By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
In November, students at a historically black university
in New Orleans led a massive protest against a speaker heavily supportive of
Donald Trump. Socially Engaged Dillard University Students, the group
organizing against the speaker, wrote an open letter: “His presence on our
campus is not welcome, and overtly subjects the entire student body to safety
risks and social ridicule. This is simply outrageous.”
The speaker’s safety was guaranteed by the university,
and he proceeded to explain, “I will be Donald Trump’s most loyal advocate.”
The protesters were of the political Left; they chanted,
“No KKK! No fascist USA!” Protesters were hit with pepper spray, and two were
arrested.
So, here’s the question: Did this make inviting the
speaker worthwhile?
The answer should be obvious: From this account of
events, you don’t have enough information to say. The speaker could have been
Sheriff David Clarke or Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich.
But it wasn’t. It was David Duke, who also said, at the
same event, “There is a problem in America with a very strong, powerful, tribal
group that dominates our media and dominates our international banking. I’m not
opposed to all Jews.”
If you did not answer that the story provided too little
information for you to judge, it’s time to check your biases. Did you decide
that the speaker was on the right because the protesters were on the left? Did
you decide that the speaker had something valuable to say if he ticked off the
Left enough, if he melted enough snowflakes?
Unfortunately, many conservatives have embraced this sort
of binary thinking: If it angers the Left, it must be virtuous. Undoubtedly,
that’s a crude shorthand for political thinking. It means you never have to
check the ideas of the speaker, you merely have to check how people respond to
him.
That’s dangerous. It leads to supporting bad policies and
bad men. The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend. Sometimes he’s your
enemy. Sometimes he’s just a dude sitting there minding his own business.
You don’t have
enough information to know.
The logic of “if he melts snowflakes, he’s one of us”
actually hands power to the Left, by allowing leftists to define conservatives’
friends. It gets to choose whom we support. This isn’t speculative. It happened
during the 2016 primaries, when the media attacked Trump incessantly, driving
Republicans into his outstretched arms. The media’s obvious hatred for Trump
was one of the chief arguments for Trump from his advocates: If, as his
detractors claimed, he wasn’t conservative, then why would the leftist media
hate him so much?
To be fair, after Mitt Romney’s bludgeoning at the hands
of the media, there was at least a shred of justification for this logic.
Romney wasn’t a hard-core conservative, wasn’t a personal shambles, and got
savaged by the media anyway, simply for the sin of having an R after his name.
The same happened to John McCain, a “maverick” Republican the leftist media had
openly pushed for years. If the media opposed Trump with all their heart and
all their soul, that must have been some sort of reaction to Trump himself.
It wasn’t, though. It was a combination of factors,
including the fact that Trump was amazing press and the press thought Trump an
unusually weak candidate. More-honest leftist commentators openly preferred
Trump to more-conservative candidates such as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.
But Trump’s war with the media carried him to the
nomination, and from there to the presidency.
In fact, Trump continues to live off of this backward
logic. His press conference last week was no ballet of informational expertise
and policy knowledge, nor was it a brilliant recasting of his policy successes.
It was a blunderbuss attack on the media, entertaining in the extreme,
occasionally daft, occasionally ridiculous. Yet many on the right immediately
concluded that it was the most successful press conference in world history,
not because it was successful with Americans per se — there was no evidence of
that — but because it was a successful assault on the media, who had it coming.
Never mind if Trump lied to the media. They were angry.
That showed it worked. Watching Chuck Todd fulminate and Chris Wallace rage and
Don Lemon bemusedly tut-tut scratched conservatives where they itch — and it
made Trump a hero.
None of this is to argue that Trump is a leftist or that
conservatives are wrong to support many of his policy prescriptions. But if
your standard of right and wrong is whether the Left hates it, you’re making a
category error.
It’s not good enough to just be opposed by the Left – you
must actually oppose the Left. We
must ask what someone is fighting
against, not merely whom. We must ask
what tools they’re using — and we must insist they use the truth. Ideas and
values matter more than identity.
But not anymore. The Left’s identity politics is focused
on racial, ethnic, and sexual identity — aspects of identity that place you
somewhere in the hierarchy of intersectionality. The Right’s identity politics
comes with a label: enemy of the Left. So long as you’re wearing that button,
you’re presumptively on our side and you’re nearly bulletproof.
Until it turns out that you’re not. Until we jump the
wrong way because we substituted political laziness for a philosophy. Until we
embrace somebody nasty because the other side hated him or her and stop caring
about truth so long as the other side is triggered.
Then we become the bad guys. And that’s a problem.
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