Ben_Shapiro-How_to_Debate_Leftists_and_Destroy_The.pdf

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How To Destroy Leftists In Debate
By Ben Shapiro
How The Left Wins Arguments
All that matters is victory.
That’s a message that seems to have been lost among conservatives, who are constantly focused on
the virtue of their message, the intellectual honesty of their cause, and the frustration of having
nobody care about either.
But it’s because conservatives don’t think about how to win that they constantly lose.
Take, for example, the election of 2012.
Conservatives lost the 2012 election for one blatantly obvious reason. It wasn’t just their
technology was no good, though the Obama campaign did have an obvious technological advantage.
It wasn’t just that conservatives did a poor job with the media -- although they did.
The reason that conservatives lost the 2012 election was garishly simple: most people in America
don’t follow politics that closely. What they see about the various candidates are what the candidates
say about each other, and what the media say about the candidates.
So, let’s assume for a moment that you’re a typical American voter: you care more about Miley
Cyrus twerking on the Video Music Awards than you do about the vagaries of Obamacare. Let’s
assume all you’ve really seen about the elections is the coverage in the mainstream press and what the
candidates said about each other during the debates.
What exactly did the candidates say about each other during the debates?
Here’s what presidential candidate Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama: Barack Obama is not a
very good President. He said Barack Obama doesn’t do a very good job on the economy; he said that
Obama’s foreign policy has a lot of holes in it; he said Obama has done a pretty poor job across the
board of working in bipartisan fashion. But, Romney added, Obama’s a good guy. He’s a good family
man, a good husband, a man who believes in the basic principles espoused by the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution. He is not someone you should be afraid of in any way. Essentially,
Romney’s campaign slogan was this: “Obama: Good Guy, Bad President.”
And here’s what Barack Obama and his surrogates said about Mitt Romney: Mitt Romney is the
worst guy since Mussolini. Mitt Romney is the guy who straps dogs to the top of cars. Mitt Romney is
the kind of guy who wants to “put y’all back in chains.” Mitt Romney is leading a “war on women”
and, in fact, has compiled a binder full of women that he can then use to prosecute his war. Mitt
Romney is the type of guy who would specifically fire an employee so that five years later his wife
would die of cancer thanks to lack of health insurance. Mitt Romney would take his money and put it
in an overseas bank account specifically to deprive the American people of money. The Obama
campaign slogan: “Romney: Rich, Sexist, Racist Jackass.”
Now, back to the American voter. Let’s assume you’ve been watching this messaging battle, and
now you have two choices: Barack Obama, Not a Very Good President vs. Mitt Romney, The Worst
Guy Ever. Who are you going to vote for? Most people would pick “nice guy, bad politician” over
Mussolini. And they did.
The exit polls showed that on the major issues of the day, Americans agreed with Mitt Romney.
They didn’t like Obama’s record on jobs, the economy, Obamacare. But when it came to the key
question – which candidate cares more about people like me? – Romney got blown out, 81 percent to
18 percent.
Now, that’s not because Barack Obama is a warm and fuzzy guy. Even those who surround Barack
Obama all day describe him as a cold fish. Obama is not someone who will bring over a bowl of
chicken soup when you have the flu; he’s not even the guy who will drive you to the airport when it
inconveniences him. Yet, somehow, he was considered the more empathetic of the two candidates.
Why? Because Romney was perceived as so darn mean.
No wonder the left seeks to avoid political debate at all costs. Why bother? Members of the left are
not interested in having a debate about policy. They are not interested in debating what is right or
wrong for the country. They are interested in debating
you
personally. They are interested in
castigating you as a nasty human being because you happen to disagree. This is what makes leftists
leftists: an unearned sense of moral superiority over you. And if they can instill that sense of moral
superiority in others by making you the bad guy, they will. People on the left are taught from
childhood that they are better than conservatives – it makes them feel good to hate conservatives. And
that hatred is justified because, after all, conservatives are bigots.
This is why it’s so comfortable to be on the left: that unearned sense of moral superiority.
Unearned, because folks on the left haven’t
done
anything positive for decades. College students’
sense of moral righteousness doesn’t come from achievement – it comes from believing that you are
a bad person. You are a racist and sexist; they are not. That makes them good, even if they don’t give
charity, have never met a black person, stand for policies that impoverish minority communities
across the United States, and enable America-haters around the globe. It doesn’t matter that if they
pointed out a KKK member to you, you’d run across the lot to knock him out; in order for them to be
morally superior, you must be morally inferior. Calling you a racist and sexist, a bigot and a
homophobe, gives them a sense of satisfaction with their status in the universe, even if they never help
a single individual human being.
This is a bully tactic. When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you
happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that’s bullying.
When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the
government shutdown, that’s bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they
disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification.
That’s nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.
The Institutional Takeover
The leftist bullies have taken over the major institutions of the United States.
The university system has been monopolized by a group of folks who believe that it’s no longer
worthwhile debating the evidence on tax rates, or whether the Laffer curve is right, or whether
Keynesian policies actually promote economic growth. They don’t want to debate those issues. What
they want to teach instead is that is you are personally ignorant, bigoted, corrupt, and mean if you
disagree with them. Their opinions are not opinions; they are fact.
This is the hallmark of being stuck inside a bubble. The people who occupy the professoriate have
not had to work a real job – a job with real-world consequences -- in over 30 years. They’ve lived on
a campus where everyone agrees with them, convincing them that their beliefs are universally-held.
Anyone who disagrees is a “flat earther.” Anyone who disagrees is a monster. You are a monster.
They used to call this Pauline Kael syndrome. Pauline Kael used to be a columnist for The
New
Yorker.
Back in 1972, writing about the George McGovern/Richard Nixon landslide election, she
famously observed, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon.
Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel
them.” She could feel the evil rolling off those people.
At the university level, this perspective is commonplace – and that leads to ideological
discrimination. That discrimination generally doesn’t manifest as purposefully giving conservatives
bad grades; most professors try to stay away from that, and do not attempt to destroy people in the
classroom, except for a few not-that-rare exceptions. Professors
will,
however, grade conservative
perspectives down unconsciously, because they believe those perspectives are wrong, and the people
who advocate for them are bad. That’s why when I was in college, I wrote like a communist on my
tests -- thank God for blue books! I would put my student ID number on my blue books, and I was
now indistinguishable from a member of the Spartacus Club. I recommend this strategy for all
conservative students at liberal organizations and liberal universities: there’s no reason to sacrifice
your grades because the professor ’s a jerk.
This sort of bullying isn’t just present at the universities. It has taken over the media wholesale.
For the media, all arguments are character arguments. If you disagree with the members of the media
about something, you are a fundamentally bad human being. The same is eminently true in
Hollywood, where moral narrative is the heart of the business. Hollywood is incredibly clever about
pushing their narrative. They create a set of characters that you believe in, like and want to hang out
with; you want to come back and hang out with those characters week after week after week. Then
Hollywood twists your newfound friends into exemplars of absolutely irresponsible behavior,
representatives of behavior you find personally unpalatable. But you like the character – and so, the
Hollywood emotional appeal goes, you’re supposed to like what he or she does. This is the
Hollywood argument same-sex marriage: you like certain characters, so if you don’t like their
behavior, it’s because you’re mean and nasty. This is what Hollywood does best.

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