Ben Shapiro’s column that demands people stop apologizing for our history

Then there’s Ben Shapiro’s column that demands people stop apologizing for our history. Here’s how his column runs down the home stretch:

The war on the history of the West isn’t merely a difference of opinion, to be glossed over with a few words about bipartisanship. America is divided right now between two groups: those who believe that America and the West are fundamentally good and worth fighting for, despite their myriad historic shortcomings; and those who believe that America and the West are fundamentally evil and racist, steeped in structural power imbalances. A house divided against itself cannot stand; those who care for their homes cannot declare unity with arsonists.

There can be no politically unifying moments with history-twisting harpies — harpies who would be speaking German without Churchill. Anyone who insists on wiping away the legacy of good in the West in favor of cynically blustering about the unique nastiness of the West cannot be included in a call for national harmony.

EXCLUSIVE: Sally Pipes On Why A Single-Payer Healthcare System Is Bad For America

An average Canadian family of four pays, through hidden taxes and fees, around thirteen thousand dollars for long waiting lists, rationed care, and light access to the latest treatment.

.. Also, there’s a shortage of doctors and hospital beds in Canada because doctors’ salaries are tied to what each provincial government is willing to pay for a procedure. Of course, a lot of doctors quit medicine and retired early.

.. This would mean that the United States would have the same problems as Canada. Rationed care, long waits, much higher taxes. That includes income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes, and even if you doubled all of those taxes, it would not cover the cost of this of this single-payer system.

.. High premiums, high deductibles, narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, and only 12 million people covered in a country of over 330 million, so it has not worked.

.. I would like to see it fully repealed and then replaced with a plan that empowers patients and doctors, not the federal government.

.. The plan I would like to see would change the tax code to allow those with private insurance to get the [same] tax benefits as those with employer-based coverage. People who are insured through their employer get their coverage tax free, but if you go into the individual market you have to pay for it with tax dollars.  I would like to see

  • states reduce their mandates on healthcare. I would like to see
  • medical malpractice reform.
  • Doctors do practice defensive medicine because they are afraid of being sued. I’d like to see people be able to
  • buy insurance from across state lines. I’d like to see
  • Medicare made better by increasing the age limit from 65 because the average American lives to 79.
  • I would like to see changes to Medicaid.

.. there are only about six million people in the market who have chronic or pre-existing conditions. The solution to help those people is to allow the states to set-up high-risk pools with funds from the federal government so that those people could get coverage and not make younger, healthier people pay for those costs. High-risk pools are a great way to deal with people who have these pre-existing conditions.

.. Long wait periods, people dying in the hospitals, and it even talks about the Veterans Administration which is a true single-payer system. It discusses how harmful it has been to the vets, and how they need privatization so our vets can have the best care.

Generation Shapiro

Ben Shapiro and the future of American conservatism

.. the person who appeared to be doing the most to shape the thinking of the new generation of Republican leaders was not the president of the United States—but Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old anti-Trump conservative pundit who came up unprompted in more than a third of my conversations.”

.. More important, though, is what Shapiro’s celebrity tells us about the changing nature of media, the emerging sensibility of conservative youth, and indeed the future of American conservatism itself.

Shapiro owes a lot to social media. His appearances on Fox News Channel are not the cause but the consequence of his fame. It is by searching YouTube that teenagers come across his debates with campus lefties, his speeches, his appearances on like-minded podcasts, and his extended interviews with friends and other members of the so-called intellectual dark web.

.. Shapiro is a conservative pundit for a dis-intermediated age.

.. They are more interested in debating social and cultural issues than the problems of government or the midterm elections. They have a snarky sense of humor that appreciates the irony in trolling the Left or “owning the libs.”

.. Nor is their consumption of media limited to conservative sources. They are well aware of the critiques of the right from the mainstream media and comedy hosts, and even laugh at some of the jokes on SNL and John Oliver.

.. The issue that motivates these young people is political correctness:

  • its denial of differences between the sexes, its
  • reduction of identity to ethnic and racial ancestry, its
  • stultifying effect on intellectual inquiry and free speech.

For them, President Trump and the constellation of social and political problems with which he is associated are secondary to larger questions of cultural and academic freedom.

..  Ben Shapiro resembles no one so much as the young William F. Buckley Jr.