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- A growing number of Americans
are trying to tear down this country, how?
By canceling our shared history,
our ideals, and our culture.
Radio host and author Ben Shapiro
writes about this dangeroustrend in his book,
"How to Destroy Americain Three Easy Steps."
Ben, welcome, it's a fascinatingbook, and here it is,
ladies and gentleman,"How to Destroy America."
Ben, talk to me about 1619.
Why is that supposed tobe an important date?
I thought it was 1620,I thought it was 1607.
What's 1620?
- 1619 is the date thatthe first African slave
arrives on American shores.
And according to "The New York Times"
and Nikole Hannah-Jones,who is the defacto editor
over there now, 1619 is the true founding
of the United States.
America really is notabout the liberty of 1776,
it is not about the history of Jamestown.
It's not about Plymouth Rock.
America is really about slavery.
All of the institutionsof the United States
are built on the bedrockof bigotry and racism
and cruelty toward others and therefore
the entire system must be torn down.
"The New York Times" haspromulgated The 1619 Project
with millions of dollars.
They're gonna try andteach it in public schools.
Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize
for an essay that was so bad
that four other PulitzerPrize-winning historians
said that the historywas just pseudohistory.
But it doesn't matter,it's about attempting
to destroy all the ties that bind us.
If we don't share avision of American history
that says America is agreat and good country
that was rooted in excellent,enduring principles
in the Declaration of Independence,
that we haven't always livedup to those principles.
The story of America hasreally, really dark periods
and really dark spots,but the story of America
is about how we overcame theendemic nature of human sin
in order to create a betterAmerica and a better world
by extension by living up tothose founding principles.
Instead of saying that that's our history,
instead The 1619 Projectand disintegrationists,
as I call them, like to claimthat America's real story
is a story of exploitation,brutality and evil.
- Well, Ben, you know, 1619,if "The New York Times"
is pushing it, we've done the story
about the Ochs and the Sulzberger family
that came up from Chattanooga, Tennessee,
they gave money to theStone Mountain Project
that had a statue of Robert E. Lee
and they not only owned slaves,they bought and sold slaves
and they have "The New York Times."
How in the world can afamily that does that
come out with the 1619 nonsense?
- I think the basic idea hereis that the only good people
who have ever been born live right now.
It's a very anti-Judeo-Christian worldview
that human sin is actually only a product
of the systems that human beings live in.
Right, if you're Jewishor if you're Christian
or if you believe theJudeo-Christian worldview,
if you're religious of any sortactually you tend to believe
that human beings are endemically sinful,
that human beings havethe capacity for sin,
and that the fact that humanbeings have done bad things
over the course of historyis not always the result
of a system, but if you are a member
of the disintegrationist leftthen what you actually believe
is that human beings are widgets
that are surrounded byforces beyond their control
and if we just change those forces,
human beings will be good.
And so the idea is that all inequalities
in modern American lifeand all past inequalities,
all past evils, those canbe attributed to systems.
And that's exactly what yousee from "The New York Times."
As far as the Sulzberger family,
obviously they'rehypocrites, but you know,
the way that they buy off the woke left
is by simply ignoring their own hypocrisy
or apologizing for their ancestors,
for apologizing forpeople who died long ago
and suggesting that theyare themselves different
and they're so differentthey're gonna hand the keys
to the car to people who really
don't like the country very much.
- Ben, in your book,what you're pointing out
is that everything in oursociety is somehow controlled
by racism and that the Blackpeople were taken advantage of
and it's because of them, you pointed out
they want reparations and you said
you've got an immigrant ofthree or four generations
has come in from someplacein Eastern Europe
and he's got to pay money to Colin Powell
because of the sins against his ancestors.
They're asking for reparations now.
How do you pay reparations for slavery?
- The case for reparationsis extraordinarily weak,
but the case for reparations is again,
based on the idea that the storyof America is unending sin.
The claim is not just thatslavery was a bad thing
that happened a very longtime ago and has aftereffects.
The claim is that Americareally never got past slavery.
That slavery transmuted into Jim Crow,
and Jim Crow didn't end,Jim Crow just transmuted
into what they call systemic racism.
This is the case that's madeby people like Robin DiAngelo.
It's a case made by Ibram Kendi.
It's a case made by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
All these folks basically claim
that what racism reallyis, is not the belief
that a group is inferioror superior based on race.
That's what normal people think racism is.
Instead what they say racism is,
is any system that ends withany level of racial inequality
is a racist system, and ifyou don't fight the system
then you are not anti-racist.
That's the language that you'reseeing being used right now.
So if you're not for slavery reparations
that's because you're notfor tearing down the system
and that's because you arein fact complicit in racism.
It's a really dangerous ideology,
and it's an ideology thatdestroys the foundations
of the freest and by theway most tolerant society
ever devised by man.
America 2020 is the mosttolerant society on planet Earth.
- Well you've pointed outas you've gone through
some very interesting history,but we did have some problems
along with we couldn't havegotten the Constitution ratified
if we hadn't changed a few things in it
having to do with givinga percentage of the people
in the Electoral College to the slaves.
But in your book you'resaying that capitalism
as we know it in Americais essentially racist,
that everything that we seeof any of the good things
in America, they're all founded on racism
and the money that was broughtabout because of slavery.
Is that the prevailing norm?
- That is the disintegrationist claim.
That is the claim that's beingmade by people in the media
is that all of the thingsyou see in American life,
all the systems that surround you,
everything from how you get your iPhone
to the internet to traffic patterns,
all of these things are rooted in slavery.
Now, that's historically inaccurate,
but it does allow for a group of people
who really don't like the American system
and wish to rebuild it in a different way,
in a sort of utopian mold,it allows them to argue
that even though Americais indeed prosperous, free,
and generous, that Americaactually is rooted in brutality
and therefore the system has to go
no matter how many people it has helped.
And the fact of thematter is that America is
the most prosperous, free, generous nation
in the history of the world.
Seeing it as the opposite,seeing it as endemically cruel
and bigoted and notlooking at American history
as the story of overcoming human sin
in order to fulfill theprinciples of the founding,
which by the way is what MartinLuther King talked about,
that's what FrederickDouglass talked about.
Both of them talked aboutfulfilling the promises
of the Declaration of Independence,
not about tearing down theDeclaration of Independence.
If you talk about tearingdown the Declaration
what you're talking aboutis tearing down the country.
There are a lot of peoplerooting for that right now.
