviews of hers are with MMA fighter Sean Strickland and comedian Leonarda Jonie. (Greg Johnson also had an excellent interview with Jonie here.) What makes Pearl so engaging, in my opinion, is that she’s wise to what she doesn’t know and fearlessly grants other people leeway in any wheelhouse that isn’t hers—and this includes politics, race, and “the Jays” (her term for our friends in the little hats).
But venturing into her wheelhouse can be a bit dangerous if she smells you “simping” or “white-knighting” for women. For example, here is Pearl digging hard into Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire over a video Walsh posted two years ago bashing Pearl for dissuading men from getting married. In Pearl’s defense, it seems that she’s not so much anti-marriage as she’s in favor of reforming anti-male divorce laws before advising young men to tie the knot. I’m extremely sympathetic to Walsh’s pro-marriage agenda, but what Pearl proposes is not unreasonable.
Pearl must be having Daily Wire on the brain however since she recently posted a video which struck hard at Ben Shapiro, who is, of course, one of the founders of the Daily Wire. The title: “Ben Shapiro is More Triggered Than Modern Women.” (The ultimate insult coming from Pearl.) At issue is Shapiro’s shameful avoidance of Nick Fuentes after Tucker Carlson hosted the oft-denounced, formerly-radioactive right-wing influencer on his program—something that Pearl did two years ago, for which she was summarily cancelled. Shapiro would rather run his mouth about Fuentes than actually sit down and debate him. Pearl finds this frustrating, baffling, and unbefitting a man.
And I was listening to Ben Shapiro on Triggernometry and his arguments are saying, “Oh, we can’t we can’t platform these type of people. I shouldn’t have to respond to this kind of thing.” And I’m like, Ben, again, what have we been giving you our money for? You know, Nick F. has a very big audience. Now, Ben Shapiro on this Triggernometry podcast is trying to pretend he doesn’t, but every guy that I know that’s a white male under the age of 25, most of them have at least heard of Nick F. And even the young women know who he is.
So Ben Shapiro keeps trying to come back and say, “Oh, he’s not that big. He’s not that big,” as he gets bigger every year. And so, you know, Ben Shapiro, if you disagree with Nick’s ideology—I don’t have an opinion either way on the foreign policy stuff, but as somebody that’s watched the Daily Wire for a long time, I’ve paid for like the Daily Wire Plus—I just want to know, like, what are we giving you our money for? You’re insinuating that people are too dumb to be able to sift through ideas that make sense and don’t make sense. Women are probably too dumb. That’s true. But men, in my opinion, have a gift from God. Especially white men have a gift from God to be able to reason and to be able to logic. I mean, there’s a reason they invented 90% of the world’s stuff. And a lot of conservative media is white conservative men. They could hear a debate between Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes and decide for themselves what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense.
Pearl goes on to urge Shapiro to put up or shut up about Fuentes. “Make him look stupid. That’s your job,” she says. And she doesn’t seem to care about who would win the debate; she’s not taking sides. Rather, she supports the principle of free speech and is calling out the hypocrisy of people like Shapiro who claim to support free speech but “think that they have the right to dictate who you can and can’t listen to.”
Amen.
My issue with Pearl on this particular topic is not that she’s wrong, she’s just trying to wring water from a stone. This is where being versed on the Jewish Question actually becomes useful since it would prevent Pearl from wasting her time, energy, and expectations on someone like Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro is a self-identifying Jew who supports identity politics for Jews and opposes it for everyone else. He’ll call white gentiles racist when they tell the truth about blacks, yet will say some of the most dismissively racist things about the Palestinians. He is essentially an Israeli patriot pretending to be an American patriot—in so many words, a shape-shifting grifter. Mark Dice, thankfully, has all the receipts on Shapiro. People on the Right have been complaining about this sort of behavior from Jews for decades. Pat Buchanan, Russell Kirk, and Joe Sobran are great examples. What makes Shapiro somewhat unique is that he’s coming from the conservative Right rather than the Left like most Jews—think a younger, hipper version of Marc Levin.
But this does not mean that Shapiro’s conservative, right-wing bona fides are genuine—they aren’t. He will promote conservatism and free speech as long as it does not adversely impact the Jewish diaspora or Israel. As soon as it does, he (along with Levin and a whole host of others) will abandon conservatism and free speech and behave no differently than the authoritarian Left. This is what Pearl is observing in Shapiro’s behavior today. Rather than debate Fuentes, he’d rather cast him out of respectable conservatism, just like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter did to Buchanan, Kirk, and Sobran in the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, Shapiro and Levin would like to cast Tucker Carlson out as well simply because he gave oxygen to Fuentes’s perspective and humanized him in their discussion.
Pearl implies that Ben Shapiro is not man enough to debate Nick Fuentes, as if he’s afraid he would lose. I disagree. In a debate with Fuentes, I’m sure Shapiro would do just fine, perhaps even well. Pearl’s mistake, in my opinion, is to assume a certain amount of good faith in Shapiro—as if he cares about the truth more than he cares about Jewish power. Assuming this latter position, everything about Shapiro not only makes sense but is predictable. He avoids Fuentes because he fears (quite neurotically) that regardless of who wins the debate, granting him an audience would at best expose Jewish misdeeds to a broader public. At worst, it would lead straight to Auschwitz. In the first case, he’d rather hide Jewish misdeeds than expose and correct them. And in the second, he’d simply assume all white gentiles are potentially genocidal. This is a stereotypical Jewish anti-whiteism, and it is a reason why gentiles eventually get fed up with Jews. There is plenty of scholarship to back this up.
Due to his overt ethnocentrism, Ben Shapiro is not to be trusted, and it does not matter if he says the right things about abortion, gun rights, or social security. Just like a long line of influential Jews who came before him, he’s hitting for another team, and he won’t think twice about hitting against white gentiles if he feels he needs to (even if in reality he doesn’t). Yes, there are a small number of Jews who have bucked this trend, such as Murray Rothbard, Paul Gottfried and Stephen Miller, and yes, there are white gentiles who’ve done so as well, such as William F. Buckley, Glenn Beck, and until 2024, Charlie Kirk. Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes have given Ben Shapiro the opportunity buck this trend, and he hasn’t taken it. Thus we can only assume that he has chosen to revert to type and stick up for his own kind rather than the truth.
Knowing this, there should never be any question as to why Ben Shapiro won’t debate Nick Fuentes. He’s a Jew, Pearl. He never will.