Posted on 10/24/2021 7:33:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
Remember when they deplatformed Parler, accused American grandmas of insurrection, and digitally silenced the president of the United States? Remember how they did all of this after Black Lives Matter and antifa rioted for months and radical mayors and prosecutors refused to lock them up? Remember how academia, corporate America, and even the military suddenly stepped out of the shadows and pushed the exact same racist theory, all pushing the lie that America is racist at the same time radicals across the country were attacking statues of our founders and even President Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant?
It all felt so snapped in place, so tightly coordinated. What if it was?
That was all just seven months ago. But the preparation was years, decades in the making. Ben Shapiro shows how it happened, who is behind it, and what to do about it now in his new bestseller, The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.
Shapiro’s book brings the goods like he always does at the Daily Wire and on his national radio show. "The Authoritarian Moment" is full of facts and hard truths about the threat America faces -- not just from China and now the deep wounds Joe Biden is inflicting on the country through his collapse of Afghanistan -- but across the elite level of all of our institutions. They’re all arrayed against America’s founders, against America’s ideals, and ultimately want to control America’s future.
“Human nature does not change,” Shapiro writes in the opening pages, and so because we want safety many of us are willing to trade our liberty for it. At the same time, some man or group always wants power. They’re only too happy to crown themselves as some form of king, assume that power, and use it to destroy liberty. America faces such a moment now, Shapiro argues, but not in the form of a singular king. It’s in the form of institutions the left has captured and now cloaks itself in as it wields nearly unchecked power over the rest of us. Dissent from their line on anything and you will be silenced.
America’s founders knew their history well, from the Bible to the Glorious Revolution, and knew how the human will to power could warp even the best people and institutions. They set up the system of checks and balances in our Constitution and body of laws that placed leaders and branches of government into healthy competition against each other, creating what Shapiro calls this “extraordinary” moment in which the United States and much of the world lives in republics, not under monarchies or dictators. It’s an extraordinary time the United States ushered in alone, and has led since its inception. It’s also a moment that those who want to amass power seek to discredit and ultimately destroy -- by any means necessary.
Shapiro doesn’t pull any punches. He asserts that the rioters on January 6, 2021, were authoritarians of the right. That is, they sought to overthrow the constitutional means by which we pass power peacefully from one president and party to the next. But those authoritarians, he says, were checked by other members of the political right -- Vice President Mike Pence most conspicuously. There are authoritarians on both sides. The right checked its authoritarians that day, but the left, Shapiro says, not only does not check its authoritarians, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and its antifa allies, the left actively encourages them and gives them succor from the very top.
This explains why America is suffering a dangerous authoritarian moment now, with the greater threat to freedom coming from the left. It’s the left through Big Tech that is silencing dissent. It’s the left, after capturing corporate America, that is attempting to brainwash Americans into dividing ourselves forever by race and other innate and immutable characteristics. It’s the left that’s doing everything it can through the New York Times’ dishonest 1619 Project on one hand and critical race theory on the other to crack up and destroy America at its foundations -- so it can then replace those foundations with its own authoritarian, totalitarian form of society and government.
Shapiro traces how we got here, from the Frankfurt School’s first study of the authoritarian mind to today and now capitalist companies like Coke swiftly unmasked themselves as Marxist indoctrination centers. He shows how Facebook and Twitter have become the vanguard of a new movement that endangers free speech even as the mainstream media militates against the freedom of speech despite the fact that doing so is not in their long-term interests.
Now Americans censor themselves. Not just on Facebook. More than two-thirds of us self censor even in private conversations. Anyone could turn from friend to informant, and they don’t even need a government to push them into as there was in Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union or the old communist bloc. They turn informant because our institutions encourage it. They’ll ruin your life just for the likes.
If you read just one book about the current crisis of liberty in America, make it Ben Shapiro’s "The Authoritarian Movement." Shapiro brings the facts and marshals them into a cogent picture of what is really happening in America and across the West. While the picture he paints is stark, and entirely accurate, Shapiro offers some hope and some tangible tools to use to fight back against cancel culture and the digital brownshirt authoritarians who currently command all of the institutions.
America is in an authoritarian moment. Our country has experienced one before, during the heavy-handed, jack-booted presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Liberty survived him and if Americans right, left, and center who love liberty band together, be brave, and fight back, it will survive this one, too, but it’s up to us. America owes Ben Shapiro a debt for describing this terrible Authoritarian Moment, and for providing a map to get ourselves out of it.
But it seems none of them want to run.
*****************
The personal consequences often discourage them from running. Hard to blame them for not wanting to endue the trashing.
Recall how the GOP treated the Tea Party. They would do it all over again. The GOP despised the Tea Party because it highlighted it’s failures and weakness.
“He asserts that the rioters on January 6, 2021, were authoritarians of the right. That is, they sought to overthrow the constitutional means by which we pass power peacefully from one president and party to the next. But those authoritarians, he says, were checked by other members of the political right — Vice President Mike Pence most conspicuously.”
“overthrow”???!!!!
The mob thought they were protesting.
Pence did not stop the mob, he stopped the Constitutional mandated state legislatures who were trying to stop the steal.
Shapiro is trying to conform media and democrat talking points into a matter of record.
Poor Ben, unable to see the true force behind the authoritarian evil ... the father of lies, a murderer from the start. So, unable to see whom it is that is whispering in his ear, Shapiro serves the lies.
“ he stopped the Constitutional mandated state legislatures who were trying to stop the steal”
Ben Shapiro is an evil little weasel BUT no State Legislature - NOT ONE - took any legal or constitutional action - WHICH THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY ENTITLED TO DO - to stop the steal.
“Shapiro doesn’t name names just innuendo.”
Probably because most of them have a very similar ring to them, Soros, Zuckerberg, Zucker, Oppenheim, Goldberg, Reuben, on and on.
His HQ is there. I know someone on his staff. She’s the daughter of a co-worker. She thinks Ben is right wing.
The only difference between Shapiro and Never-Trumpers like Jonah Goldberg is Shapiro has figured out that attacking Trump 24/7 is bad for business.
But his Never-Trumpism still slips thru from time to time.
I know that. I live here
He was supposed to move here too but flaked out for more Jewish lands like south Florida
We have six temples
It’s not like we’re some Al Fatah outpost lol
Shapiro would have been a democrat in the 70s
A neocon neocon neocon
He can’t help it
That comment bothered me too.
Did he even talk to any of those
patriots about why they did what they did?
Correct. As the leftists always say, "we must read the signs of the times"
They had better pray we don't do so.
I don’t think that this problem is Trump’s alone. SCOTUS jurists often branch out in unexpected ways.
My daughter, 24, moved to Seattle 2 years ago for work.
I wouldn't say she was a liberal. She was one of those people who lived her own life very conservatively and didn't mind OKing destructive liberal policies for other's lives, if that makes sense.
And I am sure, there was a dose of just old fashioned rebellion and exhaustion from living with her N*** mother who was on her soapbox all her life.
Well, I will tell ya, two years of having her car windows bashed in, city block after city block taken over by tent cities, parks being partitioned off because the homeless have taken them over, needles and junkies everywhere, BLM, etc. etc. ---I honestly think she'd silently go into a voting booth and vote for *insert any right wing authoritarian* if he promised to restore society.
Not that voting is gonna solve this, we both know we are long past that.
Yeah, I can't listen half as fast as Ben Shapiro talks.
It takes a certain type to want to be one of 435 or even one of 100, or one of two. Mostly sociopaths.
Yes, I think what Shapiro posits here is an interesting thought experiment. But he is missing some things. Everyone knew there was going to be a political rally that day. Everyone knew the country had been through a very rough and violent period preceding it. They did nothing to secure the Capitol and some reports are that those who tried to secure it were ordered to stand down, or ignored.
Shapiro definitely knows what the Reichstag fire was all about. And when you see the videos it is obvious that the first ones through the glass doors, smashing them, were in all black. Antifa, maybe. FBI infiltrators, maybe. Certainly not regular protestors. The regular crowd that comes in behind those who smashed the glass were just milling about in the hallway. A couple of hooligans too of course but sitting in the speakers chair and hanging from the rafters is criminal but not insurrection. The Jan 6 commission is simply in place to confirm the story they want to portray and cover up any complicity by Congress, the Capitol police, and the FBI among others.
I despise Shapiro for many of the reasons given already but I can understand him not being too nice to Malkin considering that she has cozied up with people who seem to be part of the “If only Hitler had finished the job” crowd. She has gone to the dark side.
Paranoia, liberal paranoia about anything Trump is definitely behind totalitarianism. Nothing like this kind of hate deiven douchebaggery to help elect actual terrorists.
Indeed
Ben is an assistant authoritarian.
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