“Politics on the American Campus” - Ben Shapiro

ben shapiro enrolled in at UCLA at the age of 16 where he graduated summa laude and Phi Beta Kappa that was followed by Harvard Law School he's been a nationally syndicated columnist since the age of 17 I guess he's on what some would call today an accelerated career path he's editor in chief of daily wire.com as well as editor at large of Breitbart news he's a frequent guest on radio and television and he hosts his own radio show which I guess he's maybe playing hooky from this morning called the morning answer which airs here in the Los Angeles area he's the author of numerous books including brainwashed how universities and doctrine eight America's youth he wrote that at the ripe old age of twenty what do you want to be when you grow up then other books include primetime propaganda the true story of how the Hollywood left took over your television and bullies how the left's culture of fear and intimidation silences America he's a leading voice in opposition to the movement to boycott divest from and sanction Israel that is taking place on so many of America's campuses today but I hasten to add not on hills dales and he will be speaking this morning on the topic politics on the American campus please welcome Ben Shapiro well it's a pleasure to be talking to people who have experience with campus that doesn't involve protesters and screaming children and all the other fun things that we tend to associate with them the American left these days so other than Hillsdale Americans college campuses have become a breeding ground for failure career or failure and moral failure and emotional failure there's a reason that when you go to higher college students these days what you tend to get is a group of entitled brats you think they should get six-figure salaries for having majored in lesbian dance theory this is all thanks to a perverse leftist ideology that rewards subjective self aggrandizement over objective truth so let's start with the story is from Tennessee Vanderbilt University I'm sure some people in the in the audience know where Vandy is is back in November last November so remember last year there was this whole media obsession that every college campus every college campuses all over America were rife with racism they were just hot beds of secret racism the KKK had branches that were secretly meeting at frat houses all the black people on campus were being targeted for destruction the administrators clearly hated black folks which is why they let them in with lower SAT scores and so there all sorts of protesters who showed up at campuses all over America so 200 students at Vandy decided that they wanted to protest the white privilege and microaggressions of the administration will define those terms in just a few minutes they didn't give any particular examples of what the discrimination looked like but it didn't matter if there was any actual fact to back what they were saying they felt victimized and that's the key they felt victimized so they demanded university diversity classes and a more diverse student body not ideologically diverse of course ethnically racially diverse the next day after they had this big protest a big bag of dog poop showed up at the front door of the Bishop Joseph Johnson black cultural center and naturally the apocalypse ensued the student activist group that sponsored the original March rushed to Facebook to announce what they called the vile act and they said quote the violation of a place that in many ways is the sole home from any black students is deplorable as many of us sit in grief recognize that these types of actions are what we speak of when we note the reality of exclusion and isolation of students of color and specifically black students on our campus so the police investigated and nobody was arrested or prosecuted clear evidence of white racism right well not so much it turns out that the bag of dog poo was not a racist attack in fact it was left to a blunt and by a blind girl with a service dog she couldn't find a trash can so she followed what is apparently normal procedure which is if you can't find a trash can what you do is you leave the bag of dog poop outside the nearest inhabited building knowing that somebody will come out in the morning pick it up and throw it in the garbage so you'd imagine that this student group would have a little bit of dog poop on its face right I mean this is a little bit embarrassing well not so much they apologized but then they added quote the needs of students with disabilities on this campus are also marginalized so the blind girl who left the dog poop where they originally thought was some racist KKK member who'd abandon the cross-burning routine and instead decided to drop dog excrement in front of black buildings turned out to be a blind girl and they now say that the blind girl is a victim of campus exclusion so this is how it goes at America's College campuses there's a phrase that you hear very often on college campus these days check your priveledge you hear this one a lot check your priveledge and what this really means that you're not part of one of the victimized groups the the so called hierarchy of victims that has been created at college campuses America's college campuses have one overriding goal it's the same goal is that of the American and international left and that is to level all inequality of outcome in equality of outcome equals inequity if somebody in the room has four dollars and somebody has one dollar it can't be the person with four dollars work hard and the person with one dollars blew their money it has to be the person with four dollars somehow owes at least a couple of dollars to the person with one dollar everybody should end up with 250 in this magical world America's Founding Fathers obviously didn't believe in this they believed in equality of opportunity they've thought rightly that God or nature provided mankind with rights to life liberty and happiness these are rights again because the collective their rights against the society the international left the American left the campus lab they believe that true opportunity can really only be reflected in result any inequality has to be the result of inequity it's true for individuals it's true for groups and we can't just measure inequality in economic terms it's not just the $4 $1 thing we have to feel equal we have to feel it deep in our bones we have to feel like we're not being discriminated against like society isn't colluding to harm us so on college campuses the administrators who buy into this stupid philosophy they've set up their own little mini utopias and that means great inflation so everybody gets an a right because we don't want to have anybody who feels like they are going to get a C that means that they've been discriminated against even if they can't write a complete sentence government sponsored tuition ensures that everyone has an equal shot to go to college regardless of whether going to college is actually the best thing for all these kids this is the Bernie Sanders utopian vision everybody should have a government sponsored slot in college you know that idea is basically what ruined American high schools and now is ruining American colleges because it turns out that kids didn't learn anything in junior high we pushed them up to high school said everyone should have an equal high school education everybody didn't learn anything in high school now they're pushing them up to colleges they're watering it down so basically the only way you get a really good job is if you go to grad school and soon sooner or later sooner or later we'll just be in school from the time we are born until the time we die there will be a two-day period at the very end where you're expected to earn and then you will die so college administrators are working to ensure that every individual on campus feels equally valuable this is their goal and that's not really enough because reality doesn't match the vision right they're always going to be individuals who underperform or groups that underperform this happens throughout human society it's happened throughout human history there is no society across planet earth as Thomas Sol writes in his newest book in which there is no inequality just doesn't exist there has always been group and individual inequality it always will exist because people are differently abled people have different abilities people have different skills people have different effort levels but because the facts don't match the vision the left instead blames the structure of the United States right its structural inequality that's the our history our values our economics this is the real problem to fail because of the racist classist sexist homophobic system both on campus and off and so the system has to be torn out root and branch and what the administrators do is they make students their allies in this effort which is easy because there's something that feels good about being a victim it gives you an unearned sense of virtue that you get to parade around you feel like a better person if you're a victim if you're an underachieving black woman then the campus culture will tell you that the reason you're underachieving is not because of anything you did it's because you're black and because you're a woman and that's because society discriminates against black people and women if you're an underachieving gay Hispanic then that's because the system targets people like you for everybody who's left and this is basically just what they call white heterosexual cisgender males cisgender for those who speak English this gender means that it that you have a in orientation toward your own gender that is the same as your biology in other words I'm a biological male and I think I'm a biological male right that's what cisgender means seriously I mean we laugh but this is actually a thing on campus cisgender has become a thing now right because we can't discriminate against people who are biologically male but feel their feet we can't discriminate against Caitlyn Jenner so everybody else has to has to abide by these silly linguistic conventions but for people who are left the white heterosexual cisgender males there is one way that they can get out of the unenviable position of being the only people in America who are not victims right according to the left and that is they have to acknowledge their privilege they have to check their privilege because the system was built to benefit all of the white heterosexual cisgender males right forget the fact that there are more white people on welfare than black people on welfare forget the fact that there are plenty of poor white people all over the United States forget the fact that in college admissions for example white men are disadvantaged by affirmative action programs not quite as much as Asians by the way but they are very disadvantaged by by all of these programs so you have to acknowledge your white privilege which means America is bad in your bad and by saying that you're bad that makes you good right you acknowledge your guilt may a culpa may a couple maxima culpa and now everything is good so none of this complies with the facts and this is the problem because when this white privilege faces up to reality on campus they have to come up with something else and what they have to come up with is the use of force right they have to come up with the use of force so to digress for a moment here's a brief history and this goes by the title political correctness right political correctness is basically the campus use of force in order to shut down the debate to create this own vision of utopia where everybody is forced to shut up because if you ever utter the unalterable truth that some people perform less well than others in a free society then you must be silenced so here's a brief history of political correctness on campus because campuses weren't always this way but the remoulding of america's college campuses has been a very long intergenerational process encompassing virtually the whole of the 20th century and by the way not unique to the United States Seoul writes quote the history of the 20th century shows soft subjects students and their professors were among the biggest supporters of extremist movements both fascist and communist the former in Central and Eastern Europe before World War two the latter in countries around the world both before and after the war proponents of soft subject education to be liberal arts education always have a generalized interest in radical ideas because this is what you get famous for this is how you get a fortune or you don't become famous or gain a fortune by talking about the glories of Western civilization you do it by ripping on Western civilization the outlier is always the person who gets the attention and young people of course are happy to ally with this because young people always have a taste for revolution particularly in prosperous societies and prosperous societies young people have nothing better to do and they have the need to change the world and if the world's already a pretty good place then they still have to change it and so they change it in a negative way well in the 60s all of this sort of combined to push over all the weak neat administrators at American universities and college campuses then became bubbles of leftist thought and they used as their tool political correctness now when people say politically correct it's become such a buzzword that we forgot where it actually came from the term political correctness is a Maoist term right now use the term political correctness Trotsky's to use this term also what it meant literally was that what you were saying was not in line the correct political orthodoxy and therefore you had to be harmed right that's what political correctness meant the left picked it up they said that their goal wasn't to silence voices instead they wanted to open up new vistas of viewpoints by silencing people free speech they said could only exist in a place where there was no racism no sexism no homophobia nothing offensive then people would really feel free to speak their minds all right this is the idea so basic viewpoints when in basic truths went out the window in favor of leftist viewpoints victim groups replaced actual truth and language shifted that we didn't create these quote-unquote oppressive hierarchies that silenced people who would normally have been able to speak out if not for the evil white infrastructure after the 60s and 70s basically PC became a joke for about 20 years and then well really 30 and then President Obama came along and President Obama really issued in a new era of political correctness on college campuses and across the United States because he promised a world of non offensiveness a world in which Liberty could be defined subjective as full-scale offenses political correctness says you don't even have to be a member of a victimized subgroup you don't even have to be victimized in order to call political correctness and shut down the debate you need to feel victimized it's all about how you feel so what this does is it incentivizes everybody to become a victim in their own mind because you have an advantage now the minute that you claim that you're a victim you can now shut everybody else up right anybody who talks to you I'm a victim you hurt my feelings shut up and go away this is what we call fascism right but it's a fascism of cowardice and I call on college campuses I've called them the pantywaist fascists they've fully embraced this this new form of political correctness and there are a couple of hot-button terms they use microaggressions trigger warnings safe spaces in white privilege I'm sure you've heard all of these on the news microaggressions trigger warnings safe spaces in white privilege so what are microaggressions you hear this one all the time even the left makes fun of this even while it still pushes it microaggressions are basically we'll use the definition given by Jonathan Hite who's a psychologist over at NYU he says microaggressions are quote small actions or word choices that on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless right so there's so they're not offensive you're not saying anything offensive but I take it as offensive that is a micro aggression so for example if you say I'm colorblind you're in the middle of a conversation about race and you say I'm colorblind that is a microaggression because it implies something that isn't true which is that you're colorblind right because that's that's aggressive to somebody that makes me feel bad because if you're colorblind you expect me to perform in a meritorious fashion and that in and of itself is a racist notion and I'm totally serious here this is not a good a joke okay if you use terms like he and she this as this is a microaggression because it offends the non cisgender right if you ask where are you from these are on lists of lips you can find these in college guides now where are you from is a microaggression because it implies that you're not a native-born person how about the subjective right it's how offended am i subjectively not whether this statement is objectively offensive and of course nobody bothers to ask whether such microaggressions or freedom of speech they have to be quashed so last year at University of Missouri for example I spoke at University of Missouri shortly after they had this big blowup there and one of the things that they had they announced basically in advance is that if people were using hurtful words hurtful words people should call the police seriously that of course is totalitarianism that's using the power of the gun to shut people up right you're literally calling men with guns because your feelings were hurt that is totalitarianism in its finest form and it reaches even more ridiculous proportions so for example at Brandeis University which is just an uber left campus in Boston if you even discuss microaggressions it's a microaggression so I mean it's it's beyond parody you actually cannot make these things up so last year the Brandeis Asian American Student Association put out what they called an installation in the public square to quote bring attention to microaggressions that are frequently heard in and out of the Brandeis community according to their Facebook page so they put up a wall and then they put up all these phrases like these phrases like where are you from and are you a he or a using the word he they put all these on a wall to raise people's awareness that these things were microaggressions sure enough some asian-american students felt micro aggressed by the display itself so it was removed now to prevent people from being micro aggressed one of the other phrases that's come into common usage is the phrase trigger warning you've heard this one too and trigger warnings are the idea that before we say anything we have to give you a trigger warning so if I'm going to talk about rape on college campus I have to say trigger warning I'm about to talk about rape if you have been raped in the past know anybody who's been raped in the past read about anybody who's been raped in the past or know the definition of the word rape I do not mean to offend you right that's a trigger warning so colleges have now required that certain classic works of literature actually be accompanied by trigger warnings so that people aren't triggered the idea here being that somebody's going to have like a Vietnam flashback while reading East of Eden again the point here is that nothing subjectively offensive must occur under under public under under under this regime of political correctness right perception is the reality so once the microaggressions have been put aside and once trigger warnings have been issued then campuses are water known as safe spaces right so the implication here is clear that if you are subjected to language with which you disagree then you are now in an unsafe space you require the protection of men with guns you require segregated areas in fact at university of missouri had a bunch of black students who are protesting supposed systemic racism at university of missouri which has an affirmative action program and no objective evidence of racism on behalf of the administration what they well they were protesting it turns out that there were some some mewling white students who wanted to join them as well some of these black students the black students said we don't want you here because you aren't part of our micro aggressed population right you haven't been aggressive in the same way that we have we want a segregated space in which to protest right only black people which is a USC right just down the couple hours out of here the black students have been applying for separate black housing that show on separate black housing because they think that it's a microaggression or that require they require their own black safe space right which is something that the KKK would love right it's both separate and equal it's awesome all of this is actually making America's young people not only stupid but actually evil it's actually making America's young people evil because what this does is it creates an entire generation of mentally and emotionally stunted human beings who are completely unprepared for the real world we're going to have to face up to people who disagree and realities that show that your vision is wrong and you're going to have to deal with people on the other side of the aisle right Jonathan Hite that psychologist he wrote quote the recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist sexist classist or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn't incidentally teach students to focus on small or accidental slights its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then real able the people who have made such remarks as aggressors right so the idea is you're supposed to constantly be policing the world around you for microaggressions you're still supposed to be looking to be offended you get credit for being offended you're a hero for being offended now for anybody who's ever had experience with psychologists I live in LA that means 100 percent of people have had experience with psychologists but for anybody who has ever had experience with psychologists you know that there's something called cognitive behavioral therapy right this is the most common form of psychology that's now used cognitive behavioral behavioral therapy this is where you're having a chain of thoughts that leads you to be depressed or anxious or upset and what the psychologists will do is attempt to teach you how to break this bad chain of thoughts so in if your micro aggressed by something the psychologist so why don't you think it through is it possible that the person actually didn't mean to offend you and you're just going down this road too far you're getting upset you're getting depressed getting anxious over all of this cognitive behavioral therapy is in fact one of the only forms of psychology that is clinically proven to work colleges are now doing precisely the opposite so if you say to kids you're not being micro aggressed you're just being too sensitive right nobody means to offend you you're just oversensitive now your micro aggressing times - now you're really ruining their lives and so what you've created is this this subjective this this world in which kids are rewarded for their own subjective victimization looking to be offended all the time it also makes kid I said earlier it makes kids evil it does it's a professor named Roy Baumeister is another psychologist and he writes there's this book called evil inside human violence and cruelty he says evil behavior generally Springs from idealism that turns to violence unjustified self-esteem and hyper sensitivity these are three of the elements of evil so we tend to think of evil people as like James Bond villains who sit in rooms and they have shark tanks underneath their giant conference tables and they laugh at the suffering of others and that's not really what most evil people are Baumeister says people who think they're better than they are will be the dangerous ones hypersensitive people who often think their pride is being assaulted are potentially dangerous even when a neutral observer would conclude that no serious provocation occurred it is still important to recognize that in the perpetrators own view he or she was merely responding to an attack going back to the the word microaggressions just think about that for a second it's not an offensive statement they could just call it an offensive statement it's a micro aggression it's an aggression against you and in normal life and somebody aggresses against you if somebody punches you you punch them back right so now the rule is that if you say something that micro aggress is somebody they can basically punch you and this is this is actually not just become a thing on campus this has become a thing all across the American left now quick personal aside I was on CNN this would men about six months ago and I was on CNN to discuss Caitlyn Jenner being given the heroism award by ESPN because our definition of heroism has shifted a little bit since Normandy and while I was in while I was on CNN they put me on the doctor on the dr. Drew show which is watched by no one and and he's a terrible host so that aside so they asked me to be on the dr. Drew show to talk about Caitlyn Jenner's heroism and because the producer is a former Jerry Springer producer seriously he says he knows my perspective on transgenderism which is that transgenderism is a mental illness okay you can't magically change from a man into a woman the the transgender surgery has exactly the same suicide right after as before transgender people tried to commit suicide at a 40% rate because there is comorbidity between transgenderism and depression and so you know I went in I told them all this stuff beforehand when you're on national TV they always do a pre-interview so they know sort of what you're going to say well right before the show they say okay we're going to sit you next to this person named Zoey turn Zoey tur was formerly bobbed her so Zoey tur is a transgender woman raised a man who thinks that he's a woman in had the surgery to prove it his voice was about an octave lower than mine and he and he had about 20 pounds on me at least which becomes relevant actually to this story so we're so we're going through this this entire rigmarole about about transgenderism is Caitlyn Jenner a hero in and the argument of everybody on the panel is about five people on the panel plus dr. drew the argument was everybody was from everybody was is Caitlyn Jenner a hero or should Caitlyn Jenner be actually canonized as a saint that was the argument on CNN and so they and so they came back to me and I said I don't understand why we're humoring delusion right why is society humoring to lose you're not doing anybody any good you're not doing any good for transgender people you're not doing any good for confused young people you're not doing any good for children who have to know about gender roles you're not doing anybody any good and Bob terzo eater is sitting next to me and turns to me and says you don't know anything about biology and I said and I said well actually I know that every cell in your body is genetically male except for some of your sperm cells ironically which may just carry an X chromosome right and and he says you know we you don't understand anything about chromosomes and I said well what are your genetics sir right and I didn't mean it to be particularly offensive because he's a dude and I called you'd sir and so uh-huh it was the sir that sort of set him off apparently he on national television on national television he reaches over and we're sitting you know two feet from you not even maybe a foot and a half from each other he reaches over and grabs me by the back of the neck on national television and says if you say anything like that again I'll send you home in an ambulance which first of all doesn't make sense because the ambulances don't take you home but and so and I said you know this seems my my actual reply I was really taken aback like this has never happened to me on national TV before because it's a crime right and so like it's an actual battery I'm a lawyer I know and so in and so I said I was kind of taken aback and I said it seems mildly inappropriate for a political conversation and and what was amazing about it though what was truly incredible about it was not that this incident happened to is that the entire panel all of them universally say again there are five more people on the panel universally turn on me and say how dare you offend Zoey you are deliberately offensive to Zoey that's why Zoey did that this is your fault in other words it was a microaggression and it could be responded to in kind with actual aggression Ryan didn't end there by the way Zoey terazzo eater walks off the set he says to me I'll see you in the parking lot and then later tweeted that he wanted to curb-stomp me right and all of this is okay dr. drew later said he thought that everything was totally under control dr. drew did so this is the way that the left things and it starts on campuses so all of this kind of silly laugh-out-loud ridiculous nonsense about microaggressions this is how the left moves toward actual fascism there is a reason that in November 2015 Pew poll showed that 40% of millennia people my age like 18 to 30 33 right people 18 to 34 40% of them believe that the government should be able to prevent people from making quote statements that are offensive to minority groups 40% 4 in 10 people my age or younger think 4 in 10 think the government should be able to come into your house with a gun and stop you from making statements that someone feels are offensive ok talk about the end of free speech talk about the end of the country that's the end of the country in real time and it's happening on college campuses and this is happening all over the United States I spoke at a high school outside of San Diego called Otay Ranch High School and I was talking to the students and one of the things I said to the students is that people who are permanently poor in the United States are permanently poor as a general matter because they're not good with money right if you're temporarily poor that could be because you can't upon hard times get a health problem it could be because you're you weren't able to hold down a job it could be a variety of reasons but if you're poor from the time that you are born until the time that you die unless you are physically or mentally disabled the only reason for that is because you are not good with money definitionally and there was a lot of poor kids you know parents were poor sitting in the back of the classroom they started to kind of boo and hiss and I said please name me one person who is fabulous with money who's permanently poor in the United States at this point an administrator gets up walks to the front of the room and dismisses the entire student body and says he has to protect the student body from being offended I'm supposed to speak in a couple of weeks at Cal State University Los Angeles the students some of them are trying to shut it down of course one of the professor's is actually threatening he's offering to wrestle the quote/unquote white supremacists who invited me bragging online quote I lift bro that's that's mild stuff and say okay simmer down Mongo but he's it but it's but this is this is mild stuff right where he summers the the when I was at Harvard live is during the Larry Summers debacle for those who don't remember Larry Summers Lawrence Summers was the secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and he became the president of Harvard and he was giving a speech and in that speech he mentioned the truth and it is a fact that when you look at the bell curve for how women perform in science if you look at the upper echelon of how women perform in science there aren't as many women in the upper echelon of how when performance science the bell curve for women tends to be slightly above the bell curve for men but the bell curve for men has a longer tail in other words he mentions this and he says maybe the reason there aren't that many women in science is because there aren't that many women who are interested in science and at the top levels there aren't as many women as a proportion who are good at science and he was talking about statistics he was fired from his job at Harvard University for saying that at Yale University there was a professor who said that he was ok with people dressing up for whatever they wanted to at he was a dorm supervisor he said dress up how you want for Halloween none of my business you dress up how you want the students got that person to resign this happened just a couple of months ago Tim hunt who's a Nobel Prize winner in biochemistry Tim hunt just lost his job at the University College in London because he made a joke about women in the workplace even though his wife is a scientist and it was a self-deprecating joke about why there should be more women in the workplace so what they've done is by purging the universities they've ensured that the safe space continues to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation because remember at the campuses college campuses and professorial they basically work like the old Soviet judicial system when you retire you appoint your successor which means that if you're a college professor you're not going to be giving anybody a PhD if their dissertation is on underachievement in the black community due to the increase in the welfare state it's not going to happen so one of the questions that the left frequently asks here is why not what we're just creating a better world right why shouldn't society try to conform with the hopes and dreams of the people who live in it why shouldn't we adapt society to feelings and perceptions why shouldn't subjective realities trump objective facts what does it matter if we tow the PC line to make Caitlyn Jenner or Zooey to feel better or if we want to make black students on campus feel better about not performing as well or if we or if we want to make a woman feel better about not earning as much as the man next to her because she took time off to have a baby why shouldn't we just tell these lives why shouldn't we frontally lobotomize ourselves to truth if it makes people feel better and there are professors who say this very Glasner is the president and professor of sociology at Lewis and Clark College and he along with Morten Shapiro who teaches at Northwestern they wrote a piece I think this is in the if I'm not mistaken the Wall Street Journal they said as educators we seek to develop in our students the cultural literacy that reduces the chances that someone will inadvertently belittle another wholesale denouncements of young people's concerns only hinder our efforts to do right by our students all we're doing is trying to make people feel better while doing right by students means doing wrong by the country they say that that's okay a better world will result but it doesn't obviously obviously because a society that demeans achievement gets less of it a society that incentivizes a victim mentality gets more of it a society that blames itself for individual failures ends up destroying itself on the shoals of self-esteem America is the greatest social experiment in the history of the world and it's the greatest social experiment in history because it is a it is an argument for dive for merit before diversity the individual rights Trump social engineering individual justice individual merit individual performance Trump's whatever we think of particular groups and the result has been the most successful nation conceived by human mind or put into effect by human hands and they're seeking to tear it down the left is seeking to tear it down because they live off the basis that they live off the fruit of the land while undermining the foundations that made the society great in the first place they will have equality of outcome they'll elect Barney Sanders to do it they will have equality of outcome they will tear it out root and branch unless we stop them and thank God for places like Hillsdale College because the fact is that only places like Hillsdale College stand between an entire generation and the abyss so thank you all for what you're doing thank you for supporting Hillsdale and thank you for fighting back against a college campus environment that really is the tip of the spear in the leftist attempt to destroy the foundations of Western civilization and replace it with a salted earth civilization that rewards feelings over objective merit thanks so much happy to take questions we have time for a few questions please raise your hand we'll come to you in your opinion is the current situation on academic campuses a continuation of the influence of the Frankfurt School or a perversion of it a continuation I mean the Frankfurt School for people who don't know anything about Frankfurt School philosophy is a group of philosophers in the 1920s in Germany who were expatriates they moved to the United States and basically infiltrated American universities with an ideology that suggested they realized the Frankfurt School they realized that Marxism when Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital what he was trying to do was describe how he thought society was going to work it was actually descriptive not necessarily proscriptive it was here's what's going to happen he thought class warfare would eventually break out and destroy the capitalist infrastructure when that's in World War one basically dissuaded the international left of this because there was no class uprising to start World War one it turned out the poor French people we're happy to fight poor German people and all of them were happy to fight poor Russian people so when that fell apart what the Frankfurt School decided is in order to make this change happen we can't just wait for this change to happen we have to change the culture and the Frankfurt School basically decided to change the culture from the roots out and in the 60s what they discovered is that instead of using class which is difficult it's difficult to get what a poor white guy to sympathize with the poor black guy instead what they would use as a proxy is racial groups they would use racial groups to tear down the United States and the capitalist system suggesting that racial groups are the victims of capitalism if we can just pose a racial group against a racial group then that and mix in a little bit of socialism in there we'll end up with a more civilized world right need it's the Soviet Union actually pushed this message in the 60s when it would put out propaganda about how the United States was racist right not how the United States was rich and poor didn't talk about income inequality they talked about how the US was racist and the Soviet Union was a wonderful place for people of all races when in reality was just a crap hole for people of all races so the so yes the Frankfurt School which was led by people like Eric Hughes they they it was it was very influential I believe the full-scale conspiracy theory that everybody was taken over by them but I think that influential thinkers do have influence beyond just the people who read their books I mean there's a wave that moves out and in academia there's no question that people who don't even know they've been influenced by Frankfurt School ideas have been influenced by Frankfurt School ideas just as if you ask if you ask most Democrats you know do you like Karl Marx most of them will say no even though they're buying directly into his philosophy I have a question about the alumni of the say I'm ivy or any goofy schools why don't the Alumni pitch these girls off here's a brown University for one example is starting a fund drive for two billion dollars what kind of good are they going to do with that is because they've got a bunch of Roughnecks and ingrates down there raising hell and more two billion dollars so do some more of that thank you very much so the question is is basically why alumni don't do anything they're there a couple of reasons why alumni don't don't do anything the first is that alumni really don't pay that much attention to what's going on at their schools they sort of see the name on the paper and they say I went there it was fun I enjoyed it I want to see it continue to succeed they sign a cheque and that's that's really how most alumni deal with it I know my wife used to do phone banking for UCLA this is how you got people to give right you call them up you say you remember how great your experience was at UCLA we're still doing that for thousands of kids give us some money that's how most alumni actually give the second reason is that there is a bit of self-interest attached to alumni giving in certain industries meaning I went to Harvard Law School Harvard Law School is depending on who you look at either the first or second best law school in the nation right it's Harvard and Yale and they always battle it out if I'm somebody who went to Harvard Law School then I would prefer that for the next 30 odd years when I plopped down that credential people say whew right if Harvard were to drop in the in the college rankings in the law school rankings down to 20 it's not nearly as impressive that I went there so there's a bit of self-interest attached to the continuing prominence of your school and until people tend to give for that reason as well in other words the real question and this is a question more broadly as why people don't let why why people let other interests Trump ideology and that's one and then philosophy of life and that's you know that's that is the difficulty of American politics and politics in general is getting people to understand that their own personal self-interest is not necessarily served by the short-term gains to be made if they're undermining the long-term foundations upon which success is based it's clear definitely up on everything yeah I'd like to ask you a question which I will do now well Hillary Clinton be indicted will hello to Clinton be indicted well I'm I'm not a clairvoyant but I'm gonna go No and the reason I'm going to say no is because the justice system is is entirely corrupt at the top levels on behalf of Democrats and Dinesh D'Souza we'll spend time in prison but Hillary Clinton will spend no time in prison David Petraeus will end up having to make a settlement with the government Hillary Clinton will not my indicator by the way that she's not going to be indicted is that today Jay Carney came out and said Obama was rooting for Hillary right which is the first real indicator that Obama is backing Hillary in the race he's not he's not going to endorse her full scale before South Carolina but but he even that kind of small signal the real question now is whether the FBI's investigation is so far that no one can stop them and I don't buy it I don't buy it it's you know listen I hope she's indicted for purposes of justice and yes of politics because I think that she is poised to be one of the most damaging she's already one of the most damaging politicians in American history she's the worst Secretary of State ever but beyond that she's poised to be the second worst president ever in American history if she doesn't get indicted so I'm written the same as everybody else for her to get indicted I just I don't trust the Loretta Lynch Justice Department to do actual justice they're too busy cracking down on the Ferguson Police Department hi I've noticed that this new development with language like safe spaces for instance and trigger warnings is taken on a different kind of jargon than previous revolutionary movements it's really therapeutic and its operating on an emotional level and it seems to be resonating with kids even at the high school elementary level but I try to talk to my nieces and nephews it's really evident there doesn't seem to be a foothold for a logical conversation to happen yes because emotions seem to completely fill the void if you seem to agree with that so what do you think is creating that environment because where I'm seeing it it's a very difficult thing to even have a conversation yeah I mean what's creating the environment of feelings is is basically that we're the most prosperous nation in the history of humanity so I mean if you've ever dealt with kids of very wealthy parents very often they tend to be oversensitive and easily offended and and when and these are the kids of wealthy parents namely the United States and so what are they going to complain about the fact that they're poor they're not poor the fact that they have a rough life they don't so what exactly is going to be their world-beating change and there's nothing more empowering to these kids than saying the change that you seek is about you right it's not even about the society at large about you because your feelings are now our gauge of success or failure as a society I mean that's a pretty empowering message I mean it's almost it's it's almost a bizarre leftist incarnation of Walt Whitman's I contain multitudes you know what happens to me is what happens to all of society my feelings matter than anything else in the more than anything else in the universe which is why by the way when you do argue with kids who are into this sort of stuff it is imperative to actually use emotional argument logic does not work and that doesn't mean that you have to make false arguments but you can say you're being a fascist little right and that's okay because the reality is they are being fascist little and so that's that's okay and the reason that is because what they're really doing what what kid what the left now does is they make emotionally based arguments about your character you're a bad person right the safe space argument the microaggression argument isn't that you're even saying something untrue it's that you are a bad human being and the only way to defeat you're a bad human being in an argument to say no actually you're a bad human being for suggesting that I'm a bad human being without evidence only a jerk does that right and then once we get beyond the character arguments then we can argue about logic but it's going to be character arguments all the way to the well then there's no way to be a character argument with a logical argument Mitt Romney discovered this in 2012 right you cannot make a logical argument and win people over while your opponent is saying that you kill people of cancer I mean which was the actual argument against Mitt Romney he fired people so that later their wives would die of cancer this is the Obama campaign and Mitt Romney's campaign was that guy's incompetent okay that's not so who you gonna vote for the guy who kills people of cancer with his magic Wall Street powers or the guy who's mildly incompetent right so the character arguments do matter and this is why I encourage conservatives to see the world as it is not as we wish it to be logical arguments are not going to defeat the safeSpace microaggression mentality the only thing that defeats that is showing these kids that what they are doing is actually immoral it's not just ineffective it's not just counterproductive it's immoral it is immoral to call the police if someone hurts your feelings it makes you a bad human being if you call the police because somebody hurt your feelings it makes you a fascist thug who wants to use a gun against someone and when you speak to them like that at least you can embarrass them enough for just a moment that maybe there's a gap I'm going to ask a question on behalf of my daughter and son-in-law we were visiting them he's in the military well thank you over over Christmas and he asked the question we have four kids homeschooled should we be saving money to send them to college you've described a situation he seems to sense that this is maybe not a good place for his kids but on the other hand college served him well his wife so would you please respond so you have to gauge your own kids and I think it's different listen I went to UCLA I went to Harvard Law there are no two more liberal institutions leftist I don't like the word liberal they're not liberals or leftist there are no two more leftist individuals institutions on the planet than UCLA and Harvard Law School I came out of stronger conservative because I used everything that I was learning as a as a starter it wasn't the end point right it was okay you want me to read John Rawls okay well now I'm going to go and I'm going to read Friedrich Hayek right I'm gonna I'm going to read various perspectives on the same issue so that I know how to counter the argument so I can argue leftist positions better than most leftist can right so the so if you have somebody who's a solid consider what I say to parents is about college if your kid is not a solid conservative if your kid doesn't have solid values by the time they're 18 that'll be they'll be a leftist by the time they're 21 that's the way that this works ever all your heavy lifting is done before the college years so you sort of have to I mean honestly I think that if your kid isn't solidly in ensconced in values before they hit puberty or in trouble so it's so this is a long prior and a son on the way I mean this is something I'm gonna have to work on it's it's something that you know I think that you have to gauge this so what I say to college students are really politically motivated is go to leftist campuses go to leftist campuses learn how to holding your arguments become a weapon and what that and what I also tell them is if you're going to be on the leftist campus don't be stupid if the professor is going to grade you down for being conservative in class right like a communist I mean this is actually what I did when I was at UCLA I'd argue with the professor in class and then we had things called blue books and blue books were great because they were anonymous they just used your student ID number and so if you read my actual essays from college they read like something directly out of the nation and if you you know and obvious it's not what I think but that's how you get to graduate summa laude at UCLA go to Harvard Law School and then use all their degrees against them so one of the things that you mentioned in your speech was that sooner or later they're going to have to come out of college and live with the reality of life and making a living and doing these types of things there's enough kids in the Millennial that have now come out of the colleges how are they faring what are they doing I mean they're faring poorly they're shocked I mean they're they're kids who are now suing their colleges is an actual lawsuit suing their colleges because they're saying I was promised a job I was promised an income after I come out of here right the the Occupy Wall Street movement was all disenchanted college kids who who got out after that lesbian dance Theory matron thought they were going to make six figures somewhere and it turns out nobody pays to watch people theorize about lesbian dance so you know that so this is so they end up you know going and living in tents and in Central Park and pooping on themselves so it's so it's you know it's life is a rough teacher what the left has tried to do is extend kind of the period of adolescence indefinitely right so now you're now you're 26 and you're on your parents health care okay by age twenty by age 26 I'd been married for a couple of years and I was two years away from having a kid and I met and I already had two degrees in four published books you know it turns in by the way that I'm that that's actually I'm not even a success story if you go back 50 years or a 50 years by the age of 26 you were supposed to be fully ensconced in your job you're supposed to have like three kids by that point what we've done is prolonged adolescence indefinitely and so what bama's goal is what the left's goal is what Bernie Sanders Hillary the same goal and the same goal is to extend College out right College is not a place that's kind of a break from reality College is the new reality so we have to make all of human life like college and this is what they think Europe is which is why you're ups is collapsed so it's Europe is going to collapse and it's being invaded by foreign forces and they're going the barbarians are at the gates and Europe is going to fall apart and it is falling apart so we can play this game but it's not going to end well so then the problem is that because the education is so poor instead of reacting against their teachers at college you told them everything was going to be hunky-dory instead instead of having the kind of all quiet on the western front moment you know where the where the former student goes back to his classroom after World War one he's in the middle of World War one he goes back and he yells at his professor and he says you're telling all these kids the wrong thing you're telling them that war is awesome instead of them going back and yelling at their professors they said no it just shows my professor was right because Society is unjust right the lack of my hundred thousand dollar salary that's because society is mean and so we have to transform the society and that's why young people again 40 percent back speech codes in American life this is why I think the last poll was nearing or over 40 percent of young people are ok with socialism like the actual socialism because they don't know anything they've been taught stupidity and how they feel is all that matters I mean there's a there's a video that's going around the internet getting all sorts of play about income inequality income inequality is the stupidest issue income inequality means nothing right I mean I'm I have a lot of income inequality with Bill Gates but I'm doing pretty well and I don't care that Bill Gates is doing really well the only thing we should all care about is that there are poor people we should figure out how poor people can do better not how to make Bill Gates less rich but what but this video is going around and saying here's a poll of what Americans think the wealth distribution should look like and here is what the wealth distribution actually looks like and I watch this video in bewilderment and young people love it and I watched this video and bewilderment saying who told you that you get to tell the universe how wealth is distributed right who told you that you have a moral se as to how wealth is distributed it's immoral it's evil it's wrong you're going to have to steal people's labor from them but people are not told this and so they think that their own subjective vision of what reality should look like should govern what reality actually looks like and it's only later after eighty years of communist failure that they realize oh that and hundreds of millions of people dead that they realize oh that was a bad idea for like ten years then they go right back to it could you please explain the unholy alliance between the left and the forces and the the Muslim supremacists considering that the premises and the the principles of both of them are mutually incompatible ok so they're not mutually incompatible to point a they are to point B what I mean is that it's a time the left wants to tear down Western civilization because it thinks it's unequal the radical Muslims want to tear down Western civilization because they think it's evil so to the point of tearing down Western civilization they're pretty much on the same page it's where they go from there that's a problem right one side wants to build the Caliphate and the other side wants to build a communist utopia the the reason that the left is routinely and it's almost invariable but the left ends up siding with the world's worst human beings in every situation is because again if you just go back to that fundamental leftist principle that equality of outcome is all that matters in life that equality of outcome means that something just is happening think about it the real world is a place where God designed it this way I believe this God designed it not for every individual but certainly for the vast bulk of humanity if you do responsible good things with your life you will be more successful than if you do irresponsible bad things with your life well if the left believes the people who are unsuccessful are more virtuous then what that means that the non virtuous are more virtuous right because the people who are unsuccessful are generally not doing good responsible things and the left says well those people are victims let's help them right so the Muslims in the Middle East are victims of Israel they must be victims of Israel cuz Israel's rich and its neighbors are not so they must be victims well the real reason the Muslims the Palestinian Muslims for example are poor is because they spent all the money that has been given to them hundreds of billions of dollars all the money that's been given to them over the course of decades and they've spent it on terrorism and they spent it on stocking it away in their bank accounts of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and they spent it on garbage and they spent it on anti-israel propaganda the real reason they're poor but the left looks at it and they say they're poor that means they're virtuous this is why I hate it really despise it when Republicans do the whole I'm a better person because I have a rags to riches story you weren't a better person when you're poor okay no one is a better person just because they're poor by the way no one's a better person because they're rich all that wealth is a measure of how many voluntary exchanges you engaged in in a free market that's all that that's all that the wealth is but the the idea for the left is that all inequality is evil therefore the people who are unequal at the top are evil in the people at the bottom are virtuous which is why you'll hear people on the Left say things like they like small business but they hate people who are big business like the Walmart family right the Walton family they're terrible well what are they terrible when they were just a family let millena when it went exactly did they transition over into evil right when they became successful enough because their success meant by necessity according to the leftist worldview they were depriving others of their fair share and Bernie Sanders said this right after winning New Hampshire the other night and this is Bernie Sanders this entire thing he says the principle of America is the principle of fairness which makes me want to vomit and never stop vomiting the principle of America is not fairness of outcome and he was talk about fairness of alchemy so it's unfair that 1% of the population lives with more wealth than 90% of the rest of the population and well maybe or maybe it's not unfair because it turns out that 1% of the population is hiring the other 90% of the population to actually provide their services in labor we have time for one more question hi mr. Shapiro I'm a community college teacher and so I I paid union dues to the CTA in the NEA and as you can imagine I'm not real happy about that don't let them get a hold of this tape yeah I'm gonna blur out his face and no worry do you have any hope I believe the Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments Friedreich's versus ETA any any hope that that might come out yeah I mean there is hope that that might come out the right way it really depends on you know whether Justice Kennedy had a solid bowel movement the morning I mean basically the I mean all Supreme Court arguments basically boil down to this vital question of whether he took his Metamucil it's it's a Justice Kennedy theoretically has an overriding philosophy of what he thinks of his individual liberties so anything that allows you to do more stuff on a bite on your own is something we should allow so he foods in favor of gay marriage because of allow gays people it allows gay people to get married he's in favor he's against you know campaign finance reform because he thinks people should be allowed to spend money on politics so presumably theoretically he could vote the right way on this case saying teachers should be allowed not to have to give their money to a union that uses that money to push certain political causes which is what the case is about so it's possible that Justice Kennedy comes out the right way I hate hate hate that we live in a system where we have to wait for the kadhi on the hill to to dictate to us what our lives are going to be like in perpetuity it's disgusting to me it's a perversion of the constitutional order and I wrote at Harvard Law School I wrote my entire Harvard Law School third-year paper on the idea that Martha that Madison versus Marbury is is wrong wrongly decided that marberry versus madison is wrongly decided that basically the supreme court should not have the power of judicial review because the founders didn't believe any human beings should be invested with that much authority to destroy the Constitution if they saw fit and in fact Hamilton clearly writes in Federalist 78 he talks specifically about how if the court should start to exercise will over over constitutionalism over over basic philosophy of government then it's it's betrayed its entire purpose so it's ads me that conservatives have been relegated to waiting around and by the way this is why the status thing to me of all about this election is that if we lose this election or if Donald Trump wins the election if we you know even if any of these things happen if conservatives lose the election there are at least two justices who are probably going to step down maybe three or four in the next four to eight years and so we could be living under the rule of Elena Kagan who I know and she's not someone who's rule you really wish to be living under her so well that that's I guess that's all we have time for but thank you very much really appreciate it

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 312,087

Rating: 4.526659 out of 5

Keywords: Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Ben Shapiro, Breitbart, Politics, liberal arts, campus, breitbart news, breitbart.com, NLS, National Leadership Seminar

Id: WxKwmy5AGKI

Length: 57min 27sec (3447 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2016