Fox News, Published on Mar 18, 2019
Shapiro on entitlement: You’re not owed anything in this world
Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shaprio weighs in on the entitlement generation on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’
Laura Ingraham: Members of ‘Generation E’ believe he or she should get into the best colleges, even if he or she does not have the best grades. Or the best scores. They develop their world view of their self-importance because mommy and daddy raised them to believe that they are special. What’s the end result here? Many of these young people, and it’s not just the wealthy kids, they grow up to be demanding, entitled adults.
My next guest has become a sensation, touring colleges across the country and offering the very message that I stressed in tonight’s angle. Joining me now, Ben Shapiro, editor in chief of The Daily Wire, author of the brand new book The Right Side of History, in stores tomorrow. All right Ben, I want to begin with what we were talking about earlier. It dovetails into everything you write in your book, the emerging politics of grievance and entitlement, Generation E. Your thoughts on how to best thwart this, combat this, cure this?
Ben Shapiro: I think the best way to combat a lot of this stuff is to focus on achievement and freedom and responsibility. The fact his freedom comes along with the duty to achieve. You are not owed anything in this world, why should you perceive yourself to be owed a college slot, why should your parents give you everything? That sort of mentality is foreign to a lot of the basis for western civilization and the basis for America, this idea that we were supposed to go forth and conquer, that we were supposed to go in the wilderness and build something out there. That sort of mentality unfortunately has been abandoned in favor of this grievance culture — as you suggest — that says the world owed something, and if we don’t get it it’s because the system has failed us.
Ingraham: Even the shirt that the young woman was wearing, the t-shirt when she was confronting Chelsea Clinton— of all people, Chelsea Clinton? Isn’t that kind of, I hate– I’m so sick of the phrase ‘jump the shark’, because that’s ‘jump the shark’, but isn’t that telling you a lot about just how pathetic this whole entitlement movement has gone, when Chelsea Clinton is targeted?
Shapiro: When Chelsea Clinton is too radical for you because she’s too far the right, I think that maybe you’ve not just jumped the shark, you jumped the entire aquarium. It’s demonstrative of how subjective feeling have taken the place of objective fact. What Chelsea Clinton had to say about Ilhan Omar was basically an objective fact. She was speaking anti-semitism, Chelsea Clinton called out on that, and she’s responsive and as possible for the Christchurch shooting? Because she did all of that? That’s how people feel and that’s the truth and they are told they are right, they are special, they are wonderful individuals because they go to places like NYU and their parents told them they were special. So objective fact never actually has to be brought into the conversation.
Ingraham: Speaking of The Right Side of History, Ben, your book, we have major heads of major departments at Princeton university– Eddie Glaude Jr. is on MSNBC getting back to the Christchurch slaughter. This is what he said.
Eddie Glaude Jr.: Part of what new ceiling represents in an interesting way my view a wholesale attack on what Donald Trump has enabled. […] I’m not trying to blame what happened on president Trump, but he’s helped create an environment for this sort of carnage to happen.
Ingraham: So that’s where it’s going for it he might not have pulled the trigger, but it’s the environment of Trump that created the hate and the intolerance, et cetera, et cetera. That’s reverberated across the airwaves, Ben, for the last 72 hours plus and it’s still going.
Shapiro: There is certainly a narrative that’s being driven by the left when it comes to the Christchurch shooting. Every single person in western civilization who saw that and was a decent person, appalled by that slaughter, obviously, and the attempts to immediately jump into the manifesto of the killer, and then to give it the broadest possible coverage by the media, to do exactly what the killer wanted, which is generate all sorts of political controversy in an attempt to tear apart western civilization, is really quite despicable. And one of the things I thought was so fascinating, if you actually take a look at the manifesto — which I recommend everyone should not — but if you take a look, the killer says essentially that western civilization is white people, and what you see from the intersection of the left is a similar perception of what western civilization is. Western civilization is a hierarchical system of racial domination. That’s not the west is at all. That’s why we all mourn the slaughter of innocent people, no matter what the religion living in our civilization.
Ingraham: The right view of history means the correct view of history with its thoughts, achievements, triumphs, sadness. Finally, Ben, on Fox they’re thinking of inviting a conservative to a campus to speak or a conservative going to– there are a lot of people who say, you know, I’m not doing it. Jerry Seinfeld want to perform in college campuses because of the political correctness. What do you say to those people who don’t wanna deal with the grief that you deal with?
Shapiro: I certainly understand it, but at the same time don’t give up the fight because there are a lot of people hungering for a message that is tolerant not only of humor but also tolerant of diverse viewpoints and people want discussion on campus. I spoke at the university of Michigan last week. We had a thousand people in the audience and 6,000 people on the wait-list. That’s not because I’m something special but because there is a hunger of a different point of view at a lot of these campuses being shielded by the administration.
Ingraham: on actual exchange of ideas. What a shock on a college campus. Ben, congrats on the book.
