Liberal commentator Sally Kohn faced off against Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro at Politicon on Sunday and ended up proving just how factually deprived the social justice agenda truly is, as Shapiro repeatedly crushed Kohn’s liberal talking points. Perhaps the most devastating moment for Kohn was her SJW arguments about “systemic racism,” which Shapiro dismantled point by point.
When Kohn argued that institutionalized racism was holding African-Americans down societally, Shapiro rattled off a series of statistics that left Kohn scrambling for a single fact, any fact, to use in rebuttal. By the end, Shapiro forced Kohn to at least admit that her social justice blame game fell apart when it came to gender and crime.
Shapiro began his take down of one of the social justice movement’s favorite arguments by tackling the concept of the “overrepresentation” of minorities in arrests and convictions.
“The majority of people who are stopped and frisked in New York City are blacks and Hispanics,” said Shapiro, “that’s because the vast majority of the people in New York City who actually commit gun crimes are blacks and Hispanics. I’m sorry, I can’t do anything about that.”
When Kohn insisted “that’s not the truth,” Shapiro got more specific. “From January to June 2008, 95 percent of gun assailants in the city of New York are black and Hispanic,” he said.
Predictably, Kohn attempted to dismiss the “statistical regressions” by blaming minority arrests on racial prejudice, claiming that minorities are “overrepresented … again and again and again and again.”
After Kohn, who had grown increasingly animated, was calmed down by the moderator, Shapiro responded by debunking her claim with more statistics.
“It’s not anyone’s fault that 50 percent of the murders being committed in the country are by young black men. It’s not the fault of the people putting them in prison that those people happen to be black. It’s not the fault of the New Jersey Turnpike police that they’re pulling over 23 percent black men when they did a statistical analysis and found that 25 percent of the people speeding were black,” he said.
Citing an extensive study of crime in big cities, Shapiro argued that, according to statistics, the opposite of Kohn’s argument is true.
“Again, since 1994, the 75 largest cities in America when they analyzed whether there’s overrepresentation in crimes that were reported—not just crimes that were charged, crimes that were reported—versus the prison population, they found that blacks and Hispanics were statistically underrepresented,” said Shapiro. “The biggest problem for blacks and Hispanics in inner cities is that there aren’t enough police officers to actually take care of them and police the crime to make their cities safe for investment and education.”
Shapiro’s answer was met with enthusiastic applause from the audience.
When Shapiro turned the conversation to gender, Kohn’s social justice reflexes betrayed her. Shapiro noted that women now earne more undergraduate and graduate degrees than men; meanwhile, he said, there are more men in prison than women. Was that because “the jailing system is sexist against men?” he asked.
“More men commit crimes,” answered Kohn, an admission that brought a strong reaction from the crowd. Though she was able to admit for a moment that sometimes trends among some groups are different than trends among others, Kohn refused to apply the same logic when it came to race and crime.
Partial transcript via RedAlertPolitics.