Truth Revolt Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro defended his critique of Hollywood culture following the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a debate with Mediaite’s Matt Wilstein.
The debate on radio station KIRO centered around Shapiro’s criticism of the role that Hollywood culture played in Hoffman’s death, and Wilstein’s charge that Shapiro was politicizing the tragedy.
Shapiro said that Hoffman’s death can be directly linked to the culture of the industry in which he was employed:
Hollywood enables drug use. Hollywood unfortunately has a long history of treating drug use among its stars as little more than something bothersome to be dealt with out of sight out of mind and as long as no one dies its basically ok. The environment that Hollywood creates is not conducive to virtue.
Wilstein attacked at the margins, saying Hoffman wasn’t actually a Hollywood byproduct:
Phillip Seymour Hoffman is not exactly the poster child of Hollywood. He lived in New York and was a theater actor…to lump him in with this leftist Hollywood culture is unfair.
Shapiro said that the theater culture had many of the same problems as the Hollywood culture, though it is common to lump the two together in generic conversations. He then suggested that Hollywood regularly encourages cultural conversations, just not about itself:
It’s always interesting to me what cultural conversations the left wishes to engage in. If there’s a shooting incident we can talk about the so called right wing gun culture. If there’s a cocaine problem on Wall St we can talk about capitalist culture. But when it’s a Hollywood star who OD’s then all of a sudden the Hollywood left wing culture is off the table?
Wilstein then tried to compare Shapiro to Piers Morgan in terms of politicizing tragedy. Shapiro disagreed:
Piers Morgan points to a shooting, and then says everyone who disagrees with me about guns is for the shooting. What I did is point out the direct link that points to the culture that enables Hollywood drug use and a Hollywood star actually dying.
The conversation was based on a piece Shapiro wrote about Philip Seymour Hoffman for National Review Online. In that piece, Shapiro wrote:
[H]is self-inflicted death is yet another hallmark of the broken leftist culture that dominates Hollywood, enabling rather than preventing the loss of some of its greatest talents. Libertarianism becomes libertinism without a cultural force pushing back against the penchant for sin; Hollywood has no such cultural force. In fact, the Hollywood demand is for more self-abasement, less spirituality, less principle, less standards.
No one knows what sort of demons plagued Seymour Hoffman. But without a sound moral structure around those in Hollywood who have every financial and talent advantage, the path to destruction is far too easy.
Shapiro later added:
The point I was making regarding libertarianism was not that the war on drugs is the solution to drug use (as you know, I have openly endorsed marijuana decriminalization). The point was not to blame libertarianism either. It was to blame the false libertarianism of Hollywood, which is actually libertine. Libertarianism requires personal responsibility, as well as cultural institutions dedicated to encouraging virtuous behavior. Hollywood's left requires neither, and encourages drug use in ways both open and implied.