Over the years, I’ve seen white Americans argue for why we shouldn’t be made to feel bad for the sins of our ancestors, including slavery and the colonial conquest of America, and I can feel sympathetic toward people not wanting to be held responsible for something that someone else did in another time. However, I haven’t heard any arguments actually justifying the wrongs of our past, and was surprised when I heard Ben Shapiro do this on his show in May 2025.

Shapiro claims that it is “obviously true” that “the world is better off because of . . . American power [and] the spread of European ideals.” He says that although “bad things are a tragedy . . . overall, in the broad scope of history . . . [i]t’s an absolutely wonderful thing that Europeans ended up on the North American continent.” His justification is “[t]he spread of things like property rights, due process of law, capitalism, freedom of religion, these things which are not a human universal.”

I wasn’t merely surprised when I heard this, I was shocked, and I don’t think this is an extreme response. He is saying that the end justifies the means, and he identifies the end as “an absolutely wonderful thing” that includes “property rights, due process of law, capitalism, [and] freedom of religion.” These are all good things that, unfortunately, have not applied to all Americans for much of our history. Further still, the means he refers to, those tragic “bad things,” include the genocide of Native Americans and an economic system that legalized slavery, two very significant parts of United States history that did not die off quickly. The Civil War didn’t end slavery because it was transformed into legalized oppression and dehumanization through Jim Crow laws that continued into the 1960s, and we were sterilizing Native American women against their will as recently as the 1970s, meaning people alive today experienced these abuses.

Shapiro claims that the genocide, oppression, and dehumanization of thousands upon thousands who had to die, suffer, and lose land and culture is made just by the fact that he, a rich white man, has a right to own land. Property rights and due process of law obviously didn’t apply to the victims of our conquests, and for most of the time that the United States of America has been a country, those rights were not given to everyone who called America their country and home. Those property rights he mentioned were only meant to protect land-owning white men when they were established. I would also argue that due process only applies if you can afford lawyers to defend that right, capitalism itself isn’t worth killing over, and freedom of religion is debatable.

This changes the narrative of American history. We Americans do not have the “freedoms” we enjoy because a handful of patriots rebelled against unjust oppression (what is taxation without representation compared to genocide and slavery?). Rather, we enjoy the comforts of the American way because we are “better at war,” as Shapiro puts it, which is not a Judeo-Christian ethic (something else that Shapiro promotes). Shapiro’s end currently applies to all Americans, for the most part, but only because those we oppressed endured a great struggle to undo our hypocrisy. Shapiro’s argument is “might makes right,” and embarrasses America by showing how sanctimonious we are. Our constitution was hypocritical the moment it was signed because it claimed to grant unalienable rights to its citizens while depriving slaves (and others) of those same rights. We cannot claim a moral right to contest the rebellion of those fighting for rights when we used unprovoked conquest to forcibly and oppressively take and maintain our own “rights.”

Refusing to acknowledge the wrongs of our past creates a barrier to addressing today’s failures, but this topic gets considerably more complicated from here. There is no simple fix to the flawed narrative of American history. I somewhat agree with Shapiro when he blasts the concept of simply giving up property, or “your dingy apartment in Brooklyn,” as he puts it, to make amends. It isn’t feasible to hand over the country to the remaining Native Americans, and what do we have that we can restore to the descendants of slavery? But doing nothing isn’t acceptable, and neither is pretending it didn’t happen, ignoring it, or minimizing the atrocity of it. There are a number of books that I recommend, fiction and non-fiction, to better understand the experiences of non-white Americans, including Unsettling Truths, Beloved, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Quite a few other books, movies, podcasts, and TV series are presenting American history more accurately than ever before, but there is so much working against this good work, including comments like Shapiro’s.

I believe we must not only be honest about who we are as Americans, but choose who we want to be and make it so. What does it mean to be American? What is the American dream? What is the American way of life? As for me, I detest Shapiro’s vision that justifies genocide and the dehumanizing actions, policies, and laws that are an unavoidable part of my country’s legacy. However, if we are (or want to be) a land of equality and opportunity for all, then let’s ensure it is truly that.