Ben Shapiro Stormed Congress and Blew the Left’s Argument Against Free Speech to Smithereens
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Ben Shapiro speaking at the 2016 Politicon at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Gage Skidmore
On Thursday, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro testified about free speech on college campuses before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In less than five minutes, he dissected and destroyed the Left's argument against free speech.
"Free speech is under assault because of a three-step argument made by advocates and justifiers of violence," Shapiro declared in his opening remarks. "The first step is they say that the validity or invalidity of an argument can be judged solely by the ethnic, sexual, racial, or cultural identity of the person making the argument."
This "intersectionality" argument — that society structurally oppresses people of ethnic, sexual, racial, or cultural identities and therefore only those who have been oppressed can speak about certain issues — is the ground of the "microaggression" culture stifling speech on campuses, the Daily Wire editor argued.
"The second step is they claim that those who say otherwise are engaged in what they call verbal violence," Shapiro added. "The final step is that they conclude that physical violence is sometimes justified in order to stop such verbal abuse."
In order to understand how college campuses shut down speech — often but not always conservative speech — Americans must understand the philosophy of "intersectionality." Shapiro argued that this philosophy dominates college campuses and "a large segment of today's Democratic Party."
Intersectionality "suggests that straight white Americans are inherently the beneficiaries of white privilege and therefore cannot speak on certain policies, since they have not experienced what it's like to be black or hispanic or gay or transgender or a woman."
This philosophy, Shapiro declared, "ranks the value of a view not based on the logic or merit of the view but on the level of victimization in American society experienced by the person espousing the view." An LGBT black woman is automatically considered more correct than a straight white male, before any speech exits either of their mouths.
"The next step is obvious: If a straight white male, or anyone else who ranks lower on the victimhood scale, says something contrary to the viewpoint of the higher ranking intersectionality identity, that person has engaged in a microaggression," the editor declared.
He quoted NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who defined microaggressions as "small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless." Here's the key — "You don't actually have to say anything insulting to microaggress. Somebody merely needs to take offense."
In other words, an offended person who fits the "oppressed" identities of intersectionality has the power to dub any speech from someone "less oppressed" a "microaggression." This word means not merely an insult. As Shapiro noted, "Microaggressions are the equivalent of physical violence."