True conservatism is not about low taxes or the GDP; it’s not even about “individual liberty” or the free market, as Ben Shapiro argues. Conservatism is first and foremost about order , and currently we’re living in a very disordered and chaotic America.

“Facts don’t care about your feelings” is the well-known catchphrase of columnist and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro. Many of the well-known talking heads in Conservatism, Inc. essentially have parroted the line, putting debate above violence and facts above emotion. Shapiro has built his entire brand around “owning the libs” and he portrays himself as a person who is open to any and all debate.

The problem with the persona that Shapiro has constructed for himself is that it’s easily exposed as artificial when challenged by people to his right. Whenever Shapiro is confronted with facts that he is uncomfortable talking about, he relies on decades-old Communist labeling tactics in order to transform the inquisitor into a social pariah.

In a recent speech at Stanford University, Shapiro decided last minute to completely alter the subject of his lecture. Originally scheduled to speak about the Left’s attempts to control how Americans raise their kids, Shapiro announced that recent events convinced him that he should talk instead about the alleged “alt-Right trolls” who may have attended the event to ask him questions.

The first glaring problem with the term “alt-Right,” is that no one really knows what it means. The definition of this term made popular in 2015 becomes even murkier if you put the question to Shapiro himself. Not too long ago, Shapiro tweeted out a list of people and groups he defined as “alt-Right.” It included Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, Breitbart News, and even President Trump.

Throughout his entire one-hour speech, Shapiro proceeded to set up imaginary alt-Right strawmen and knock them down one by one. At one point, Shapiro was interrupted by chants coming from left-wing protesters in the crowd, to which he paused and inquired why they would protest him while he was publicly condemning the “literal Nazis.”

Shapiro never addressed the legitimate concerns of proponents of the America First agenda. Instead, he resorted to creating fictional characterizations of the questioners to make them reprehensible in the minds of the audience. The answers that Shapiro did provide were blatant obfuscations that would fall apart easily when confronted by anyone well versed in the facts that don’t care about Ben Shapiro’s feelings.

On Immigration and Assimilation

During his speech, Shapiro denied that Republicans will soon never again to be able to win Texas or a general election, thanks to a profound shift in demographics. Shapiro boldly claimed that “voting is malleable,” and went on to refer to the Cuban vote in a shaky attempt to prove his point.

The problem is, Cubans voted just 54 percent for the Republican party in the 2016 presidential election. The younger generation of Cubans leans more left than their parents. Younger Cubans, in fact, are voting more and more consistently with the rest of Hispanics according to all data.

Outside of Cubans, who only make up 0.5 percent of the U.S. population, the Hispanic demographic as a whole have voted approximately 70 percent for the Democratic Party in every election since the 1970s.

What is going to happen when Hispanics make up a super-majority in Texas come 2024?

Shapiro appears to offer strong support for the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution, yet simultaneously he disregards the fact that shifting demographics are not only a direct threat to gun rights and free speech, but to the American cultural way of life in general.

According to the Pew Research Center, 75 percent of Hispanics say it’s more important to institute gun control than to protect gun rights. Pew also finds that 72 percent of Hispanics consider hate speech “violence.” What’s even more concerning is 52 percent of Hispanics say we should actually criminalize hate speech.

A recent poll by Campaign for Free Speech found that more than 51 percent of Millennials support a “hate speech” exemption in the First Amendment. When that poll is broken down by race, it is almost identical to the Pew Research results.

Shapiro—along with the likes of Charlie Kirk, Michael Knowles, and others in Conservatism, Inc.— has suggested that “conservatives must do a better job winning over minority voters of all varieties.” It’s a good idea in theory. In practice, however, the sheer rate at which immigrants are pouring into the country and having children renders this mathematically impossible.

Bad Signs for Future Elections

Within my lifetime, barring drastic action to reverse demographic trends, a Republican presidential candidate will never again be able to win an election. To deny this reality, is also to deny simple mathematics. The solution is either to address this shift head-on, or for the GOP to move further left than it has already to expand the party’s appeal to a changing electorate. Conservatism, Inc. seems to prefer acquiescence over confrontation.

Shapiro and many others have claimed that “after two or three generations, voting patterns for these communities historically have normalized,” but this isn’t true, either. According to the Pew Research Center again, third-generation Hispanics still vote almost 60 percent for the Democratic Party. This is most apparent in Texas. In the top-five Texas counties, which account for 36 percent of the population, Beto O’Rourke received almost 80 percent of the Latino vote in the 2018 U.S. Senate election.

Dallas County has gone from deep-red to deep-blue, and will never go to Republicans again because of this detrimental transformation. California, which once elected Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, has also suffered this same electoral fate. The 2018 election led to Arizona electing a Democrat senator for the first time in a quarter-century.

Conservatism, Inc. claims to be concerned about the 67 million residents now speaking a language other than English at home. But the answers from conservative pundits and talking-heads suggest their concern is synthetic. Mainstream conservative commenators also purport to be disturbed by the mainstream media boasting how mass migration is wreaking havoc on former conservative strongholds, but this expression of disquietude doesn’t seem to match their diction. Their actions and rhetoric instead seem to function as a proverbial opiate for the conservative base, while our ideas are slowly being excluded from discourse and government.

In a recent study, Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt argued that conservative parties are central to democracy. If conservatives fear they soon will be excluded from American politics forever, they are more likely to believe there is no longer a political solution and reject democracy outright.

Uncomfortable Truths

Many intellectuals have argued that it is the job of the center-right to “wall off” more extreme right-wing movements, shutting out the radicals who attack the political system. My belief is this is what Conservatism, Inc. sees itself as doing while it attempts to convince the larger conservative electorate that somehow the results of this demographic change will be beneficial.

They’re lying.

While the mainstream media is celebrating the coming eternity of Democratic Party control, many famous conservative pundits are explaining these trends away with claims of “indoctrination” by academia.

The glaring flaw in this thesis is that college-educated Hispanics vote more for Republicans than their less educated counterparts. In the 2018 Texas U.S. Senate election, nonwhite college grads voted 34 percent for Ted Cruz while nonwhites with no degree voted only 29 percent for Ted Cruz. The opposite is true for the white non-Hispanic demographic, however if it weren’t for the blitzkrieg of Third World migration into America, induced by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, Republicans would not have received their recent walloping in Virginia, and even states like California would still be in play.

In the 2016 election, President Trump lost Virginia by five points, but won the white vote by 25 points.

The Los Angeles Times is one of the many mainstream outlets that is being more truthful than mainstream conservatives:

The GOP’s core constituency is white people and they’re a declining slice of the California population pie. Conversely, Democrat-backing Latinos and Asian Americans have been expanding their slices. That pattern is projected to continue, although at a slower pace. So the raw numbers won’t be getting any better for the already weakened California GOP. “Republicans are heading into a demographic cul-de-sac,” says longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.”

For some reason, conservatives either have a hard time openly acknowledging these uncomfortable truths, or they are deliberately attempting to pacify the right-wing while this shift occurs in order to save democracy.

True conservatism is not about low taxes or the GDP; it’s not even about “individual liberty” or the free market, as Shapiro argues. Conservatism is first and foremost about order, and currently we’re living in a very disordered and chaotic America. In nature, chaos always is restored to order, and we know that order will also soon be restored in America, as well. The question is, will this restoration of order be peaceful or violent?

I fear that if Conservatism, Inc. doesn’t become the true opposition to leftism that we need them to be, the latter will be the reality.