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Ok, I just have to go off on one more thing about Ben Shapiro's vision of history. It is clear that when Ben talks reverently about "the founders" he means only the white people who were alive in the 18th century.
Ben especially likes the non-racist founders, which is good. The Venn Diagram of white founders and anti-racist founders, however, is close to a null set. There were many critics of racism in the founding era, but THEY WERE ALMOST ALL AFRICAN-AMERICAN, both free and enslaved.
There's Lemuel Haynes, Phyllis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, or Harry Washington (formerly enslaved by GW who then helped settle Sierra Leone), etc. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Was…
The ideas and actions of these black founders helped push the nation in the direction of freedom, though the ultimate triumph over slavery would take until the Civil War.
But like almost all American conservatives, Ben likes to celebrate America's commitment to equality while denigrating almost all of the actual people and movements (past and present) who fought the battles on behalf of it.
Conservatives love that slavery ended, but they hate John Brown and those radical abolitionists. Conservatives love that women have more rights today, but they can't stand those damn "feminzazis." They pride themselves on being tolerant of gay people, but think Act Up was icky.
The ultimate irony of course is that for people who claim to love America the most, they know so incredibly little about it and seem to have so little curiosity about learning anything about it that doesn't confirm their radically constricted priors.
And this is precisely how you get politician "historians" like Mike Lee who think the best way to explain the 14th Amendment is to look at the writings of someone like Thomas Jefferson, rather than, O I don't know, Frederick Douglass?
If your vision of American history can not authentically incorporate the actions and aspirations of anyone who wasn't a property-owning white man, then you're not producing history, you're producing self-serving propaganda.
