Shapiro: It does give one a sense
of disquieting unease
when you feel as though the ground
is moving beneath you,
when you feel as though you
can't say basic things that are true,
things like,
"communism is bad,"
or, "a man is a man
and a woman is a woman."
If you say these sorts of things,
then you are cast out of polite society,
and that really means that there
are stakes to this clown show.
It's all dumb,
but there are actually stakes to that,
and that's why activism is
really, truly important.
Tonight, I want to give you seven tips
on activism as you move forward
into your college career.
First tip: read.
I know everybody wants to be on TV.
And listen, I've been doing this
since I was 17 years old.
I remember being your age.
It wasn't all that long ago.
Because there are so many media outlets,
because there's such a hunger
for conservative content,
there is an incentive structure
that leads people to get out there
before they are ready.
It leads people to get out
in the public eye before they have
fully formed thoughts,
and that's a dangerous thing.
As somebody who was writing
a syndicated column
at 17, I can guarantee you
that most of my
stupidest ideas came in the first
five years of writing that column.
People who are experts on a topic
are people who have read
10 books on a topic.
People who are qualified to speak on TV
about a topic
are people who have read
an article on a topic.
Be the person who reads
10 books on the topic,
not the person who read
the article on the topic.
This means listen more than you talk,
at least for now.
The second tip is that you
should understand your own principles.
You really need to understand
what you believe at a core, root level.
There's a lot of pressure in politics
to follow the leader.
There's a lot of pressure to think
like a person who you admire.
I've always encouraged folks that
they shouldn't always just defend somebody
they admire because
they admire that person.
Maybe the person has a bad idea.
I love Ronald Reagan.
That doesn't mean that every single thing
that Ronald Reagan ever did is
something that I agree with.
You need to follow the evidence,
and that means that you should be
constantly guided by new facts
and new evidence that are brought to bear.
If you're not changing
your mind constantly,
if you're not constantly rethinking
and integrating new facts, then
you're not doing your job.
If your perspective is so thickened
that nothing is able to penetrate it,
then you essentially
become akin to a leftist.
The third tip for activists,
and this one is very practical:
stay off social media.
Stay off of it.
Have a news feed on Twitter.
Have a news feed on Facebook.
Check Instagram.
Don't post anything for
the rest of your life.
Social media ruins your life.
I don't just mean this in terms of,
you post something,
and then, 10 years later,
people come after you
with something that you posted,
which is the current sport.
It's virtue signaling, by which people
go back into the past,
grab something, then use
it as a club against you.
It doesn't matter that you're
high schoolers, by the way.
They'll do it. It doesn't matter.
It really has no relevance
what age you are.
As long as you are an enemy,
they will do whatever
they can to ruin you.
It's not just that.
It's also that social media contributes
to a really ugly sense
of self-aggrandizement.
You think people are thinking
about you all the time.
The fourth tip is,
and this is hard given
what I've just said,
you need to stay open-minded
to people who disagree with you,
so long as they are open-minded with you.
There has to be a quick
protection mechanism,
and that is when you realize
that something is a bad faith criticism,
when you realize that people
are saying things to you
just to be ugly or hurtful
or to attack your character,
the curtain has to come down immediately.
It has to descend immediately,
and that's the end of the conversation.
That's the end of the communication.
The fifth tip
is that, as a corollary of this,
you should identify the
purpose of each conversation.
You have to determine whether
it's a conversation that is
designed to inform you.
Is it a conversation that's designed
to allow you to bounce ideas off somebody?
Is it a public debate, where the goal
is obviously to defeat the person
who is across from you
or to destroy their viewpoint?
What, exactly, is the purpose
of the conversation?
As an activist, you really do have
to identify this stuff
in the first 30 seconds.
The sixth point for activists
is you must behave well.
No matter what you purport to say,
no matter what it is that you represent,
understand that the best thing
that you can do for your philosophy,
and this is true for
left, right, and center,
but particularly if you're a conservative,
where you're held to a higher
behavioral standard that a
lot of folks on the Left...
How you behave in public
is how you are going to
recruit people to your ideology.
Maybe, just because you
disagree with someone,
it doesn't mean that they're
necessarily a bad person.
Maybe they're actually a nice person.
If you deal with somebody
on a one-on-one level,
maybe you have to rethink
what you think of them,
in terms of character.
Be the person who makes people rethink
in your daily life. Be that person.
Make sure that you're
continuing to have fun
while still maintaining good character.
The kind of fun that you have
shouldn't be at the expense of
anything except bad ideas.
If you're having fun at the expense of
bad ideas, that is a lot of fun.
I try to do it on a daily basis.
