Ben Shapiro: The Authoritarian Moment

His latest book, which of course I have purchased, is The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent. The Authoritarian Moment. Ben Shapiro, great to talk to you.

Hey, great to talk to you, Dennis. Really appreciate the purchases. Used to say that I used to thank people for helping put my kids through college, but since I am nothing less planning on putting my kids in college at all, I'll just thank you for the money.

That's a good one. I pretty much understand your position on that. Anyway, it's— how old are your kids?

Uh, they're 7, 5, and 1.

Oh my God, that is one lively house, Ben. Hey, I got a big question before your book. You left California. We were essentially neighbors for years. I mean, you know, within 25 minutes of one another in LA. You moved to Florida, a free country, from a totalitarian one. How does it feel?

It is the best move ever. Dennis, I've been trying to convince you for a long time that you are committing an act of grave immorality by paying taxes to the California state government. And let me just tell you, this state is spectacular. And there's a reason why half of the people that I was friends with in California have already tried to buy places here, skyrocketing real estate over here. It's, it's, it's not an irrational, crazy place. It's not a place where people feel that it is somehow morally required of them to live worse lifestyles in order to please some sort of pagan god of equity. And it's, it's pretty fantastic. I mean, people are walking around without masks after they're vaccinated, for example. And we also pay zero state income tax and have better public services than California. And it doesn't make me a better or more pure human being to have people shooting heroin into their feet outside my home. It's pretty great. You know, things that I took for granted when I was a kid and that disappeared over the course of time in California are still very much present in Florida.

What if they elect a Democrat?

Well, then I'll have to go to Alabama or something.

No, no, no, no, no, I want— I don't know, it's a very fair answer, but How much would it change?

I don't think that it would radically change in the sense that this is or was a very purple state. So even when there were Democrats like, you know, Charlie Crist was, I believe, a Republican at that point. He was governor. You know, they had Democratic governors in the past. This last election cycle with DeSantis and Gillum was extremely close. I think DeSantis is going to walk away with it this time. I think he's going to win by 4 or 5 points going away. The state has gotten significantly more red over the past several years. Donald Trump won this state by about 100,000 votes in 2016. He won it by almost half a million votes in 2020. And that's because a lot of people are seeking a place that is not like the rest of the country, that still has a lot of cosmopolitan feel because Miami's a big city, Fort Lauderdale's a big city, Orlando's a big city, and all those resources are available. But you don't get along all the baggage. A lot of people, This is also one of the things people in Texas are worried about. So in California, my Texas and all of that, the people who are moving out of California, typically speaking, are much more red than the general population of California. And the same is true in New York and Connecticut. When people decamp to Florida, they're doing so generally for a reason.

So not to make it blue.

No, I think that there was a study recently that came out that showed that Florida's immigrants community actually had made the state about 1% more red over the course of the last 3 years.

Well, so your book, The Authoritarian Moment, which is— it's almost depressing to even say the title of your book, that we're living in an authoritarian moment in the United States of America. By the way, again, folks, it's up at DennisPrager.com, and anything Ben writes is just obligatory reading. And as I said, I've just purchased it myself. By the way, do you read the Audible?

I do.

So this will be the only Audible that I won't increase the speed on.

Exactly. You don't need a 2x speed on the Audible.

No, no, not even 1.3. So I'm curious, do you think the authoritarian moment applies to the whole West?

Uh, I do think that it is unique to the United States. I think you're starting to see, uh, in some cases a sort of pullback from it in Europe. I think that when you see members of the French government, for example, saying, don't bring that woke crap over here, and when you see Eastern Europe, which has become significantly more right-wing and is rejecting a lot of the social authoritarianism we're seeing, I do think that it's uniquely American and It is, I think it's odd because normally the United States tends to pick up bad ideologies from Europe, but this is one we're actually exporting to Europe, which is kind of a unique thing historically.

Would you have written The Authoritarian Moment 15 years ago?

No, no. I mean, I think that there were other problems in the country 15 years ago, but when I talk about how we're living in this sort of authoritarian moment, I don't mean that the government of the United States is fully authoritarian controlling every aspect. Of our lives. I think that we're living in a time when our fellow Americans are increasingly embracing a sort of authoritarian mindset. And not only that, I think that they've mainstreamed that and inlined that into institutions of power. I start off the book by talking about the kind of myth of January 6th that's been created in the mainstream media, which is that January 6th was not a bunch of idiots and morons and people who were misguided invading the Capitol building to do harm to people because law enforcement was not there and staffed up in appropriate numbers. And then within a few hours, everybody had been arrested and life went on as normal. The left treated that as though that was indicative of risk to democracy on a serious level, that we were 5 minutes away from the entire democracy being overthrown, and therefore all of their opponents need to be silenced. I think that January 6th is a really good war shock test. Where do you think the authoritarian threat is coming from? Is the authoritarian threat coming from people who are misguided, misinformed, and idiotic doing things with no institutional support? Or is the authoritarian threat coming from major institutions of power, which in response to January 6th decided to, for example, deplatform Parler or pressure social media companies into tossing Donald Trump and banning quote unquote misinformation, or companies that were forced to relocate their activities from red states and defund Republican politicians, or educational systems that have crammed down particular points of view on students? The thing that I'm pointing to in the authoritarian moment is that all the major institutions of our society have been weaponized against people who think not like the mainstream left. And this is a serious danger. It's a real danger, because that only ends one of two ways, governmentally. One is that that exact perspective gets mirrored in the government, in which case the government does become more authoritarian. And the other is that there's a really ugly backlash that is not classically liberal in any serious way. And I don't think any of that is good for the future of the country.

That's right. So everything has been weaponized. Is there— so I think, for example, of the NBA, right? Is that a fair example? Or Major League Baseball pulling, pulling the, uh, the All-Star Game out of Georgia?

Exactly. So every single area— what the book does, it goes chapter by chapter, takes a different institution, and it explains not only that it has been weaponized but how it has been weaponized. And so if you're looking at entertainment, the attempt to take neutral spaces and then politicize those spaces, and then declare that if you refuse to go along with the politicization, it is you who have, you are somehow morally derelict. If you turn off the NBA because you don't wish to see Black Lives Matter slogans festooning the court, all you wanna do is watch basketball, this means, of course, that you are implicitly racist, and it is you who are the problem. You morally lack. When you look at the institutions ranging from the perversion of science, the scientific institutions of our country, to the media, which obviously has been re-normalized. What we've been watching over the period of time is a very small group of very mobilized and aggressive radicals who basically cowed the rest of the country into silence. And this is where I think the hope lies, is that there will be a majority that eventually stands up and says no. But what the studies tend to show is that all it takes in order to, quote unquote, re-normalize an institution is about 20% of the population of any institution aggressively insisting that its points of view be listened to. Most people are conflict averse, and so if they're in the middle, or if they don't really have a strong perspective, they tend to just cave to that 20%. And you can see it in institution after institution. Like, where exactly were the NBA owners when all this was happening? Why— and some of those NBA owners, by the way, I'm sure are conservative. Where were the NBA owners saying, you know what, I think that we'd be better off not, for example, turning the NBA into a political product? Well, the answer is that they were too busy caving to the Players Association and too busy caving to the media to do anything. You see this with mainstream corporations. I think a lot of, particularly in the last couple of years, a lot of conservatives have been shocked to see corporations—

All right, we'll continue, Ben, with the corporations. I want to remind everybody, and I'm sure you'll be happy I do, as you should be, because it's another wonderful book. And it is The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro, up at DennisPrager.com. It's being published tomorrow. We'll continue.