Ben Shapiro defends Fox host Greg Gutfeld’s widely criticized remarks about the Holocaust
Shapiro: “No one said there was anything good about slavery or the Holocaust. They said that resilient human beings sometimes are capable of making the best of their horrific situations.”
Published
Citation From the July 26, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): So, Greg Gutfeld, he's on Fox News doing a show, and he was talking about all of these false accusations with regard to Ron DeSantis -- all the lies that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are talking about, about how American history won't be taught, Black history won't be taught in Florida Schools anymore. Which is a lie. It is not true. It is a lie. Okay. So, Gutfeld was talking about the part of the curriculum that says that some slaves cultivated skills they could use for their personal benefit after slavery, which is clearly true. And he makes the pretty much unobjectionable point that even in the worst circumstances human beings could possibly be in, they cultivate skills because this is how human beings adapt and survive, and demonstrates their resiliency. Even in the worst places human beings can be, they cultivate skills that they can then use for their personal benefit afterward. And he makes the comparison to Viktor Frankl writing Man's Search for Meaning after the Holocaust -- the notion that he was able to cultivate certain spiritual levels through suffering in the Holocaust. And naturally, then the left jumps on that.
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Okay. Again, what Gutfeld says there is absolutely unobjectionable. As an orthodox Jew -- and, you know, thank God my immediate family, our family line was in America since the early 20th century, but the entire extended family was in Europe at the time of Holocaust. So, we lost a lot of, you know, distant relations and family relations in Europe during the Holocaust. And, of course, I'm deeply ensconced in the Jewish community, so pretty much everybody knows a Holocaust survivor. What he's saying there, which is that the durability and the adaptability of human beings, the resiliency of human beings in terrible circumstances leads them to cultivate skills that are useful to them in the rest of their lives -- even in the worst circumstances, one of the glories of being a human being -- that's unobjectionable.
So, what does the White House do? They immediately call him an antisemite. And now, he didn't even bring it up, right? Jessica Tarlov brought it up. But wait for the -- wait for the usual cast of characters to sound off.
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No one said there was anything good about slavery or the Holocaust. They said that resilient human beings sometimes are capable of making the best of their horrific situations. Which, of course, is true. That, of course, is true. That's the story of the heroism of the slaves making the best of one of the world's worst situations in human history. Same thing with Holocaust survivors. Like, trying to survive, trying to cultivate a skill set while undergoing the worst horrors a human being can imagine. But, of course, they have to lie. They have to lie.