Table Of ContentDedication
To my children, who deserve to grow up in a country that values the
freedoms promised by the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed
by our Constitution
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: How to Silence a Majority
Chapter 2: How the Authoritarian Left Renormalized America
Chapter 3: The Creation of a New Ruling Class
Chapter 4: How Science™ Defeated Actual Science
Chapter 5: Your Authoritarian Boss
Chapter 6: The Radicalization of Entertainment
Chapter 7: The Fake News
Chapter 8: Unfriending Americans
The Choice Before Us
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Also by Ben Shapiro
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
According to the institutional powers that be, America is under
authoritarian threat.
That authoritarian threat to America, according to the Democratic
Party, establishment media, social media tech bros, Hollywood glitterati,
corporate bosses, and university professors, is clear—and it comes directly
from the political Right.
And that authoritarian threat, according to those who control vast
swaths of American life, manifested itself most prominently on January 6,
2021.
On that day, hundreds if not thousands of rioters broke away from a far
larger group of pro-Trump peaceful protesters and stormed the United States
Capitol, many seeking to do violent harm to members of Congress and the
vice president of the United States. Their goal: to overturn the legally
constituted results of the 2020 election.
The images from January 6 were indeed dramatic—and the rioters of
January 6 did indeed engage in acts of criminal evil. Pictures of barbarians
dressed in buffalo horns and idiots carrying Trump flags and military gear–
clad fools carrying zip cuffs made the front pages globally. Sitting
congresspeople and the vice president of the United States were rushed to
safety, shielding themselves from the droogs beyond.
All Americans of goodwill—on all political sides—decried the January
6 riots. Vice President Pence personally oversaw the counting of the
electoral votes; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
condemned the rioters as vile cretins, then moved forward to the
certification of the election.
But according to the Left, the January 6 riots weren’t merely an act of
universally condemned criminality. They were the culmination of right-wing
authoritarianism. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote, “We
entrusted a sociopathic instinctive authoritarian with the most powerful
office in the world. What did we think would happen?”1 Paul Krugman of
The New York Times suggested, “one of our major political parties has
become willing to tolerate and, indeed, feed right-wing political
paranoia. . . . The GOP has reached the culmination of its long journey away
from democracy, and it’s hard to see how it can ever be redeemed.”2 Greg
Sargent of The Washington Post explained, “Trump’s GOP has an ugly
authoritarian core.”3 Lisa McGirr wrote in The New York Times,
“Republicans will certainly seek to pivot from the riot, but the nativism,
extreme polarization, truth-bashing, white nationalism and anti-democratic
policies that we tend to identify with President Trump are likely to remain a
hallmark of the Republican playbook into the future.”4
“If you voted for Trump,” said Don Lemon of CNN, “you voted for the
person who the Klan supported. You voted for the person who Nazis
support. You voted for the person the alt-right supports. That’s the crowd
that you are in. You voted for the person who incited a crowd to go into the
Capitol and potentially take the lives of lawmakers.”5
Score settling would be necessary. Charles Blow of The New York
Times asked, “What do we do now as a society and as a body politic? Do we
simply turn the page and hope for a better day, let bygones be bygones? Or
do we seek some form of justice, to hold people accountable for taking this
country to the brink?”6 Joy Reid of MSNBC called for “de-Baathification,”
à la the post–Iraq War purge of Saddam Hussein’s military.7
Indeed, the American Left argued, the greatest threat to America’s
future came from right-wing authoritarianism—which, naturally, the Left
conflated with white supremacy and conservative philosophy. To fail in the
quest of ridding America of this threat would spell the end of the republic.
Authoritarianism had to be stopped.
But what if the most dangerous authoritarian threat to America wasn’t
the several hundred evil conspiracists, fools, and criminals who breached the
Capitol?
What if the most dangerous authoritarian threat to the country wasn’t a
properly despised group of agitators making asses of themselves by charging
into the Hall of Democracy, variously dressed in military gear, animal skins,
and buffalo horns?
What if the primary threat to American liberty lies elsewhere?
What if, in fact, the most pressing authoritarian threat to the country
lies precisely with the institutional powers that be: in the well-respected
centers of journalism, in the gleaming towers of academia, in the glossy
offices of the Hollywood glitterati, in the cubicles of Silicon Valley and the
boardrooms of our corporate behemoths? What if the danger of
authoritarianism, in reality, lies with those who are most powerful—with a
ruling class that despises the values of half the country, and with the
institutions they wield? What if the creeping authoritarianism of those who
wield power has been slowly growing, unchecked, for years?
What if authoritarianism has many strains—and the most virulent strain
isn’t the paranoia and fear that sometimes manifests on the Right, but the
self-assured unearned moral virtue of the Left?
THE AUTHORITARIAN INSTINCT
Something there is in man that loves a dictator.
In the book of Samuel, the people of Israel, threatened from without by
warring tribes and within by dissention, seek to end the age of judges: they
want a king. They have been warned repeatedly about the disastrous
consequences of such a choice. God tells Samuel that the people have
“rejected Me”; Samuel excoriates the people, telling them that a king “will
take your sons” and “take your daughters” and “take your fields and your
vineyards” and “take the tenth of your flocks”—that, in the end, “you shall
be his servants, and you shall cry out in that day because of the king you
chose, and the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
And the people answer: “No, there shall be a king over us; that we also
may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us, and go out
before us, and fight our battles.”8
Human nature does not change.
This is the unfortunate truth of human history: because man is a threat
to man, human beings seek safety and satisfaction in authority; because man
is a threat to man, human beings seek the possibility of a remolding of man,
a remolding to be achieved through the exercise of power. Human beings,
all too often, trust not in the moral authority of a God above, looking down
benevolently on humanity, providing ethical guidelines for building
fulfilling lives and rich communities. Instead, they look to the earthly
authority of a king, a leader, an institution. It took just a few weeks from the
splitting of the Red Sea for the Jews to embrace the Golden Calf.
Human beings are ripe for authoritarianism.
For most of human history, authoritarianism manifested in centralized
governmental systems: monarchies, oligarchies, aristocracies. The
widespread democracy of the post–World War II period is extraordinary,
and extraordinarily fragile: human beings may be granted freedom, but
freedom has a short shelf life.
Democracy is threatened chiefly by ochlocracy: the rule of the mob.
Mob rule transforms freedom into authoritarianism in two ways: through
reactionary brutality, in which citizens seek protection from the winds of
change, without and within—a form of brutality largely associated with the
political Right; and utopian brutality, in which citizens seek to escape
present challenges through the transformation of mankind itself—a form of
brutality largely associated with the political Left. Often, the two forms of
