Opinion | The Hollow Bravery of Ben Shapiro
The Hollow Bravery of Ben Shapiro
By JANE COASTONOCT. 12, 2017
Ben Shapiro speaking at the University of Utah in September. Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune, via Associated Press
Ben Shapiro, the conservative writer, prides himself on speaking bold truths to liberal power. His shtick goes something like this: Set up a speech in a progressive bastion, ideally a college campus full of coastal elites who have never left their bubble. Spar with snowflakes who are offended by something he says about race or gender and perhaps even believe he never should have been invited in the first place. Post the exchange on the internet and use it as proof that the cultural consensus is stacked dramatically against conservatives. As Mr. Shapiro has put it: “The left has run out of aggressors to target; instead, they’ve become the aggressors, self-righteous morality police dedicated to wiping out dissenting thought.”
It’s true that campuses tend to be hostile places to conservatives like Mr. Shapiro, Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald. But the notion that they are the cultural underdogs is bogus.
What Mr. Shapiro does on campus is shadow boxing meant to pander to his conservative fans whose values dominate mainstream American culture. If he wanted to be genuinely brave, he’d challenge some of the wrongheaded ideas held by his right-wing fans. Instead, he uses his megaphone — the website The Daily Wire — to reinforce what they already believe.
To take only the most recent example: On Monday, The Daily Wire published a video that depicted Native Americans as animated savages before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. In one slide, the video lists Native American achievements as consisting of dreamcatchers, tomahawks and cannibalism, while stating that Columbus’s arrival in 1492 assured the arrival of “math” and “the iPhone.” The animated video was actually the second one The Daily Wire posted this past weekend on the subject; the other carried the subtle title “Christopher Columbus Actually Was a Great Man.”
Mr. Shapiro and The Daily Wire aren’t alone in pandering to their readers. Over at the website The Federalist, the editors took the opportunity of Columbus Day not to examine its complicated legacy or illuminate some overlooked aspect of history but to publish an article titled “Why ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ Is Far Worse Than Columbus Day,” which makes the case that the historical violence of some Native American peoples wash Columbus clean of his genocidal sins. “The only reason,” it says, that anti-Columbus activists “ideological idiocy has free rein today is because Europeans showed up in 1492.” That same publication had a “black crime” tag on its website until two weeks ago, which included an article titled “If You Don’t Want Police to Shoot You, Don’t Resist Arrest.” The subheading: “Every time I hear of a black man getting killed by the cops, he’s almost always a criminal thug I have no desire to defend.”
As they feed their audience the reddest of red meat, Federalist editors like Mollie Hemingway and Ben Domenech insist that they are being besieged by the forces of the left. In a postelection panel on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Ms. Hemingway saidthat conservatives “are sick of being bullied” by a liberal media elite that is “deciding to quadruple down on everything they got wrong, disparaging people who they don’t understand, don’t even seek to understand.” Mr. Domenech wrote in 2014 that President Barack Obama’s “failed” administration wasn’t because of “universal intolerance for other points of view, but intolerance on one side of the debate” — in short, closed-minded liberals. That’s a trope that The Federalist often echoes. Just Tuesday, the site published a piece entitled “The Left’s Sirens Are Already Hinting Our Culture Wars Will End in Another Civil War,” which ends with the author writing, “The radicalization of Democrats is something qualitatively different, and much more dangerous, than the radicalization of Republicans.” Because to a conservative audience, of course it is.
These publications and commentators aren’t embracing the kind of real debate that they pay lip service to on campuses; they are spoon-feeding screeds to their right-wing readers. They are telling them that their most deeply felt beliefs about the world and about their fellow Americans are not only factually correct, but also morally righteous. Often, that means reinforcing ideas about race and gender shaped by bias more than fact, while simultaneously claiming to be the last redoubt of objective journalism.
To begin, many white conservatives are already largely dismissive of concernsregarding police brutality. According to the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 55 percent of white Republicans believe that African-Americans “just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.” In that same study, a quarter of white Republicans said they also viewed African-Americans as less intelligent. No wonder that when the former N.F.L. player Burgess Owens told Tucker Carlson on Mondaythat “70 percent of black men do not stay around” their families because of “liberalism,” his audience was primed to believe him — even more so because Mr. Owens himself is African-American.
On issues affecting L.G.B.T. people, according to a study conducted by YouGov, 21 percent of Americans believe, as Mr. Shapiro does, that transgender people are mentally ill, and 39 percent believe that being transgender is a choice. So for conservative websites to regularly publish stories arguing that to acknowledge transgender people requires denying scientific fact is not audacious.
Donald Trump’s campaign was built on similarly hollow rhetorical flourishes. He did not tell the truth to the American people: He sold the American people falsehoods that millions already believed — for example, that America’s inner cities are hellholes and that black people have “nothing to lose” and that the biggest danger to America’s working class are undocumented immigrants. His message, then, was not popular because it was controversial, or spoke truth to an overwhelming power. It was popular because it didn’t.
I reached out to Mr. Shapiro to ask him about the Columbus Day video. He sent over a statement apologizing for it, saying it “engaged in broad-based stereotyping,” which he also posted on Twitter. In the email, he added, “I think there’s a lot of political ground to be gained in pandering to your own side and confirming their biases. I strive not to do that.”
And yet he, and vast swaths of the conservative right who decry “groupthink,” still do. To tell strident college students to examine their own politics and embrace real debate is brave. To insist on the same from those on the right would be even more courageous.
The Hollow Bravery of Ben Shapiro
By JANE COASTONOCT. 12, 2017
Ben Shapiro speaking at the University of Utah in September. Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune, via Associated Press
Ben Shapiro, the conservative writer, prides himself on speaking bold truths to liberal power. His shtick goes something like this: Set up a speech in a progressive bastion, ideally a college campus full of coastal elites who have never left their bubble. Spar with snowflakes who are offended by something he says about race or gender and perhaps even believe he never should have been invited in the first place. Post the exchange on the internet and use it as proof that the cultural consensus is stacked dramatically against conservatives. As Mr. Shapiro has put it: “The left has run out of aggressors to target; instead, they’ve become the aggressors, self-righteous morality police dedicated to wiping out dissenting thought.”
It’s true that campuses tend to be hostile places to conservatives like Mr. Shapiro, Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald. But the notion that they are the cultural underdogs is bogus.
What Mr. Shapiro does on campus is shadow boxing meant to pander to his conservative fans whose values dominate mainstream American culture. If he wanted to be genuinely brave, he’d challenge some of the wrongheaded ideas held by his right-wing fans. Instead, he uses his megaphone — the website The Daily Wire — to reinforce what they already believe.
To take only the most recent example: On Monday, The Daily Wire published a video that depicted Native Americans as animated savages before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. In one slide, the video lists Native American achievements as consisting of dreamcatchers, tomahawks and cannibalism, while stating that Columbus’s arrival in 1492 assured the arrival of “math” and “the iPhone.” The animated video was actually the second one The Daily Wire posted this past weekend on the subject; the other carried the subtle title “Christopher Columbus Actually Was a Great Man.”
Mr. Shapiro and The Daily Wire aren’t alone in pandering to their readers. Over at the website The Federalist, the editors took the opportunity of Columbus Day not to examine its complicated legacy or illuminate some overlooked aspect of history but to publish an article titled “Why ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ Is Far Worse Than Columbus Day,” which makes the case that the historical violence of some Native American peoples wash Columbus clean of his genocidal sins. “The only reason,” it says, that anti-Columbus activists “ideological idiocy has free rein today is because Europeans showed up in 1492.” That same publication had a “black crime” tag on its website until two weeks ago, which included an article titled “If You Don’t Want Police to Shoot You, Don’t Resist Arrest.” The subheading: “Every time I hear of a black man getting killed by the cops, he’s almost always a criminal thug I have no desire to defend.”
As they feed their audience the reddest of red meat, Federalist editors like Mollie Hemingway and Ben Domenech insist that they are being besieged by the forces of the left. In a postelection panel on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Ms. Hemingway saidthat conservatives “are sick of being bullied” by a liberal media elite that is “deciding to quadruple down on everything they got wrong, disparaging people who they don’t understand, don’t even seek to understand.” Mr. Domenech wrote in 2014 that President Barack Obama’s “failed” administration wasn’t because of “universal intolerance for other points of view, but intolerance on one side of the debate” — in short, closed-minded liberals. That’s a trope that The Federalist often echoes. Just Tuesday, the site published a piece entitled “The Left’s Sirens Are Already Hinting Our Culture Wars Will End in Another Civil War,” which ends with the author writing, “The radicalization of Democrats is something qualitatively different, and much more dangerous, than the radicalization of Republicans.” Because to a conservative audience, of course it is.
These publications and commentators aren’t embracing the kind of real debate that they pay lip service to on campuses; they are spoon-feeding screeds to their right-wing readers. They are telling them that their most deeply felt beliefs about the world and about their fellow Americans are not only factually correct, but also morally righteous. Often, that means reinforcing ideas about race and gender shaped by bias more than fact, while simultaneously claiming to be the last redoubt of objective journalism.
To begin, many white conservatives are already largely dismissive of concernsregarding police brutality. According to the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 55 percent of white Republicans believe that African-Americans “just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.” In that same study, a quarter of white Republicans said they also viewed African-Americans as less intelligent. No wonder that when the former N.F.L. player Burgess Owens told Tucker Carlson on Mondaythat “70 percent of black men do not stay around” their families because of “liberalism,” his audience was primed to believe him — even more so because Mr. Owens himself is African-American.
On issues affecting L.G.B.T. people, according to a study conducted by YouGov, 21 percent of Americans believe, as Mr. Shapiro does, that transgender people are mentally ill, and 39 percent believe that being transgender is a choice. So for conservative websites to regularly publish stories arguing that to acknowledge transgender people requires denying scientific fact is not audacious.
Donald Trump’s campaign was built on similarly hollow rhetorical flourishes. He did not tell the truth to the American people: He sold the American people falsehoods that millions already believed — for example, that America’s inner cities are hellholes and that black people have “nothing to lose” and that the biggest danger to America’s working class are undocumented immigrants. His message, then, was not popular because it was controversial, or spoke truth to an overwhelming power. It was popular because it didn’t.
I reached out to Mr. Shapiro to ask him about the Columbus Day video. He sent over a statement apologizing for it, saying it “engaged in broad-based stereotyping,” which he also posted on Twitter. In the email, he added, “I think there’s a lot of political ground to be gained in pandering to your own side and confirming their biases. I strive not to do that.”
And yet he, and vast swaths of the conservative right who decry “groupthink,” still do. To tell strident college students to examine their own politics and embrace real debate is brave. To insist on the same from those on the right would be even more courageous.
