The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent

Ben Shapiro

Jul 2021 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

New York Times Bestseller

How far are Americans willing to go to force each other to fall in line?

According to the establishment media, the intelligentsia, and our political chattering class, the greatest threat to American freedom lies in right-wing authoritarianism. We’ve heard that some 75 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump represent the rise of American fascism; that conservatives have allowed authoritarianism to bloom in their midst, creating a grave danger for the republic.

But what if the true authoritarian threat to America doesn’t come from the political right, but from the supposedly anti-fascist left?

There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition.

The authoritarian Left is aggressively insistent that everyone must conform to its values, demanding submission and conformity. The dogmatic Left is obsessed with putting people in categories and changing human nature. Everyone who opposes it must be destroyed.

Ben Shapiro looks at everything from pop culture to the Frankfurt school, social media to the Founding Fathers, to explain the origins of our turn to tyranny, and why so many seem blind to it.

More than a catalog of bad actors and intemperate acts,The Authoritarian Moment lays bare the intolerance and rigidity creeping into all American ideology – and prescribes the solution to ending the authoritarianism that threatens our future.

Ratings and reviews

If you have studied the history of authoritarianism, this book will read like a very elementary argument full of holes. If you are looking for ways to misunderstand authoritarianism to fit your worldview, you will probably enjoy it.

Paper-thin arguments that are sure to make the fanboys swoon. Are you a critical thinker? If so, you will not like this book.

Apart from the trolling liberal who strolls by to leave a bad review for the the gags of it; you will find alot of well illustrated examples of how our country is falling away from its biblical and liberal (in the classic definition) freedoms with self responsibility to not veer into licentiousness in a free, capitalist, constitutional Republic. We (half our nation) are doing just that, living in lavish with no self awareness and its causing our nation to collapse. ps- there is nothing new under the sun.

About the author

Ben Shapiro is founding editor-in-chief and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show," the top conservative podcast in the nation. A New York Times bestselling author, Shapiro is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and an Orthodox Jew. His work has been profiled in nearly every major American publication, and he has appeared as the featured speaker at many conservative events on campuses nationwide, several of those appearances targeted by progressive and “Antifa” activists.