The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  Second, we must firmly reject the notion that speech is violence. Dissent isn’t violence; disagreement isn’t harm. That’s because politics isn’t an identity; it isn’t a denial of someone’s identity to disagree with them. We know this in our everyday personal relationships—we disagree with those we love most of all, on a regular basis. They don’t feel that we’re “denying their humanity” or “doing them violence.” They understand that if they wish to be treated as adults, they ought to subject their views to the scrutiny of others. Anyone who utters the phrase “speech is violence” should be immediately discounted as a serious human being.

  Finally—and most carefully—we must deny the conflation of cordiality and inoffensiveness implicit in the Cordiality Principle. To be cordial does not mean to be inoffensive. As I’m fond of saying, facts don’t care about our feelings. That doesn’t mean that we should be deliberately rude. It does mean, however, that we shouldn’t allow others’ subjective interpretations of our viewpoints to rule our minds. We cannot grant others an emotional veto over our perspectives. To oppose same-sex marriage, for example, should not be considered prima facie offensive—one can make a perfectly plausible argument for the superior societal importance of traditional marriage over same-sex marriage without insulting those who are homosexual. To go silent in the face of important societal issues out of fear that you might offend is to grant unending power to those who are quickest to rise to offense. And that’s a recipe for emotional blackmail.

  In rejecting the Cordiality Principle, we need not give cover to those who deliberately offend. To be politically incorrect means to say that which requires saying, not to be a generic, run-of-the-mill jackass. There is a difference between making an argument against same-sex marriage and calling someone an ugly name. In fact, conflating the two grants the authoritarian Left enormous power: it allows them to argue that nonliberal points of view ought to be quashed in order to prevent terrible behavior. Fighting political correctness requires a willingness to speak truth and the brains to speak the truth in cogent, clear, and objectively decent language.

  When we fight back in this way, we win. We win because bravery draws followers; we win because honesty without vile behavior draws admirers. Once again, this isn’t an issue of Left versus Right. It’s an issue of upholding values dear to a pluralistic democracy—values that should be held in common across the political spectrum, and in direct opposition to the authoritarian Left.

  RENORMALIZING OUR INSTITUTIONS

  As I’ve argued throughout this book, our institutions have been steadily renormalized by an intransigent minority, making common cause with other “marginalized” populations in opposition to the majority. But this process can be reversed. It’s time to renormalize—return normalcy—our institutions.

  To do this requires the creation of an intransigent minority. Because too many Americans have allowed the authoritarian Left to cudgel them into silence or agreement, the key here is courage. Americans must be willing to stand up, speak out, and refuse to acquiesce to the power hierarchy.

  Take, for example, the case of Donald McNeil Jr., a science reporter for The New York Times. In February 2021, McNeil was forced out of his job. It turns out that two years before, in 2019, McNeil acted as an expert guide on a Times student trip in Peru. During that trip, a student asked McNeil whether he thought a twelve-year-old ought to be canceled for using the n-word. In the process of explaining contextual differences in using the n-word, McNeil uttered the infamous slur. Some of the students complained. And some woke staffers at the Times demanded action; they sent yet another in their endless stream of whining letters to the editors, demanding action. The editors quickly acquiesced, thanking the authoritarian leftist brute squad for their input. So McNeil lost his job.7 Executive editor Dean Baquet went so far as to state, “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent”—a standard so insanely authoritarian that Baquet later had to walk it back.8

  But here’s the thing: a lot of New York Times staffers thought McNeil should have retained his job. McNeil was a member of the NewsGuild, a union of 1,200 Times employees. As Vanity Fair reported, “McNeil is not without sympathy or support, both inside the Times and out. Some people feel that he was the latest victim of cancel culture run amok, forced out of his job by a public pressure campaign.”9

  So, here’s the question: where were they?

  What would have happened if the Times staffers, instead of allowing intellectual authoritarians like Nikole Hannah-Jones to rule the roost, stood up in favor of McNeil? There are 1,200 employees at the Times. Just 150 staffers signed the letter to the editors. What if 400 employees had signed a letter the other way? What if instead of caving to an intransigent minority, the Times employees who backed McNeil had formed their own intransigent minority—or even an intransigent majority? What if those staffers had forced the editors into a binary choice: side with free speech and non-authoritarianism or side with a relatively small group of malcontents?

  The same logic holds throughout American life. What if employees banded together and simply refused to go along with the latest cancellations, or the latest demand for “diversity training,” or the latest Maoist struggle session? What if religious Americans, who comprise a plurality of Americans in nearly every organization, said that they would not go along with attempts to force them into silence?

  The answer has been shown time and time again: authoritarian leftists back down when faced with an intransigent majority. That’s why they are authoritarians in the first place: if they could convince others of their arguments, they wouldn’t need to create social stigma around their opponents, or militarize weapons of power against them.

  In December 2020, Pedro Domingos, professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, wrote publicly about the standards for scientific research at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). NeurIPS now suggests that “[r]egardless of scientific quality or contribution, a submission may be rejected for ethical considerations, including methods, applications, or data that create or reinforce unfair bias.” This means that good research cannot be conducted under the NeurIPS auspices so long as such research challenges prevailing leftist politics.

  Domingos wrote that this was a terrible idea. This prompted a backlash, naturally, with authoritarian leftists labeling Domingos a racist; as Domingos wrote, his own department distanced itself from him. Other professors suggested that anyone who cited Domingos’s work was, by definition, a bigot.

  But once again, that wasn’t the end of the story. Domingos writes: “as the days passed, and it became clear who the real radicals were, something interesting happened. Many of the usually reticent moderates in our community began to speak up, and denounce the unhinged and ruthless tactics applied against me and my supporters. In the end, I suffered no professional consequences (at least not in any formal way). And the cancel crowd’s ringleader even issued a public apology and promised to mend her ways.”

  So what happened? According to Domingos, solidarity kicked in: a network of like-minded people willing to speak up actually spoke up. Activate when you’re on solid ground—and try to pick fights in which you can knock off the authoritarian Goliath. Never apologize. And direct your resistance not merely at authoritarian leftists, but at those in charge of the institutions. As Domingos writes, “Even companies that posture heavily in the area of social justice don’t actually want to be stained by the disgraceful behavior of mob leaders.”

  If an intransigent minority can be activated, then renormalization can occur. Those in the middle rarely like the authoritarian Left. They’re just afraid to speak out against them. So form a core group of intransigent people who share your values. And then build.10

  PRYING OPEN THE INSTITUTIONS

  All of this may work for institutions that are still up for grabs. But what do you do if the heads of these institutions aren’t merely going along to get along, or blowing with the wind�
��what if the heads of these institutions are dedicated authoritarian leftists themselves, invulnerable to intransigent minorities, fully willing to utilize every power they have to silence dissent?

  At this point, Americans are left with three options. And they should exercise all three.

  First, the legal options. The authoritarian Left is extraordinarily litigious. When they can’t win victories in the court of public opinion, they seek victory in the courts themselves. In fact, authoritarian leftists frequently use the mere threat of lawsuit to force compliance from those in power. Other Americans are generally reluctant to invoke the use of courts to force their employers to do their bidding.

  That’s usually the right instinct. But it’s precisely the wrong instinct when it comes to fighting the authoritarian Left.

  When it comes to the authoritarian Left’s desire to cram down “diversity training” that discriminates based on race, for example, lawsuits are fully merited. If companies force employees to attend training sessions segregated by race, or in which white employees are taught of their inherent privilege, white employees ought to seek legal redress. So-called anti-racism training often violates the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 by explicitly discriminating on the basis of race. Make your employer pay the price for doing so—or threaten to do so if the company doesn’t stop its legal violations.

  Another option is available politically for those who wish to fight the authoritarian Left: the formal expansion of anti-discrimination law to include matters of politics. Many states bar discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, religion, age, and disability, among other standards. Yet you can still be discriminated against based on your politics. If we wish to hold the authoritarian Left to its own standards—if we wish to use the bulwark of the law to prevent “discrimination” by limiting free association—then why give the authoritarian Left a monopoly on anti-discrimination law? Why not force the authoritarian Left to back down by using the same legal tools they have utilized themselves to silence dissent? If you’re a traditionally conservative baker who doesn’t want to violate his political precepts by catering a same-sex wedding, you’ll find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit. If you’re a leftist caterer who doesn’t want to violate his political precepts by serving a Republican dinner meeting, you’re off the hook. Perhaps that should change.

  This is an ugly option, particularly for those of us who still believe in core freedoms like freedom of association. I happen to believe that people should be able to hire and fire whomever they want to. But the authoritarian Left disagrees. And not only do they disagree, they’ve captured the legal system to the extent that you can only be targeted for having the wrong politics today.

  All of this raises a broader strategic possibility: the possibility of mutually assured destruction. Before I founded the Daily Wire, I ran an organization called Truth Revolt. The goal of the organization was to act as a sort of reverse Media Matters: to use a team of activists to encourage advertisers not to spend their money with left-wing outlets. In launching Truth Revolt, we openly acknowledged that we didn’t like our own tactics. In fact, as my business partner Jeremy Boreing stated at our founding, we’d happily dissolve our organization if Media Matters did the same. But if the authoritarian Left was going to utilize nasty tactics in order to force institutions to cave to them, we’d have to make clear that the Right could do the same. Either organizations would begin to ignore both sides—a preferable outcome—or they would simply stop engaging with the political universe generally. In our view, there was only one strategy worse than arming up against the authoritarian Left: unilateral disarmament.

  Americans can engage in the same tactics as the Left when it comes to our most powerful institutions. We can withhold our money from Hollywood, refuse to shop at the wokest corporations, remove our endowments from authoritarian-run universities. We can stop subscribing to media outlets, and we can pressure advertisers to stop spending their money there. Either these institutions will learn to tune out all the insanity—which they should—or they can remove themselves from the business of politics.

  Then there’s the final option: building alternative institutions.

  At the Daily Wire, we call ourselves alternative media, because that’s what we want to be: a place for people who have been ignored by institutional media to access information they want to see. We’re building up an entertainment wing to serve the needs of Americans who are tired of being lectured about the evils of their non-woke politics. This is necessary, because the authoritarian Left hasn’t just captured most of our major institutions, they’ve closed the doors behind them. It would be nice if real conservatives wrote regularly at The New York Times or The Atlantic, but that seems like a pipe dream. Exclusion is the order of the day.

  In shutting the doors of our most powerful institutions, the authoritarian Left has left those of us outside with one option: build it ourselves.

  The outcome, unfortunately, will be a completely divided America. We might patronize different coffee brands, wear different shoes, subscribe to different streaming services. Our points of commonality might disappear.

  That’s not our preferred outcome. But it may be the most realistic outcome: two separate Americas, divided by politics.

  None of these options are mutually exclusive. In fact, all of them should be pursued simultaneously. Our institutions must be opened up again. If they aren’t, the social fabric of the country will continue to disintegrate.

  FOR OUR CHILDREN

  These days, I find myself worried for America on a bone-deep level.

  I grew up in an America that made room for different points of view, an America that could tolerate political differences. I grew up in an America where we could attend ball games together without worrying about who voted for whom, where we could attend different schools and recognize our differences without trying to beat each other into submission. I grew up in an America where we could make the occasional offensive joke—and then apologize for it—and not have to worry about our livelihoods being stolen, because we all understood that we were human. Most of all, I grew up in an America where we could all participate in a search for truth, without fear that the mere searching would end in our societal excommunication.

  That America is simply disappearing.

  And that scares me for my kids.

  I’m afraid that by the time they become adults, they’ll take their lack of freedom for granted. I’m afraid that they’ll already know not to speak out, because they’ll have seen too many others lose their heads for doing so. I’m afraid that they won’t explore interesting and diverse ideas, because to do so might mean social ostracizing or career suicide.

  It’s my job to protect my kids from this authoritarian culture. But as the institutions of America mobilize against families like yours and mine, we lose options.

  What happens if my kids are required to reject my values—to dishonor their father and mother, the tradition they’ve been taught—as a ticket into approved society?

  What happens if my kids are told they can’t speak truth about the nature of the world—and what happens if I fight back against the untruth?

  What happens if I lose my job tomorrow because the authoritarian mob puts a target on my back?

  Millions of Americans are asking these questions. Tens of millions.

  Most of us.

  That’s the problem. But that’s also the solution.

  The authoritarian moment relies on the acquiescence of a silent majority.

  We must no longer be silent.

  When we stand up to the institutional dominance of an intransigent minority of Americans; when we announce that our values matter, that our ideas matter; when we speak out together, recognizing the diversity of our politics but cherishing our common belief in the power of liberty—the authoritarian moment finally ends.

  And a new birth of freedom begins.

  Acknowledgments

  E
very book is the work of dozens, not merely the author. That’s certainly true of this book, too. To that end, thank you to Eric Nelson, my intrepid editor at HarperCollins, whose good humor, bravery, and nuanced thinking help me hone my own thinking and writing.

  Thanks to my business partners, Jeremy Boreing and Caleb Robinson—both of them brilliant businessmen, true friends, and the guys with whom you’d want to walk into battle. Thanks to the entire staff at the Daily Wire, without whom our movement would be utterly debilitated, whose hard work makes my own possible, and whose constant sense of mischief enlivens every day and reminds me that the culture war is supposed to be fun. Thanks to our partners at Westwood One, who don’t just help us keep the lights on but stand with us when the going gets tough. Thanks to my longtime syndicators at Creators Syndicate, who discovered me two decades ago and have stood by that odd and incredible decision ever since.

  Thanks to my parents, who are bulwarks for our family and for me personally, whose first response is always “How can we help?,” and who instilled in me the values I hope to pass on to my children.

  Speaking of which, thanks to my kids: my inspiration, my joy, and the source of my lack of sleep. Their hilarity, inventiveness, and imagination never fail to amaze.

  Finally, thanks to my wife, who isn’t just the world’s greatest mom but the only person in the world with whom I’d want to forge forth on this adventure of a lifetime. I’m so glad I asked. And I’m more ecstatic every single day you said yes.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1.Jonathan Chait, “Trump Authoritarianism Denial Is Over Now,” NYMag.com, January 12, 2021, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-authoritarianism-capitol-insurrection-mob-coup.html.