Episode Details

On his daily podcast, Ben Shapiro notes that many were outraged that ABC had suspended Whoopi Goldberg from The View for two weeks following comments she made about race and the Holocaust. But Shapiro notes that it isn’t good enough to suspend her, per the Left’s and The View’s OWN standards. He cites the Ilya Shapiro case wherein Georgetown Law is now trying to decide whether Ilya Shapiro should be fired for an offensive tweet. The students at Georgetown are holding a protest and demanding he is fired.

If Georgetown fires Shapiro, if the collective hive on the Left goes along with this, then they must, by their own standards of intent vs. impact, fire Whoopi Goldberg.

Says Ben Shapiro:

Okay, so here's the thing. They didn't just suspend Roseanne Barr, for making a racist statement about Valerie Jarrett. They fired Roseanne Barr and took the top rated sitcom off the air. So here's the deal. If you guys are going to play this game, where if somebody is openly identified as anywhere close to a conservative and they say something that is a bad thing, little trademark symbol, if somebody does a bad thing, and they're completely removed from their job, then you don't get to suspend Whoopi Goldberg, you have to fire her. These are the standards and you set them and you don't get to play by two sets of standards.

One of the most inexplicable untruths we’ve been forced to swallow over the past few years is the idea that intent doesn’t matter. When someone, or a group of people, feel hurt or offended it’s called impact. You caused them to be offended and thus, you are guilty.

Impact matters. Intent does not. You are still required to apologize and take responsibility for causing harm. As in:

But you can see how that would be a problem for the modern-day Left. They need villains. If Dustin Hoffman got handsy with a woman on a set 40 years ago, even if that was just what people did back then (it was), intent can’t matter. Punishment must be enacted because the story being told NOW causes harm to people who hear it.

Intent can’t matter when deciding whether the Roosevelt statue should stay outside the National History Museum in New York. Intent doesn’t matter if an old Hollywood movie has outdated stereotypes. These images still cause harm and must contain a warning or else be removed entirely. The image of Thomas Jefferson causes harm because he once owned slaves, regardless of how things were back then.

If a professor says something that people find offensive, he or she could lose their job. We don’t even argue about it much anymore. We just kind of go along with it. The Left is in power and they don’t really believe in forgiveness. They believe in punishing people for impact, like Donald McNeil at the New York Times.

The only acceptable response to Ilya Shapiro’s tweets about a “lesser black woman” is that he meant it because he is a racist. They would never consider the other possibility - that he did not choose his words wisely and was swarmed and persecuted as a result. He has apologized, of course, but that doesn’t matter.

This is covered quite well by Bari Weiss on her substack:

Led by a Slate journalist, the Twitter mob did what Twitter mobs do and stoked the intended result: In an email to the school the dean called Shapiro’s tweets “appalling” and “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law.”

Then Shapiro, who had already deleted the tweet, sent an apology addressed to the Dean William Treanor and the entire Georgetown community: 

“I sincerely and deeply apologize for some poorly drafted tweets I posted late Wednesday night,” he wrote. 

If you’ve ever been the