The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

by Ben Shapiro

This desire to silence—or subdue—those who disagree with us has been reaching new, terrifying heights.

Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.

Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives.

But we care about both the moral and the true, and that requires a baseline assumption: that we can discover the moral and the true.

Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.”

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger wrote in 1921 that the question of sterilizing the disabled was “the most urgent problem today.”70 In one of her speeches, she suggested the sterilization or quarantining of some “fifteen or twenty millions of our population,” who would—she put it rather gently—“be organized into soldiers of defense—defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”71 She declared birth control “nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.”72 For her work, Sanger was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a staggering thirty-one times—twice as many times as Gandhi.

Disgusting. Planned Parenthood started as eugenics and still is killing millions of lives today.

The same is happening in medicine, where schools have been encouraged to stop using the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) for ethnic minorities. The impact: “From 2013 to 2016, medical schools nationally admitted 57 percent of black applicants with a low MCAT of 24 to 26, but only 8 percent of whites and 6 percent of Asians with those same low scores, according to Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch.” How it helps patients to have less qualified but more ethnically diverse heart surgeons remains unexplained.

We used to see each other as brothers and sisters, not “the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent” or “the privileged vs. the victims.”

As Ronald Reagan put it, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

Our parents never die so long as we keep the flame of their ideals alive, and pass that flame along to our children.