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  • The Authoritarian Moment

  • How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
  • Written by: Ben Shapiro
  • Narrated by: Ben Shapiro
  • Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (117 ratings)

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The Authoritarian Moment

Written by: Ben Shapiro
Narrated by: Ben Shapiro
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Publisher's Summary

New York Times best seller

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.

©2021 Ben Shapiro (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

What listeners say about The Authoritarian Moment

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Read

Shapiro nails the problem in our society today and I recommend this for Canadian readers as well,

3 people found this helpful

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I wish everyone would read!

Ben's the bomb.com
the world would be a better place if everyone would read this lol.
the end.

2 people found this helpful

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Ben Shapiro is irrefutable and entertaining.

The woke garbage is still growing. Maybe it's wrong to be right. "The Woke Dead"

1 person found this helpful

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Another winner Ben

Great stuff Shapiro, another sharp and meaningful analysis of todays culture and mindset. But for the love of Moses, STOP DOING IMPERSONATIONS, they suck. Again love your work, all the best from Toronto.

1 person found this helpful

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Good read

As a member of the silent majority Ben speaks about, I found this book to have a lot of great points. He goes at length to discuss the authoritarian left but doesn't discuss the same playbook being used by the far right. He briefly differentiates between liberals and the authoritarian left but for most of the book you're left with the impression that the two are one in the same, which only perpetuates this idea of "you're either with us or with them".

If you're looking for a book to explain what left leaning authoritarism can look like, this is it. For contrast I would suggest you read The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno.

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Absolutely necessary!

Excellent work untangling and articulating the very current state of society. Understanding of oneself is paramount. The book offers hope for a brighter future for ALL of society. If we all worked as hard as Ben Shapiro imagine what could be accomplished.

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An important message sullied by the messenger.

Ben did himself a huge disservice by narrating his own book with insanely high levels of sarcasm, weird impressions, and annoying repetitions of him screaming “THE SCIENCE!” through an entire chapter. His ideas end up coming across as whining and therefore fall short. For a more even tempered look at the same problem of authoritarian leftists I would recommend John McWhorter’s more centred Woke Racism.

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Outstanding

Totally enjoyed this and would highly recommend, points are right on the money and hopefully we can straighten out the current mess.

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eye-opening

+ Source of hope to overcome the current division of the American society +

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Entertaining and informative as expected

Current, informative and entertaining. It's worth it just to listen to Ben's impersonations when reading quotes.

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  • Jonathan Bruce Williams
  • 2021-07-30

The Daily Weasel

In this audiobook, Ben Shapiro manages to undermine what could have been a clear, cogent summarization of his partisan ideology by embellishing his reading of the text with embarrassing impersonations. He does not impersonate Barack Obama well, but perhaps he does manage to remind one of Joradan Peele’s 2018 deep fake of Obama, which was created to make an important statement about the reality of fake news. Shapiro’s arguments against ultracrepidarianism should be highlighted, as his performance of these intentionally derogatory caricatures is ill considered. This kind of comedy is clearly not his area of expertise, and every syllable of his attempts erode his otherwise intelligible points. While his summaries of so called woke-ism do reflect some of the current distortions in our media landscape, this book plays like the cash grab that it is. Many of the cases and examples he cites, such as the behavior of the student body at Evergreen college in 2017, have been written about and discussed over and over and over again. It seems that his proposed solution to the cancel culture of the left, is to enact the same kind of tactics in retaliation from the right. Shapiro does elucidate the incredible biases, manipulations and hypocrisies that are taking place in American media, leading by example. At least in his reading of this audiobook he doesn’t interject an advertisement for erectile dysfunction medication or a waffle maker just before making his next point.

28 people found this helpful

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  • Kindle Customer
  • 2021-08-21

Rife with false equivalency and contradiction.

-To list them chronologically, but not completely, my issues with this book are as follows:
-Many republican lawmakers and I suspect readers of this book will disagree with his accurate summary of the January 6th insurrection.
-Why is the morality of the left unearned? Does the left also not give charity and do good in general?
-You already simplify millions of people into the "left" when just as the "right" has much diversity in ideas, morals, beliefs, and cultures, the left does too.
-You use arguments from religion and the Bible which are not accurate representations of human histroy, culture, or society.
-Our country, and every other democracy, is an example of men seeking safety, security, and authority through the equal distribution of power.
-Claiming humans can't be moral without God, and without God humans look to a king?
No leftists I know claim moral absolutionism, that is a quality taught by religion ( not to say all leftists are without religion)
-SOME members of the right checked the right wing authoritarianism of January 6th, others did and still are trying to rewrite the history of that event and smooth the whole thing over. The ENTIRETY of the left however checked that show of authoritarianism
-Cheering on the right for abandoning their contribution to the insurrection only after the consequences of there actions came to fruition is not praise, its reckoning and admission
It's referred to as an insurrection not a coup, you're deflecting here intentionally
-Trump at the rally literally said "Were going to march on the capitol and ill be there with you."
-Claiming that because those on the right who instigated an insurrection on our capitol finally relented to do their job AFTER the consequences of their actions and threats on their life that this somehow absolved them of responsibility
-Removing the members of congress who invited the insurrection is not unprecedented and I 100% agree with the idea
-Comparing right wing authoritarianism towards our government to the left wing authoritarianism of private institutions. One is we the peoples which we can use to reign in the other unless it is damaged by, we the people. Also, facebook, twitter, and godaddy are all companies which can deny service without cause or reason.
-Huge contradictions related to the first amendment and how it relates to the three parts of it. Mocking journalists who you say thought they were some form of protected entity because they're specifically mentioned in the amendment thinking "media is protected, I'm the media, I'm special," then explaining how that relationship is not direct but a byproduct of the language "government shall make no law restricting freedom of the press," but then turning around to claim we simply have free speech, when it is not only the exact same amendment but the exact same relationship. We "have" free speech because of the negative space created by the wording "government cannot make a law restricting it." This is also vastly different from a company or social media platform denying you service based on harmful or dangerous or discriminatory language on its platform; which has always been cause for removal on many places on the internet since its inception.
-Constantly conflates issues of morality and science while also claiming to hold the correct opinion that science inherently cannot make moral decisions. The application of science is what defines its morality, therefore humans define the morality of science.
-"When did social media become a flaming dumpster fire of visceral hatred?" - Ben shaprio. is he kidding? Has he never existed online? The internet has always had that side to it where people interact. Before facebook it was youtube, before youtube it was MySpace, before MySpace it was AOL IM, and so on. What changed was the lack of privacy and anonymity not the attitudes.
-Intellectual inconsistency with the effect news (journalism) can have on people. If liberals saw the hunter biden story it would've changed the election, but not holding that misinformation in the same form that people were convinced was real didn't effect people.
-He treats the inception of social media like it wasn't born of the idea to collect, steal, and sell every single users personal data.

20 people found this helpful

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  • Confused
  • 2021-07-29

Treatise of the Unwoke

Shapiro has penned a significant treatise of conservative objection to the illiberal shift of today’s left. It doesn’t just offer ample, concrete, and timely examples of why alert observers oppose the progressive authoritarian crush, it convinces us that a broader resistance to this misguided impulse is imperative and offers a roadmap to the exits of the bad dream that is woke culture.

20 people found this helpful

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  • Anonymous User
  • 2021-07-30

Important Read! Great Awareness and Insight

Read this to understand how the political left has institutionalized itself in the major areas of everyday life. Help shed light on the blinders that have been installed into the minds of many Americans.

15 people found this helpful

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  • Philip Starr
  • 2021-07-29

Excellent and unfortunately too true

Been Schapiro does an awesome job explaining how the left has taken over the culture and all its institutions

14 people found this helpful

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  • Anonymous User
  • 2021-07-27

Thank you Audible! It is a nice book. Nice book. G

Thank you Audible! It is a nice book. Nice book. Great book. Good book. Fun to read it.

14 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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  • emay
  • 2021-07-30

One Simple Tip

Put your speed on 80😂. Sorry Ben, but I think you know what I'm saying!😉

12 people found this helpful

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  • whatsup
  • 2021-07-30

Required reading

Authoritarian Moment is an amazing summary of our current American situation and a must read for everyone.

10 people found this helpful

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  • Jacob Fallis
  • 2021-07-30

Amazing thoughts!

A must read for any and all sides of the political spectrum. Each argument is well placed and put together.

7 people found this helpful

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  • Ryan Fieldsspack
  • 2021-08-22

Don’t miss this!

If you are concerned in the slightest that you can’t speak up about your feelings on this society, don’t miss this book.

6 people found this helpful