You know and love him as host of the most savagely irreverent conservative podcast on the web. Now, Ben Shapiro is debunking common Leftist fallacies in the way only he can. This collection is full of concise, fact-heavy pieces that will arm you with the knowledge you need, while offering insight into the logic of the Left. This is Debunked.

The Left constantly argues that gun control prevents crime. This ignores two pertinent facts. 
First, that criminals don&#8217;t tend to obey laws and you might need a gun to protect yourself. And it ignores the fact that gun control also removes power from individuals to band together to defend themselves against tyrannical governments. Democracies do have an ugly tendency to go too radical from time to time. So, weapons in the hands of the population help guarantee against that, as the founders knew.
By restricting the conversation to gun crime itself, the Left generally bases its belief on two things. First, gun crime statistics, rather than general crime statistics; and two; comparing non-comparable populations. 
The Left argues that nations like Great Britain have nearly no gun deaths. That&#8217;s true in many countries with heavy gun laws because there are fewer guns. But that also neglects the fact that Great Britain has far higher violent crime rates than the United States — which does make sense since guns tend to deter crime. According to Politifact, for England and Wales, the rate of violent crime was 775 per 100,000 as of 2013. For the United States, the rate was 383 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The UK had approximately double the rate of the United States. 
Also worth noting: if more guns equal more crime, it&#8217;s very odd that the United States’ rates of gun ownership have skyrocketed in recent decades, while our rate of violent homicide by gun has sliced in half.
Second, the Left makes comparisons between non-comparable population groups — populations that differ in terms of age and culture, for example. The Left will claim that European countries that are largely homogenous and middle class have lower gun violence rates than the United States. 
But let&#8217;s take a look at Vermont. Vermont has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States and has always had the lowest levels of murders in the United States. As Charles Cooke of National Review points out, in 2012, there were eight murders there — just two of which involve firearms. 
With those stats, you would probably assume there are no guns in Vermont. Nope. Vermont has virtually no gun laws. Nearly three-quarters of all Vermonters own firearms. As Cooke points out, well we can absolutely say that A) an abundance of firearms and a set of loose regulations do not inevitably lead to more crime; and B) that the widespread suggestion that they do is dishonest. 
Leah Libresco is a former gun control advocate and data cruncher for FiveThirtyEight. She wrote in The Washington Post in October 2017, “My colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.” 
According to Libresco, neither Britain nor Australia experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun-related crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. 
What about Joe Biden&#8217;s supposed “common-sense” assault weapons ban?
ProPublica — far from a right-wing source — found in 2014 that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban didn’t affect gun crime in any meaningful way. Nearly all researchers agree with that assessment. 
One of the most bizarre arguments that you hear from people in the anti-gun community is only the police should have guns. The reality is that what guns are for in private hands is to respond before the police can. The police can only respond if somebody calls the police. If, however, somebody arrives at your house, and they intend to do you harm, many times you don&#8217;t actually have the ability to call a cop, and when you&#8217;re looking at major cities that are generally underpoliced, the best available defense may be your ability to wield a firearm — which is why during the riots of last year, there were a lot of people who were going out and buying guns and standing on top of their businesses, and basically warning people away. 
There are some folks who argue that if you require a license to drive, certainly you should go through a bunch of hoops if you want to legally own a gun. Now, pretty much everybody agrees that if you have a criminal history, you shouldn&#8217;t own a gun. However, if the argument is that “in order to defend myself, I have to have the state give me a license” — that is a very different argument than “in order for me to transport myself faster, I ought to have a license to drive.”
The Second Amendment was written specifically in order to ensure that states were able to resist predations. That is why the language of the Second Amendment suggests that a well-armed militia — being necessary for the preservation of a free state — the people have a right to keep and bear arms. 
The reason that the well-regulated militia clause is in there is that it is a justificatory clause: it is there to justify. The goal of that clause is to suggest that you should join a well-regulated militia — not a well “legally-regulated militia,” a “militia” that trains a lot. Like, they regulate. They were called regulars. 
If you get together and you train a lot and you form a militia, then you are able to stand up to grand federal predations. This was the explicit purpose of the Second Amendment. 
There are some morons who suggest that the Second Amendment ought not apply to modern weapons; that it only applies to muskets. This is sort of like saying that freedom of the press only applies to printing presses because the founders never could have anticipated that people would be able to print things off of the computer. Freedom of the press was not restricted to the mechanisms of distribution of information, nor is the freedom to keep and bear arms restricted to the arms in common practice at that time.
People on the Left are constantly attempting to avoid the consequences of their own position, but the reality is that for many on the Left, they just don&#8217;t like the Second Amendment and would like to see it go away. But a lot of them will say, “I love the Second Amendment, I love guns and firearms, I go hunting.” And then the first move they make is “let&#8217;s get rid of assault weapons,” without any evidence that it will be effective. 
The reality is the vast majority of murders committed in the United States with guns are committed with handguns. None of this makes any sort of internal sense; if they were just going to be consistent, they would admit full-scale what they really want is gun confiscation. 
Ayn Rand once wrote, “Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man&#8217;s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.” That, of course, is exactly right; there is a reason why tyrannical states use, as their first move, an attempt to disarm the population. In Nazi Germany, gun regulations were high on the list of priorities. In Soviet Russia, gun regulations: high on the list of priorities. Tyrannies are constantly seeking to remove all possible threat of resistance, which is one of the reasons why tyrannical governments are so often in favor of gun control. 
A lot of gun control advocates deny the possibility that we might need guns to protect ourselves against a tyrannical government. They&#8217;ll say things like, “well, could you really fight back against a nuclear armed force?” Well, I mean, the fact is that small arms have generally been a pretty good defense against overwhelming power going all the way back to Vietnam. Guerilla warfare has been a successful tactic since the days of George Washington. 
But the broader question is whether governments tend to go tyrannical at all. To ignore the history of governments going tyrannical is to ignore pretty much all of history. Germany was a democracy before it was a dictatorship. Russia, after the tsarist regime, turned into a socialist democracy for a brief period of time before it turned into a full-scale USSR dictatorship. China was run not by Mao Tse Tung in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but rather by Chiang Kai-shek, who ended up actually founding Taiwan. Japan had a certain root level of democracy before it was a dictatorship. 
Countries routinely go through stages where they are democracies, and then they slide into dictatorship. So, the basic idea that you should never feel a threat from the government is simply an evolutionary hangover of the fact that the United States has never been — thank God — a dictatorship. 
One of the great things about our Constitution, of course, is that there is plenty of play in the joints when it comes to how local officials address issues with regard to guns. The general question as to whether the federal government ought to be involved in the gun issue at all is basically obviated by the Constitution, but the federal constitution was never actually meant to apply to the states. 
So, if you wanted a locality that really didn&#8217;t like guns, theoretically you could have that locality. Now, there have been some experiments along these lines. It turns out that if you ban guns in a particular community, and everybody knows that guns are banned, you know where criminals are more likely to rob a house? However, if everybody in the community has a gun, you know where criminals don&#8217;t actually want to rob a house in the middle of the night? 
One of the big talking points people on the right use, of course, is the idea that Chicago has heavy gun regulations, and yet gun deaths continue to be extraordinarily high in Chicago. The same thing is true of Washington, DC, for example. 
And it keeps getting worse: the Left will suggest that this is because people in Chicago go to the outlying areas, they purchase their guns, they bring them back to Chicago. If we could just shut down gun sales in the entire general region, then you wouldn&#8217;t have murder in Chicago. This ignores the fact that plenty of places — like these exact towns — where people buy guns and don&#8217;t kill each other. The real problem in Chicago is lack of policing. 
A lot of people are worried about security at schools. Many are concerned that if you ban guns in the broader community, that maybe this will increase security at the schools themselves. 
That, of course, is pretty ridiculous. Most of the cases of school shootings that we&#8217;ve seen are people who have either violated the law in some way and obtained their gun illegally; or, alternatively, obtained their gun legally, and then violated the law to go into the school in the first place. Once again, criminals generally do not actually follow the law. 
Security at schools can be improved pretty easily: you need armed guards at schools. Every major Jewish day school in America — at least in the Orthodox community — has serious security standing outside. There is no reason we can&#8217;t have the same thing at schools around the country. If you want a job creation program, that would be a job creation program. 
Many on the Left believe that if you get rid of guns, you create a safer society. And to a certain extent, you sort of understand the logic. If guns are used to shoot people, what if there just were no guns? Sort of like their argument about nuclear weapons: if you don&#8217;t want to go nuclear war, what do you just get rid of all the nuclear weapons? 
Well, it&#8217;s pie in the sky in both situations. The idea that you&#8217;re gonna cleanse a society like the United States — in which there are over 300 million guns in circulation — of those guns, and this will generally lower the crime rate, is not supported by the data.
One of the weirdest things about American public opinion with regard to guns is that it&#8217;s so conflicting. 
So every time there&#8217;s a shooting and it gets a lot of media coverage, people will say, “we are very much in favor of gun regulations” — and then, as soon as you ask them, “how about this specific gun regulation,” they&#8217;re like, “nope, not interested in that one.”
The reality is that guns in the hands of a bad person are a weapon that can be used for bad things; and guns in the hands of a good, law-abiding person are weapons that can be used for good purposes. 
Guns are, like most other inanimate objects, tools. What really matters is who wields them.
As somebody who&#8217;s frequently threatened, I do own firearms. I don&#8217;t own them because I go hunting or because I enjoy target shooting; really not my thing. But I do own enough guns to protect myself and protect my family.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

SHAPIRO: Debunking Gun Control

Debunked

Gun Control

You&#8217;ve heard that climate change is going to put an end to all life on Earth; that it puts civilization in existential peril.
That if we don&#8217;t take drastic action, hundreds of millions — perhaps even billions — of human beings are going to die.
These are lies.
Let&#8217;s begin with what climate change is. According to William Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, “The ultimate source of global warming is the burning of fossil or carbon-based fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, which leads to emissions of carbon dioxide, CO2.” 
These greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, where they result in feedback loops that increase global temperatures. Increased global temperatures have a variety of follow-on effects, ranging from rising sea levels, to storm frequency, to ocean acidification.
Possible impact? Well, there&#8217;s serious debate over how much the world will warm over the course of the next century. 
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the global climate will warm somewhere between 2°C and 4°C above the mean temperature during the 1850 to 1900 period. That&#8217;s a pretty large range. 
There&#8217;s also significant uncertainty about sensitivity of the climate to carbon emissions. As NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt explains, climate sensitivity has “quite a wide uncertain range, and that has big implications for how serious human-made climate change will be.” 
There&#8217;s wide uncertainty about the impact with regard to climate change. Will human beings be able to adapt? How many “shock events” will occur? It&#8217;s impossible to predict shock events, of course, but we can at the very least attempt to quantify the probabilities. This allows us to quantify the sacrifices we should make in the here and now to prevent significant possibility of future damage. 
So, what exactly should we do? Uncertainties about the impact of climate change lie at the heart of climate change policy. How much should we sacrifice current economic wellbeing and future economic growth for the sake of stabilizing the environment? 
In essence, there are two possible pathways towards dealing with climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Human beings are really good at adaptation. The costs of mitigation are extremely high. 
Nordhaus, for example, has suggested that people ought to accept that a certain amount of global warming is baked into the cake, and that we&#8217;re going to be able to adapt to it, and that we ought to work on curbing global warming outside of that range. Nordhaus suggests that the cost of mitigating global warming to less than 2.0°C over the course of the next 100 years far exceeds the future damages that would occur from such a climate change. 
So, you shouldn&#8217;t bother to try and mitigate below that level. Nordhaus suggests that we have to try measures to contain climate change to 3.5°C over the course of the next century.
Experts in politicized science have no problem proposing radical solutions to climate change, which just coincidentally happen to align perfectly with left-wing political recommendations. Those who disagree are quickly slandered as climate deniers, no matter their acceptance of IPCC climate change estimates.
Thus the media trot out Greta Thunberg, a scientifically unqualified teenage climate activist who travels the world obnoxiously lecturing adults about their lack of commitment to curbing climate change.
They trot her out as an expert, and they ignore actual scientific voices on climate change. 
In truth, very little can be done about climate change in terms of regulation without seriously harming the economy. To abide by the Paris Agreement guidelines, for example, would cost — by Heritage Foundation estimates — at least a $20,000 income loss per family by 2035, and a total aggregate GDP loss of $2.5 trillion. And as even the UN Environment Programme found in 2017, if every major country kept to its pledges under the much-ballyhooed Paris Agreement, the Earth will still warm at least 3°C by 2100.
In fact, even if the United States were to cut its carbon emissions 100%, the world would be 0.2°C cooler by 2100. To reach net zero carbon emissions worldwide by 2050 via Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s infamous Green New Deal would cost the typical family of four $8,000 every single year.
Proposals for global carbon taxes are also highly unlikely to become reality. There are simply too many developing countries reliant on carbon-based forms of energy. 
So, what exactly should we do?
I&#8217;m not suggesting that nothing can be done about climate change; we should be pushing for research and development into better energy storage. One of the problems with solar and wind energy is that energy must essentially be used as soon as it&#8217;s generated. We should also be cheering on America&#8217;s fracking industry, which has redirected energy use from more carbon-intensive industries. That&#8217;s the reason for America&#8217;s carbon emissions reduction over the past few years.
We should be pushing for the use of nuclear energy, and for research and development into how to make it cheaper. As Bjorn Lomborg, former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute, writes, “Nuclear energy doesn&#8217;t make carbon dioxide. Perhaps surprisingly, nuclear energy is also very safe.”
We could also invest R&amp;D dollars into carbon-sucking technologies — machines capable of sucking carbon emissions from the air. 
Then there&#8217;s adaptation. First, we should be promoting capitalism, which increases living standards around the world, thus making people in poverty less vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. You aren’t all that worried about climate change personally because you probably live in a globally wealthy area with access to resources. Making everybody more wealthy means more ability to withstand the risks of climate change. 
We should also be investing in adaptive measures like sea walls and artificial nourishment, essentially adding sandy beaches, and we should be looking at new technologies like geoengineering, which can actually change the climate itself. 
Yet those who promote these policies are treated as deniers. Those who shout that the world is ending and the only solution is massive economic redistributionism are treated as truth speakers.
This should alert you to the real agenda for many who promote climate change hysteria: remaking the global economy, not preventing or mitigating the effects of climate change.
If you want to take climate change seriously, you have to look at real solutions. And, if you want to solve the problem of climate change, you have to view it as an actual problem, not merely as some sort of horrible dystopia that we must embrace socialism in order to avoid. 
The reason the Left has to put focus on climate change is because you need a crisis in order to incentivize people to engage in strategies that really affect their lives in nasty ways. 
A mistake that many on the Right make is to simply say that they don&#8217;t believe global warming is happening at all. The truth is that global warming is happening. We&#8217;re not sure exactly to what extent and, because of that uncertainty, it makes zero sense to spend trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars mitigating a problem that may not be nearly as severe as the Left suggests it is — especially when those trillions of dollars are spent in pursuit of actual policies that may not mitigate climate change in the first place.
Pretty much everybody in the know on the Left agrees with every single thing that I&#8217;m saying in this video. I have been to high-level conferences with climate scientists from top universities, all of whom behind closed doors will tell you exactly the same thing that I&#8217;m telling you right now. But then, as soon as the doors open, they&#8217;ll walk out front and explain that if we don&#8217;t embrace AOC’s Green New Deal, then you must be some sort of climate denier.
You keep hearing over and over and over that climate change is going to kill us all. It&#8217;s absolute nonsense.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

SHAPIRO: Debunking Climate Change Hysteria

Climate Change

It feels like America’s major cities are falling apart. And that’s because in large part, they are.
There’s only one problem with rent control: it is a giant failure.
That giant failure is rooted in a very simple lie: that landlords are capable of extracting extraordinary rent from tenants out of sheer greed.
That’s not true. Your landlord can’t just charge you any amount that he wants to charge you, because you will move. You won’t just keep living there and paying extraordinary rent if there’s an apartment building across the street charging you lower rents for the same property. As rents rise, developers also typically seek to develop more rental units. It’s supply and demand.
If I can charge a lot of money for rent, then I myself will build another building, or retrofit an old building, or convert condos into apartments. Or, a developer opponent will do the same thing. As the demand rises, the supply will rise to meet it.
Landlords aren’t any different from grocery store owners. They can only charge what the market will bear. They have to compete with the other landlords.
The big problem is rent control drives scarcity. What you end up doing is removing the profit incentive for people to come in and build new apartments. Supply drops; rents rise in all the non-rent-controlled apartments.
As even liberal Brookings Institute says, while rent control appears to help current tenants in the short run, in the long run it actually decreases affordability, it fuels gentrification, and it creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood.
Nobody builds new apartments.
So here’s the thing: government will subsidize affordable housing. Okay, so you subsidize the affordable housing. What do you think happens next? Well, nobody wants to live next to the affordable housing, so they leave. But then the tax base decreases. So then you have to raise the taxes on everybody who’s left. But then more people leave, and then the tax base decreases again. This is how you drive people out of California.
When Cambridge, Massachusetts, unleashed its rent after decades of rent control, the result was a massive uptick in property values. As Brookings noted, “rent control properties create substantial negative externalities on the nearby housing market, lowering the amenity value of these neighborhoods and making them less desirable places to live.”
When you get rid of the profit margin for landlords, landlords have no interest in increasing their costs. They stop, in many cases, even doing basic maintenance on their buildings. All of this very often makes the apartments worse for tenants, because it turns out when landlords don’t care about the condition of the buildings — because they lose money taking care of the problems — well, tenants are the ones who suffer.
Rent control leads people to stick around in apartments they don’t need just because they’re getting a deal.
So, let’s say that you have a family of four. They get a rent-controlled apartment, and the two kids each have their own bedroom. Well, over time, your kids go to college. They move out. You gonna get rid of that apartment?
Now normally, you might get rid of the apartment because the rent would be so high. Why would you keep paying for extra bedrooms that you’re not using? But, because rent control artificially lowers the price that you’re paying for the apartment, people keep sticking around.
The giant apartments are being occupied by fewer people than need the giant apartment, and the next family that has several kids can’t actually get into the apartment because you’re still there. This only strains supply even more.
According to one study, over one-fifth of all rent-controlled apartments in New York City are occupied by tenants who have the wrong number of rooms for the size of their family.
There are two ways that the Left tries to handle the problem of rents being too high. 
One is that they will pass laws that prevent developers from building more units because they don’t actually want their own property values to drop. And then they will subsidize government-owned affordable housing. This leads to this vast income gap between the people who can afford to live in a city and the people who can’t afford to live in a city, and there’s nobody in between.
The second way they have found is with rent control. You want to know why San Francisco is now all high-tech entrepreneurs and homeless people? Rent control is a big part of that story. Yet in California, Democrats are actually trying to unleash rent control across major cities. Last year, they put it on the ballot.
Even Californians weren’t dumb enough to vote for it.
In New York, the City Council considered a rent control proposal that would heavily restrict landlords’ ability to move rents in response to markets.
Economists broadly agree on the stupidity of rent control. Everybody — I mean everybody, from Thomas Sowell to Paul Krugman — understands that rent control is an idiotic idea. 
But rent control — like raising the minimum wage — is a bad idea that never dies. It’s always easy to rip on greedy landlords. It’s always a lot tougher to recognize that getting rid of landlords doesn’t make rent free; it just means that nobody builds apartment buildings anymore, and there are no more apartments available for rent.
If cities actually wanted to make housing more affordable, there are some things that they could do. The easiest thing would be to remove development regulations.
In fact, the cities that have some of the worst rent issues are the most heavily-regulated cities. Places like Seattle make it incredibly difficult to build new housing. San Francisco has been rated the most over-regulated city in terms of real estate in America. L.A. is in the top ten. Riverside is in the top ten. Is it any wonder that you see 150,000 homeless people in California these days?
In the aftermath of COVID, a lot of folks on the Left have been saying, “Look! For like a year we just blew out the rents. We just said you didn’t have to pay your rent, and it worked out just fine.” That only works so long as people on the other end know they will eventually get the rent. Otherwise, nobody builds new housing units. 
I have friends who have stopped buying into the residential real estate market specifically because they are afraid that the government is going to start forgiving mortgages, and the government is going to start forgiving rent. Once that happens, no developer in their right mind would put money into this process. 
Rent control itself is a bad liberal policy. It makes no sense. It reduces the ability to build new housing units.
Rent control has failed everywhere it’s been tried, from New York City to San Francisco.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Debunked Episode 7: Rent Control Promo" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UnO7O2waXEk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This piece is adapted from an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOBm8asJcPU">episode</a> of Ben&#8217;s newest series, Debunked. Become a Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/debunked">Insider</a> to watch the full episode now!
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

SHAPIRO: Debunking Rent Control

Housing

Readers Pass

There are a lot of people out there who have had abortions and now regret it. It’s a tragedy what has happened to you, and the fact is that now you have a chance to do something new and something better. And the first step toward something new and something better is to recognize what it is that you’ve lost so that we can all grieve with you.
The process of human life begins at conception, with a new creature created with its own genetics, its own blood type, its own body. 
Professor Hymie Gordon at the Mayo Clinic says that, “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.” Professor Micheline Mathews-Roth of Harvard Medical School agrees: “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual life begins at conception.”
Unborn human beings have their own forming nervous systems by the third week, before most women even realize they’re pregnant; their own developing eyes, legs, and hands by the fifth week; their own fingerprints by the eighth week.
Human life changes over time. Brain development changes over time. But that does not mean a child is less human than an adult, or a person with Down syndrome is less human than a person without that condition. To pretend that these human lives are somehow simple clusters of cells or balls of meat is to deny scientific reality.
Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the Constitution of the United States invalidated virtually all serious state restrictions on abortion, nearly 60 million children have been aborted in the United States. America easily averages over 1 million abortions per year — a far cry from the less than 200,000 per year reported prior to Roe v. Wade. While the oft-cited figure that one in three American women will have an abortion is certainly an exaggeration, a significant portion of American women will indeed procure abortions. 
These women will disproportionately be members of minority groups. According to the CDC, black women are five times more likely than white women to have abortions, and Latino women are twice as likely. In New York City, a child conceived by a black mother has a higher chance of being aborted than being born.
The most honest abortion advocates will simply say that an unborn child is, in fact, an unborn child, and that the unborn child’s interest in life doesn’t outweigh the mother’s preference. But most abortion advocates aren’t so honest. Instead, they participate in the blatantly anti-scientific lie that a fetus is not a human life. 
How about feeling pain? There are fully grown human beings with genetic conditions preventing them from feeling pain. Are they not human?
How about viability? Many people live thanks to dependence on machines. Are they no longer human? 
How about life beginning at implantation? Well, that would suggest that babies fertilized outside the womb are not life, and that even if we developed artificial wombs, they would not be lives.
How about brain activity and sentience? We each go to sleep every night. Would it be acceptable to murder us in our sleep? Would we be no longer human?
There’s only one logical line to draw when it comes to human life: conception. 
Even Peter Singer — the moral relativist philosophy professor at Princeton University — acknowledges that “if preservation of human life is your standard, you ought to want life protected from conception.” Singer just says that his standard for human life worth preserving isn’t met by unborn human beings — or by newborn babies, which is why he’s not opposed morally to infanticide. Points for consistency. 
When it comes to the necessity for abortion, the Left usually attempts to shift the discussion from elective abortion to cases of medical necessity or to cases of rape and incest. As early as 1987, the Alan Guttmacher Institute asked women about their reasons for abortion, and only 1% of the 1,900 women surveyed suggested rape or incest. And 95% of those who mentioned rape or incest named additional reasons for deciding to abort. 
As Tamar Lewin reported at the time, “in a separate 1979 analysis, when federally financed abortions were available in cases of rape or incest, or when the pregnancy threatened the woman’s life or physical health, a total of 3,675 women had abortions paid for by federal money. But the institute said that it knew which category qualified only 2,444 of the women, and of these, 72 were eligible because of rape or incest. 
The Guttmacher Institute statistic is still used as the baseline for future estimates, although the numbers are likely much lower now than 1%. Politifact, for instance, says there may have been just 7,165 pregnancies from rape in 2010 in the United States. And that doesn’t say how many of those pregnancies actually resulted in abortion. Each year, there are 1 million abortions in the United States. 
How about abortion due to medical necessity? That is extraordinarily rare, even in cases of preeclampsia or toxemia in late-stage pregnancy, C-sections are often the best medical solution. 
There’s a difference, too, between taking actions to save the life of the mother that result in the death of the unborn child and aborting a child for medical necessity.
Now, you can still argue honestly that fetal life shouldn’t outweigh maternal life, but you can’t argue that a baby in the womb is not a baby in the womb; that life is not life; and that terminating life isn’t killing.
Does a biological mother owe any duty to the life growing inside her?
This is a philosophical question very different from the one posed by pro-choice advocates who simply claim that unborn life should be treated as an invader.
The termination of a human life in the womb — that is what an abortion is.
Abortion is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy for mothers, it’s a tragedy for fathers. Most of all, it’s a tragedy for the unborn hearts stilled. A tragedy for a world that will never see the light of lives snuffed out in the womb, and a tragedy for a society that cheers abortion as somehow making it morally advanced.
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This piece is adapted from an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbCSGgZebUU">episode</a> of Ben&#8217;s newest series, Debunked. Become a Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/debunked">Insider</a> to watch the full episode now!
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

SHAPIRO: Debunking Pro-Abortion Propaganda

Abortion

Pro-Life Movement

So you keep hearing that Joe Biden is doing a magnificent job on COVID. That he inherited a mess, and now we&#8217;re on the right track. 
Here&#8217;s the problem: That&#8217;s not true. They’re not following the science. They’re lying about the plans. They’re setting unattainable standards for reopening.
And they are doing all of this for political gain.
Throughout this pandemic, the media particularly have been in the bag for the Democrats. The media routinely said that Donald Trump was lying when he said that within the year there would be a vaccine. 
Here&#8217;s the thing: he was right. 
In fact, they only announced the efficacy of the vaccine one week after the election. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s a coincidence, actually.
The vaccines had already been developed. The U.S. government was always going to buy these vaccines. It is states that have been tranching out the vaccines.
By the end of February, here is how many sites Joe Biden&#8217;s administration had set up: seven.
According to Bloomberg News, his administration&#8217;s distribution of vaccines so far looks little different from that of its predecessor.
Biden and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said repeatedly that their goal was 100 million shots in 100 days. 
Well, here&#8217;s the thing: America was already injecting a million people per day by the time Biden took office.
In reality, here’s what the Biden administration did: they got elected. That&#8217;s the whole thing.
The media kept claiming over and over and over that on the eve of the pandemic, Trump cut the CDC budget.
That&#8217;s not true, even according to FactCheck.org. Trump may have proposed cuts; the cuts never happened. In fact, the CDC budget increased. By the way, citing people&#8217;s budgetary proposals is actually the basis for failure. It is itself a fail. Budgetary proposals never make it into law.
Then there&#8217;s the claim Trump said coronavirus was a hoax. 
He never said that coronavirus was a hoax. Trump instead said that the way that the media was treating him over coronavirus was a hoax. That&#8217;s what he actually said. 
And by the way, he was right about hydroxychloroquine being a treatment that has now been authorized for emergency use.
The insane hatred for hydroxychloroquine just because Trump mentioned the drug? It was indeed a crazy thing.
One of the areas where the Trump administration should have done better was in ramping up testing very early. But the reality is that as the pandemic progressed, testing was not chiefly the issue because once we had moved into community spread phase, there was no way to do testing and tracing. It just was not possible once you had tens of thousands of cases — hundreds of thousands of cases — simultaneously across the United States. 
At that point, we were not going to test our way out of the pandemic. The only solution was a vaccine.
There&#8217;s no question: the Biden administration is more pro-mask than the Trump administration. But we are now a year into the pandemic and masking is no longer the chief issue. Yet, that still seems to be the thing that Biden talks about the most, which suggests that a lot of this is about optics, not about efficacy.
Trump was right about schools. He said early on that schools should be opened. He was consistently right about that. Democrats are still insisting that many schools should not be open. 
Now, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has pointed out that schools could open safely without teachers being vaccinated.
One of the most robust findings in science is that schools — particularly for elementary school students — do not increase risks to teachers. In fact, studies show that the baseline level of risk to teachers is no different from the baseline level that all adults in a society experience from COVID.
But the White House didn&#8217;t like that because it suggested that schools should be open. Teachers unions don&#8217;t want the schools open.
According to Joe Biden, &#8220;reopening schools safely will be a national priority for the Biden-Harris administration. They need to open safely under the circumstances.&#8221; That sentiment was echoed by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who said &#8220;We can reopen them&#8230; but we want to do it safely.&#8221;
&#8220;Safely&#8221; can mean literally anything because you can always say that schools are just not safe enough.
Here&#8217;s the thing. Well over half of schools are already open.
The Biden administration — which is a lockdown administration — is doing this entirely in contravention of the available data.
Florida and California took precisely the opposite tacts. California shut down forever; Florida stopped the shutdown in the middle of last summer. They have a very similar death per million rate. The only difference is that Florida is the second oldest state in America; California is the fifth youngest state in America. California wrecked its economy, wrecked its freedom, wrecked everything. 
Dr. Anthony Fauci says we can never go back to normal until there is no risk. 
There is no such thing as no risk. There will always be risk when it comes to COVID, so long as COVID is with us. 
The actual disappearance of the disease is not likely. So the question is risk assessment. The Biden administration does not want to do risk assessment. Instead, it would like to prolong the feeling of crisis.
Deaths are down precipitously. Cases are down precipitously. Vaccinations are up precipitously. And yet we keep hearing that we&#8217;re still in crisis mode — “maybe we&#8217;ll get back to normal next year.” The truth is there&#8217;s been an entire cottage industry dedicated to the idea that COVID should make you afraid for your life at all times. 
The reality is that we have been living with this virus for a year. Many Americans have been going out, have been going to work. Many Americans who are younger have been participating in everyday life. Many Americans have already gotten COVID and recovered from it because the death rates on COVID are not 10%. They&#8217;re not 5%. The death rates on COVID — for the bulk of the American population overall — total 5 in 1000. 
Why are they doing all this? Because they have an agenda. They want to spend $1.9 trillion in COVID relief. 
By the way: that $1.9 trillion in COVID relief? That includes hundreds of billions of dollars for state and local bailouts. A huge majority of states didn&#8217;t even lose tax revenue during 2020 because of the bailouts we already did, but Biden wants to bail out those states anyway. Which states does he want to bail out? The blue states, of course, because those are the states that have systemic debt problems.
The actual financial shortfall this year from COVID is gonna be about $450 billion in terms of GDP. So he&#8217;s gonna spend $1.9 trillion, which is crazy. 
All of this is just a political agenda.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Debunked Episode 4: Biden’s Covid Lies" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/efjKTWK72Ec?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This piece is adapted from an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efjKTWK72Ec">episode</a> of Ben&#8217;s newest series, Debunked. Become a Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/debunked">Insider</a> to watch the full episode now!
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

SHAPIRO: Debunking Biden’s COVID Lies

Biden Administration

COVID

Today, we&#8217;re going to discuss a very common question: can a man be a woman?
In the past few years, you’ve heard a lot of statements that sound like, “we must not raise boys as boys and girls as girls, because we just can&#8217;t be sure that kids actually have the sex assigned to them at birth.”
You&#8217;ve heard that some people are men and women&#8217;s bodies or women in men&#8217;s bodies. You may even have heard that if you&#8217;re a straight dude and you don&#8217;t want to have sex with a trans woman — meaning a biological male — this makes you gay.
All of this is insane, patent nonsense.
Males and females reproduce with one another in the human species. We&#8217;ve known this for quite a while. The simple reality is that the human species is sexually dimorphic. Sex is binary. We come in two brands: male and female. 
Typically, those who have the XY chromosomes are male. Those who have XX chromosomes are female. Males and females differ. They differ in size and shape, in musculature, in brain function. As neuroscientist Steven Pinker says, “differences between the sexes are part of the human condition.”
There are certainly people who have anomalous genetic conditions like Klinefelter syndrome, in which a person has two X chromosomes and a Y chromosome, and in whom breast development looks female while male genitalia are present. 
Overall, disorders of sexual development affect one in every 5000 births. Now, the presence of abnormal development does not mean that sex is a spectrum. To suggest otherwise would be the same thing as saying that because one child in every few thousand is born with three toes, this means that the number of toes in the human being is a spectrum, or that a person with three toes might actually be a three-toed sloth human.
All reproduction is rooted in the presence of sexual dimorphism. To pretend otherwise is biologically nonsensical.
That&#8217;s why to end a conversation on transgenderism, just ask for a simple, non-self-referential definition of the terms “man” and “woman.” And when I say non-self-referential, I mean you can&#8217;t say “I feel like a woman, therefore I am a woman.”
For advocates of biology, the answer for “what is woman” or “what is man” is simple. You can look at chromosomes, the SRY genes, reproductive systems, verifiable answers to the question. For advocates of the position that some biological men are women or vice versa, there is no standard that can be applied. A man can become a woman — or a woman a man — at any time without any stable definition of man or woman whatsoever.
According to our pseudo-medical activists, gender identity is completely separate from sex. The separation between gender and sex relies on a simple fallacy: that gender is entirely socially constructed and thus separate from biology.
Gender, in this iteration, would be all the various feminine qualities that adhere to womanhood, or the masculine qualities that adhere to being a male. According to these folks, gender and sex are completely different. And all of those gendered notions of femininity? They’re completely separate from being a biological female. 
This Cartesian notion that you can be a woman in a man&#8217;s body — a soul in the machine because your gender is separate from your sex — is utterly unsupportable at any level. Everyone understands there are some attributes that are generally considered more masculine — chopping wood, being dumb — and some that are considered more feminine — being caring, being nice.
These are distinctions that do appear in virtually all cultures. Some of that is undoubtedly biologically oriented and some is undoubtedly social construction. But it is simply ridiculous to suggest that if a boy is effeminate, he&#8217;s actually a girl, or that if a girl is masculine, she might actually be a boy. But this is what gender theorists argue.
The origins of the gender identity movement lie with a professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins in the 1960s. His name was John Money.
After twin boys were born, and after a botched circumcision destroyed one boy&#8217;s penis, that boy was raised as a girl. By the time that boy was a teenager, the boy felt extraordinary discomfort because he was biologically male, and his parents told him the truth. Both twins ended up killing themselves in their mid-thirties. 
That didn&#8217;t stop John Money from founding the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1965. His theory was children could identify as members of the opposite sex and that radical surgery was the proper solution — that inside, these kids were members of the opposite sex in reality, and that surgery would really make their bodies align with their identity.
Money claims that “the gender identity gate is open at birth for a normal child no less than for one born with unfinished sex organs, and would stay that way for at least a year.” So in other words, you could have a full biological boy with finished sex organs, and his gender identity was still open. Brains and bodies were considered in direct opposition, completely separate from one another contra science.
Radical feminists like Judith Butler began arguing that all gender was socially constructed, and that therefore all inequalities in outcome between men and women could be laid at the feet of an evil, sexist society. If gender is a meaningless social construct created by society, why does it matter more than sex, which is actual, real biology? And why is gender more real than biology itself? Why would anyone need to change his or her body in order to align with gender — a social construction — when gender and sex are completely separate in the first place?
Gender dysphoria — which is what we&#8217;re talking about here — is a serious and tragic disorder. It is also extremely rare. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s fifth edition, those who had received a diagnosis of gender identity disorder or transsexualism and were seeking hormone treatment and/or surgery” represented just 0.005% to 0.014% for males and 0.002% to 0.003% for females. Those stats are now rising dramatically. 
People suffering from gender dysphoria — which, in its non-politicized definition, means the persistent belief that you&#8217;re a member of the opposite sex — have a tragically high suicidal ideation and depression rate. The suicidal ideation rate remains tragically high after surgical and hormonal treatment. Longitudinal studies that are good just do not exist on the efficacy of these measures, and the mental health problems associated with gender dysphoria remain extremely damaging, even in particularly accepting societies. But suffering from a mental disorder does not change your underlying sex any more than believing that you are Napoleon Bonaparte makes you Napoleon Bonaparte.
Transgender activists make an objective claim about reality based on subjective internal feelings. That&#8217;s unsustainable. Once more, transgender activists demand that you abandon reason, biology, privacy — even the ability to raise your kids in concert with reality — in favor of a delusional quasi-religious worldview in which gender and sex are completely segregated and a boy can be a girl and a girl a boy.
Now, none of this means that anybody suffering from gender dysphoria ought to be mistreated. Anybody with any sort of disorder ought to be treated with nothing but sympathy and care, but this does mean that a society that seeks to propagandize to children that they can switch their gender is both lying to kids and doing them psychological harm and process. Unfortunately, that&#8217;s exactly what our society is now teaching kids in public schools: anti-biological nonsense, including the lie that you might just be a different gender with different pronouns. 
And it&#8217;s not just that, but the new Equality Act. 
The Biden administration and the Democratic Party are seeking to promote the idea that any institution that doesn&#8217;t mimic these lies has to be destroyed. Religious institutions are not exempted from federal regulations that demand that men who identify as women be treated as women. This is true in sports, in restrooms. Ironically, feminists who sought to protect women from men have now seen female spaces completely destroyed because they can&#8217;t define female and male properly. 
Most shockingly, we are now a society that demands that parents hand over their kids to the tender mercies of political actors masquerading as medical specialists. If you have a twelve-year-old at school with a headache, the school nurse cannot prescribe to them Tylenol without calling you first, but we now have officials in states and in the federal government suggesting that if a twelve-year-old says that she is a boy, the school should be able to prescribe puberty blockers without calling the parents. That is a sick society.
In the end, a man claiming to be a woman is making an unsustainable claim. He can&#8217;t even know what it is like to be a woman because he is not one. A man with surgeries and hormone treatment does not become a woman, nor does a man who simply declares himself a woman.
All of this is insane propaganda that is being propagated for political purposes. 
So, no, a man cannot become a woman, or a woman a man.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Debunked Episode 3: Transgenderism" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MOBm8asJcPU?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This piece is adapted from an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOBm8asJcPU">episode</a> of Ben&#8217;s newest series, Debunked. Become a Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/debunked">Insider</a> to watch the full episode now!
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

SHAPIRO: Debunking Transgenderism

LGBTQ

Transgender

Woke Culture

Minimum wage is predicated on a very stupid notion.
The notion is that employers are essentially Scrooge McDuck: they&#8217;ve got a giant money bin, and that money bin is filled with all of their profits, and if only we could pry that money bin open and hand all that cash over to the workers, they would all be better off.
There&#8217;s only one problem: the minimum wage does not accomplish what it seeks to accomplish. 
Here&#8217;s the deal. Here&#8217;s how wages are set. It is reliant effectively on two factors.
Factor number one is the price people are willing to pay for a product. You can&#8217;t charge a bunch of money for labor if the product is going to be sold for a much lower price. So let&#8217;s say that you&#8217;re buying a hamburger for a buck. You can&#8217;t then pay somebody $5 an hour to make that hamburger or you will lose money. So, what people are willing to pay for a product is one of the factors in determining the price of labor. 
The other factor in determining the price of labor is the market for labor. So, for example, if there are five people on planet earth who can cook a hamburger, you’re not going to be able to pay them $5 an hour. It&#8217;s going to be very, very expensive. Because again, high demand, low supply. Supply and demand are the name of the game when it comes to setting wages and setting prices, and essentially all wages are a price for labor.
Basketball players get paid an enormous amount of money, not because of the social value they create but because there is enormous demand for excellent basketball players, and there are not very many of them.
By contrast, janitors — who provide an enormous social value — are not paid very much money. The reason being, the number of people who are capable of doing a janitor’s job is very high — so high supply — and the amount of demand is sort of in the middle. 
Minimum wage jobs are typically the kinds of jobs that are middling demand but extremely high supply. Lots of people are qualified to do those jobs, and that means that employers are not going to pay an enormous amount of money for those particular jobs. Now, in reality, the number of people who are working in pure minimum wage jobs — $7.25 an hour jobs — is actually exorbitantly low.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2017, there were about 80 million people who are working hourly wage jobs. Only about 542,000 were working at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Another 1.3 million were actually working for below that amount of money, which means that grand total — in terms of people who are being paid an hourly wage — only about 2.3% of all people being paid an hourly wage were either making minimum wage or below. 
That&#8217;s because, again, the market for labor is typically above the minimum wage. Most people who are going to be working an hourly wage are going to be working for more than minimum wage.
So who exactly are these minimum wage workers? Well, they&#8217;re typically not a single mom, aged 35 with three kids. A quarter of minimum wage workers are under the age of 25. In fact, 8% of all teenagers are working for minimum wage. 
What does this mean? It means that minimum wage jobs very often are the first jobs that people take. Many, many people start at minimum wage jobs and then work their way up the food chain. This means that minimum wage jobs are particularly attractive for both employers and employees for people who don&#8217;t have tremendous levels of skill. Actually, about two-thirds of people in minimum wage jobs are going to be earning more than minimum wage within one year of beginning that minimum wage job.
<h3>What happens when you raise the minimum wage?</h3>
What happens when you artificially boost the price of labor? 
Well, a couple of things happen. The first thing is you push a bunch of people out of the market.
Thomas Sowell is fond of saying the minimum wage is never what the government says the minimum wage is; the minimum wage is zero.
Say, for example, that there is a job that is currently being paid $8 an hour. Now the federal government says it&#8217;s going to be paid $15 an hour. 
The people who were competing for a $15 an hour job were typically people who are going to be college-educated. They&#8217;re people who have more work experience, because a $15 an hour job was not the lowest level of job that you could obtain. But now, a $15 an hour job is the lowest level that you can obtain, and that means that if you are an employer, you&#8217;re going to be looking for a college graduate to flip burgers as opposed to a high school graduate.
All the people who have those high school degrees? Those people are kicked out of the labor markets in favor of people with a college degree that employers are now looking for to fill a $15 an hour job. Because again, the value of the job has not actually changed, it&#8217;s just that now you&#8217;ve opened up that job to a new pool of labor. 
So, what does the minimum wage actually do? It creates artificial disparities in the labor market. In fact, according to Sowell, in 1948, the black unemployment rate for teenagers was 10%. Since the advent of higher and higher minimum wages, the black unemployment rate has never been lower than 20% and has often been higher than 50%. Because again, the people being pushed out of the labor markets are the people who most need the jobs. 
As Sowell notes:
<blockquote> If you go back to say 1950 — 1948, ‘49, ‘50 — you find that at that time, the unemployment rate among black teenagers was a fraction of what it is today. And there certainly wasn&#8217;t any less racism than there is today. What was different was that at that time the minimum wage law was a decade old. It was a decade of inflation, and the law hadn&#8217;t been changed. So for all practical purposes, it didn&#8217;t exist. </blockquote>
This is not actually a partisan point of view. The Congressional Budget Office recently evaluated Joe Biden&#8217;s plan for a $15 federal minimum wage, and what they found is that over the course of the next few years, it would improve the salaries for some 900,000 people, but it would put 1.4 million people out of work. 
The reason being that when you artificially boost the price of labor, people don&#8217;t just magically come up with the money. Instead, they fire a bunch of people, or they automate a bunch of those jobs. The people who retain their jobs make the higher minimum wage. Everybody else, again, they make Thomas Sowell’s minimum wage of $0.
In 2015, Seattle raised its minimum wage from about $9.50 an hour to about $10.50 an hour, and then a year later they raised it again to about 13 bucks an hour. That second boost in pay actually boosted the wages by about 3%, but what it also did is it reduced the number of hours worked by about 9% for a net loss of income.
Then there is the problem of a federal minimum wage. You may have noticed that New York does not look a lot like Mississippi. Neither does California. This is one of the problems: the price of labor in these places is very, very different. So for example, a $15 minimum wage in Los Angeles is not going to pay for a studio apartment. However, a $15 minimum wage in Mississippi is actually higher than the median wage right now. The median wage — like, the guy in the middle — in Mississippi right now is $14.22 an hour. That means the guy working in Mississippi for 15 bucks an hour can probably afford a small house. 
Creating a federal minimum wage that applies equally across all the states is completely idiotic. It actually puts out of work more people in the states where the pay is already the lowest.
<h3>Who is hurt when minimum wage is forced higher?</h3>
The businesses hurt the worst by an increase in minimum wage are not big businesses. They are in fact small businesses.
Small businesses already have a tough time competing with big business. They&#8217;re unable to aggregate their costs, they have fewer sales. Their margins of profit are generally smaller. That means that small businesses pay the price when minimum wage gets increased. In fact, big businesses tend to pay more than minimum wage.
There&#8217;s a reason that a poll in February 2020 — an economic boom time — found that 8% of small businesses said they would have to lay off workers if there was a massive increase in the minimum wage. Fourteen percent said they would have to cut worker hours, and 22% said there would be a loss of profit margin, which in the end would lead to hourly cuts or to employees getting laid off.
Raising minimum wages in a time of high unemployment is among the dumbest ideas ever. It is one thing to raise minimum wages when you are talking about a shortage of labor for desirable jobs, but when you&#8217;re talking about a surplus of labor, then raising the minimum wage only means that you are creating a greater disparity between what businesses ought to be paying in a free market and what businesses are now being forced to pay. That means more people being put out of work at a time when you actually need more people employed.
And then there&#8217;s one big cost we haven&#8217;t even talked about; and that is the cost of automation.
If you&#8217;re a trucker, you do have to worry about the possibility that your boss is going to decide your labor is too expensive and then put some sort of machinery in the truck that drives the truck instead of you.
The same thing has already happened to grocery stores all around the nation. When you artificially boost the price of labor, at a certain point the business figures: “You know what? I don&#8217;t want to deal with this union. I don’t want to deal with this labor. Why don&#8217;t I just hire a machine? I don&#8217;t have to pay the machine anything. The machine doesn&#8217;t need a living wage. In fact, the machine doesn&#8217;t earn a wage.” They have decided that the burdens of labor are simply not worth the cost of labor. 
Now, right now, because low wage jobs are still cheaper than implementing that technology, people still have jobs. But at a certain point, when you artificially raise the price of labor, the machinery becomes cheaper than the jobs.
And at that point, you&#8217;re going to see workers replaced entirely across wide swaths of the American economy.
The bottom line is this. When you have officials setting an artificial standard for the price of labor across industry, across states, without regard to how businesses are actually run, you end up with more people out of work, fewer hours worked, and in the end, more people earning the minimum wage of zero.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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