How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps Quotes

“When doctors don’t know what is causing a disease or how to cure it, they call it a syndrome. When sociologists don’t know what is causing a problem or how to cure it, they call it systemic.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Since America is, by all available metrics, incredibly tolerant and open, it has grown more and more difficult to find instances of true oppression in America. When demand for victimization narratives exceeded supply, Disintegrationists mine American history for such oppression, then declare that modern ills can be attributed to historical injustices. Sometimes, to some extent, that is the case. But the outsize attempt to pin modern, continuing ills on events centuries old wears thin for those who would rather solve problems than create them.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Government cannot change the hearts of human beings—it cannot make them that which they are not.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Markets are natural outgrowths of human nature, and natural rights. You own yourself, and you own your labor—and no one has the right to remove that labor from you for the good of the collective without just compensation.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Benjamin Franklin placed free speech at the center of American life and American philosophy some five decades before the Constitution was written: Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. . . . An evil magistrate intrusted with power to punish for words, would be armed with a weapon the most destructive and terrible. Under pretence of pruning off the exuberant branches, he would be apt to destroy the tree.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“We have the ability to treat everyone equally under law; we have the ability to create governments to protect individual rights. But we don’t have the ability to guarantee that even two kids the same age living on the same street will start from the same point; two children growing up in the same family don’t even start from the same point. We certainly don’t have the ability to ensure that everyone ends at the same point.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Free speech must be replaced by hate speech regulations, with hate itself left undefined. Freedom of religion must be replaced by secular universalism. Freedom of association and contract must be prohibited, so long as that freedom cuts against the appropriate standards of ethnic, racial, or sexual diversity (under this standard, for example, an all-black school is considered diverse, while a police department that doesn’t represent ethnic populations proportionately is considered discriminatory, even if that police department staffs based on meritocratic concerns). Due process must be supplanted with mob rule, private property with public need.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Students are taught to confess their “white privilege”—a key component of the intersectional theory undercutting traditional American notions of individual responsibility and rights”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“By ripping away the core components of Unionist government—delegated powers, checks and balances, and federalism—Disintegrationist government heightens the stakes of politics while reducing our common ground. It forces Americans to fight for the high ground of power, lest they be victimized by their opponents, who seek to dominate them using the mechanisms of arbitrary and unanswerable governmental coercion.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“We are not gods, and simply do not have the capacity to rectify imbalances of innate individual qualities. We have the ability to treat everyone equally under law; we have the ability to create governments to protect individual rights. But we don’t have the ability to guarantee that even two kids the same age living on the same street will start from the same point; two children growing up in the same family don’t even start from the same point. We certainly don’t have the ability to ensure that everyone ends at the same point. Setting up all Americans as either purveyors of a hierarchical and discriminatory system or as victims of that system, we disintegrate the ties that bind Americans together.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“The story of America is one of the great stories in human history. America was founded on great principles; America has struggled to live up to those principles, but with each step toward those principles, America has magnified its own greatness. The world is better off for America. We ought to understand the shadows and curses of our history; we ought to understand how history affects the present. But we all ought to understand, most of all, that we are part of the same history, not rivals in a country divided by identity or class.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Yes, we are flawed.

Yes, we are cruel and generous and brutal and gentle and cynical and idealistic.

But most of all, we must not be enemies.

We must be Americans - Americans together - and we will be so again, when we are touched by the better angels of our nature.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“I want my kids to have their adventure. That's the great joy of life: the adventure, choosing correctly in the face of adversity, overcoming obstacles and thriving. They can only have that adventure if I teach them to defend the individual rights our founders recognized - rights that preexist government, that adhere to them as individual human beings created in the image of God; if I teach them to engage in a culture of robust debate and to act with virtue in that culture; and if I remind them that they are inheritors of a grand and glorious American tradition, and that it is their responsibility to carry forward that tradition while widening its promises to more and more human beings.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“What, then, are the easily identifiable factors that lead to lower income mobility for black Americans? First, lack of fathers in the home: single motherhood is one of the most powerful predictors of intergenerational poverty.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Frederick Jackson Turner, president of the American Historical Association, stated in 1910 that history ought to be separated from objective study, and ought to instead be activated in service of “points of view furnished by new conditions which reveal the influence and significance of forces not adequately known by the historians of the previous generation.” Carl Becker, a deeply influential progressive historian, suggested as much: “To me, nothing can be duller than historical facts, and nothing more interesting than the service they can be made to render in the effort to solve the everlasting riddle of human existence.” Becker would later explain, “in truth, the historical fact is a thing wonderfully elusive after all, very difficult to fix, almost impossible to distinguish from ‘theory,’ to which it is commonly supposed to be so completely antithetical.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“The philosophy underlying secessionism never died. It merely metastasized. Today, Disintegrationists claim, just as Davis and Calhoun did, that America was based on a power arrangement, not on fundamental principle. Ironically, Disintegrationists make such claims on the basis of defending the same minority groups Davis and Calhoun targeted. But their larger point—that the entire American system is a hierarchy of power, not a system based on equally applicable principles—perversely reflects the secessionist view of American history.6 In the Disintegrationist view, America is corrupt, a ruse and a sham promising liberty but actually guaranteeing tyranny. The American system, in this view, did not replace the Hobbesian war of all against all—it merely channeled that war into a system of dominance by white Americans, male Americans, straight Americans. All the high-minded talk about unalienable rights and delegated powers is simply kabuki theater. The true story of America is the story of the strong crushing the weak, both domestically and abroad.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Draw a line down the middle of any room, and you will find group disparities in income, IQ, education, and age. Such disparities are not the result of societal discrimination. They are the result of statistical probability. But according to the Disintegrationists, disparities are automatically the result of discrimination, often relabeled under vague terms like “privilege,” “institutional racism,” or “patriarchalism.” The Disintegrationist philosophy therefore leads to this extraordinarily destructive logic: we must have equality of opportunity, which means unequal rights, because people are not inherently equal; any inequality in society is proof of inequality of opportunity. No system can survive under this logic: inequality of outcome is a feature inherent to humankind. But that’s precisely the point. The system must be destroyed.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“philosophers warred over the best governmental regime for ensuring the enforcement of virtue (that is, right reason); the ancients were far less concerned with natural rights than the imposition of natural law. Thus, Plato argued (possibly ironically) in The Republic for a heavy-handed regime of philosopher-kings controlling all aspects of human life, and rigidly categorizing human beings by quality;31 Aristotle argued instead in favor of a system that would combine aspects of democracy with aristocracy, relying on Greek tradition for that model.32 Cicero, following Aristotle’s lead, championed a mixed system—a system of shared government responsibility.33 As Western history unfolded, it became clear that unchecked monarchies could limit rights as”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Dr. Deanna Adkins of Duke University School of Medicine claims that gender identity is “the only medically supported determinant of sex,” adding, “It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“All that will be left are polarized groups, seeking their own interests.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Forty years ago, Thomas Sowell observed, “West Indians in the United States have continued to hold sizable advantages over American Negroes in incomes and occupations.”59 It’s still true today.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Alexis de Tocqueville, as we have seen, paid tribute to both the entrepreneurial spirit of Americans and to the ability of American citizens to pursue their economic interests. “Almost all Americans are comfortable,” Tocqueville observed. “In America most of the rich have begun by being poor. . .”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“The core of critical race theory (CRT) lies in the propositions that racism is ordinary and permanent; that whiteness and property coincide; that history is told only by dominant groups, and requires a counternarrative; and that color-blindness is a myth, and that the notion of equality of rights is itself a reflection of color hierarchy.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“you wish to suggest that systemic change is necessary in order to achieve an end goal, the most useful strategy is to blame the system. And if you can’t blame today’s system, simply label it an outgrowth of yesterday’s.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“These three elements—America’s philosophy of reason, equality, liberty, and limited government; America’s culture of individual rights and social duties; and America’s shared history—define our country.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“The philosophy of the United States centers on three central principles, as articulated in the Declaration: on the reality of natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that preexist government; on the equality of men before the law; and on the notion that government is instituted only to protect those preexisting rights and equality of men before the law.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Disintegrationist philosophy of government boils down to a government without limits, administered by bureaucrats without accountability.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

“Then there is another strain of thought. Throughout American history, this strain of thought has emerged victorious—though never without pain and struggle, and sometimes at the cost of death. This philosophy argues that what unites Americans is far stronger and deeper than what divides us, that our vows to one another were cemented in blood, that we are inextricably intertwined. A separation would kill us both.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps