I don’t listen to talk radio anymore. I’m burned out on the bombast and the callers. However, I do listen to podcasts on my twice-weekly trek to our satellite office, and love listening to Ben Shapiro’s show. He’s articulate, funny, and is probably the smartest guy in any room he enters.

So I was eager to watch the livestream of his address at UC Berkeley on Thursday night. You know, the speech that cost UC Berkeley over 600K in security because a little Jewish guy wearing a yarmulke and professing conservatism might bring on the Final Horseman of the Apocalypse. Or cause liberal heads to explode, a là Scanners.

However, no animals or students were harmed during Shapiro’s address. He’s not a provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos or Ann Coulter. Shock speech is not his stock-in-trade. Oh, he called his Antifa opposition “pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses,” and dropped the word ‘bullshit’ a few times. But he also invited liberals to challenge him after his speech in a question-answer session. He treated them with respect, skewering their arguments rather than bombing them with cheap ad hominem attacks.

And, because this was a university setting, the issue of abortion came up. As an Orthodox Jew, Ben Shapiro is firmly on the side of life. As a Harvard-trained attorney, he knows how to defend his points. Yet there was one guy who thought he might challenge the master and win. It didn’t go well for the student. Shapiro took the challenger’s points and deftly trained them back on him.

Here’s the exchange:

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that when Shapiro crushed the student’s faux erudite argument about ‘sentience,’ the student devolved into the real root of the pro-abortion argument. And it boils down to this: I don’t want to have this baby! Therefore, I get to choose if this baby’s life is valuable. Because it’s my body. Me, me, me. Mine, mine, mine.

Defeated, the student backed down. Thankfully, he gave Ben Shapiro the same respect that Shapiro gave him. I can only hope that Ben lit a small light among some of the more thoughtful liberals dwelling in the toxic air of UC Berkeley.