Free speech is under assault
because of a three step argument
made by the advocates and justifiers of violence.
The United States is a global engine of growth,
not just because of free markets,
but because of the values embedded in free markets.
The only way to ensure that political correctness
continues to lose is if we tell the truth.
I've a very strong standard with regard to incitement.
If I'm not telling somebody to commit violence,
I'm not inciting them to violence.
If we don't have social fabric,
if don't have community,
if we don't know what America is about
or what we're doing in the world,
if we don't have purpose and meaning,
it makes it almost impossible to live a fulfilled life.
Left versus right matters a hell of a lot less
than right versus wrong,
and right versus wrong is just another way of saying
true versus false.
Well, please welcome my good friend
who has appeared on the show before,
the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Wire,
who is the author of several books, Ben Shapiro,
who is here to talk about his latest book,
The Right Side of History,
which is online and in stores today.
Welcome, Ben Shapiro!
(applause)
I always introduce you as controversial.
I have to, you are controversial.
Yeah, it's unfortunate, but--
Well, I don't know, it makes people think.
I hope so, that's always the idea.
You have written a new book and I've read it.
It is very well done, congratulations on this.
What motivated you to write this book?
During the 2016 election,
I was noticing the level of anger
that was just palpable in public.
It was much larger than the level of anger
that I'd seen in recent times in modern American history.
At the same time, the divisions on actual policies
seemed actually narrower than they had been
in many areas in past elections.
When it came to how angry we were at each other,
the levels were extremely high.
I was receiving enormous numbers of death threats.
I was the most targeted Jewish journalist online
by the alt-right.
Why are we so angry at each other?
Why are we so mad?
And that got me to thinking
what do we even have in common with each other anymore
and that brought me to the book.
The book is about two mysteries, you say.
The first mystery, why are things so good?
The second mystery is why are we blowing it?
The first mystery is why are things so good.
Things are unbelievably good.
By any standard of history,
we are living in the best time in human history,
in the best place in human history.
You're gonna live in prosperity.
You're gonna be able order any product you want
with the press of a button.
It will arrive magically at your door
inside of three days.
It's an amazing time to live, an incredible time to live.
At the same time, suicide rates are going up.
They are the highest they've been in decades.
Our dissatisfaction with our social institutions
is extremely high.
The level of anger, as I say, at one another is palpable.
We feel like our politics are broken.
We're calling for revolutionary solutions.
The first question is
how did things get so good in the first place?
To do that, I say we need to go back to
original principles, what created this civilization.
I talk about the fact that on college campuses,
we don't teach these things anymore.
We don't teach the classics,
we don't teach about Judeo-Christian values,
we don't teach about Greek reason.
We don't teach the foundations of Western civilization.
Instead, it seems like we have replaced
the entire conversation about what made the West great
with why the West sucks.
And that's just not true, the West doesn't suck,
the West is pretty unbelievable.
That is true by any standard.
Even take issues that are deeply controversial,
like the issues of race.
Racism in American, by any metric, is at an all-time low.
And yet, we are treating each other as though
race issues are the most pressing issues in America.
Racial injustice and racial intolerance and racism itself,
we should be calling it out wherever we see it,
but to suggest that Western civilization
is the repository or the creator of racism,
that's just a failure to acknowledge
realities on the ground.
You say racism is at an all-time low,
but you acknowledge if you're the target of it,
if you're the one that's suffering it,
for you, it's 100%.
You might be a part of a statistic
where it's the lowest it's ever been,
but if you're the one that's being excluded,
you're the one that's being marginalized,
you're the one that's being impacted by it.
For you, it's 100%, doesn't matter
where it is statistically.
That is, of course, true.
As I've said, I was the number one target
of online anti-Semitism in 2016.
That does not mean that America
is an anti-Semitic country.
America is overwhelmingly philosemitic country
that has been incredibly good to Jews.
It works the other way too.
We can recognize that our personal experience
may not, in fact, be indicative
of what American civilization is.
We have to separate those two things out
because, otherwise, we end of creating false divides.
I think every good-hearted person in American
who wants to find individual instances of racism
and then fight them,
the question becomes do you see America
as a repository of evil that needs to be torn down
and then replaced with something else
or do you see American as a country
that has great principles
that we have not always lived up to,
but that we are trying to live up to
better and better everyday.
The book is The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro.
