Are America's founders heroes or villains? Ben Shapiro says a new poll is 'devastating to future of country'
Ben Shapiro reacts to a new Fox poll that asks if the founders of our country are heroes or villains
Author and commentator Ben Shapiro told “Fox & Friends” on Monday that the results of the latest Fox News poll, which revealed that 63 percent of voters view the country’s founders as heroes, is “devastating.”
The survey also found that 15 percent of voters view the country’s founders as villains, another 15 percent say it depends and 7 percent gave no opinion.
The host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" noted that the fact that “only 63 percent of Americans describe the founders as heroes is devastating, that means that 37 percent of Americans do not describe the founders as heroes, they describe them as either villains or I don't know.”
He then said that “if you look at the racial cross-tabs it's really devastating.”
The survey revealed that White voters (71 percent) are more than twice as likely as Black voters (31 percent) to consider the founders to be heroes.
“If you look at the Black community in the United States, according to this poll, a plurality of Black Americans believes that founders were villains rather than heroes, which is devastating to the future of the country,” he said.
“If you believe that the country was neatly founded on sin and evil, it's going to be very difficult to reach the sort of national unity that we require in order to move forward and I think that is something the radical left has been promulgating.”
Host Steve Doocy noted that Shapiro’s new book, titled “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps,” addresses some of “these same themes.”
“My book is really about how if a nation is to move forward it has to have a common philosophy, which is the Declaration of Independence, it has to have a common culture, a culture of tolerance, but also a culture of defense of rights and culture of entrepreneurship and the country has to have a common history,” Shapiro said.
“We have to share history and believe that we are all part of the same great stream of American history, trying to justify those founding principles, falling short, but eventually succeeding.”
“If we don't believe in those things, the country falls apart,” he continued.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE POLL RESULTS
Shapiro then said, “I think a lot of members of the radical left who have moved into the mainstream halls of democratic power have tried to destroy each of these.”
“The Declaration of Independence is now bad, the Constitution of the United States is now bad, American history is now the 1619 project as opposed to the 1776 project,” he noted.
“All of this spells doom for our country of unity and essentially just means that the only thing holding us together is government power.”
When asked what he thinks about the riots taking place in cities across the country sparked over the death of George Floyd in police custody Shapiro said, “This is just the final flowering of a program that began decades ago, to basically rewrite America's history and to suggest that America has not progressed at all, even since the civil rights era, which is, of course, an absolute lie.”
He went on to note that he thinks “the fact that President Trump is president” has “devastated the left.”
“They literally thought they were going to be in charge for the rest of time after Barack Obama's presidency,” Shapiro said, adding that he thinks “that has generated an awful lot of radical feeling on the left and that it flowered here, in the lead-up to the election.”
“My suspicion is that if Joe Biden is elected, you're going to see a lot of this go away, at least for a little while, while the left stops humoring its own radicals,” Shapiro said.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Fox News’ Dana Blanton contributed to this report.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox