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When Woke Institutions Threaten Democracy
Have you ever noticed how those shouting the loudest about protecting democracy often seem the most eager to silence opposing voices? In Ben Shapiro's provocative bestseller "The Authoritarian Moment," he flips the script on one of today's most persistent narratives. While mainstream media, academia, and political elites warn of right-wing authoritarianism culminating in the January 6th Capitol riot, Shapiro argues the true authoritarian threat comes from the institutional Left-the powerful coalition of journalists, academics, Hollywood executives, tech giants, and corporate leaders who increasingly demand ideological conformity and punish dissent.
The book has struck a chord with conservatives feeling marginalized in today's cultural landscape, while generating fierce criticism from progressives who see it as downplaying genuine threats from the right. What makes Shapiro's argument particularly compelling is his meticulous documentation of how supposedly liberal institutions now employ decidedly illiberal tactics. Whether you ultimately agree with his thesis or not, "The Authoritarian Moment" forces readers to confront uncomfortable questions about power, censorship, and the fragility of democratic norms in an increasingly polarized America.
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The Authoritarian Instinct and How It Threatens Democracy
Something in human nature loves a dictator. Throughout history, people have sought safety in authority and the remolding of man through power. Most of human history featured centralized governmental systems like monarchies and oligarchies. Democracy is extraordinarily fragile.
Democracy faces two primary threats: reactionary brutality (associated with the Right) and utopian brutality (associated with the Left). These forms often feed on each other, creating a downward spiral into tyranny, as happened in Weimar Germany. America's Founding Fathers recognized this danger and created governmental checks and balances to protect individual rights from mob rule.
Despite these constitutional safeguards, the authoritarian mindset always looms beneath the surface. In 1950, Theodor Adorno and colleagues developed the "F-scale" to measure pre-fascist personality traits, suggesting such personalities were products of American society that could only be changed through societal transformation. However, their analysis ignored the possibility of left-wing authoritarianism. When researcher Lucian Conway simply rewrote Robert Altemeyer's "Right Wing Authoritarianism" questions with left-wing premises, he found liberals scored highest on authoritarianism.
Left-wing authoritarianism manifests through revolutionary aggression, top-down censorship, and anti-conventionalism. Even Adorno eventually acknowledged this when student protesters occupied his classroom, displaying what he called "thoughtless violence that once belonged to fascism."
If authoritarians exist on both the Right and Left, where does the true risk lie? The January 6 Capitol riot demonstrated right-wing authoritarianism-but crucially, the system held. Vice President Pence fulfilled his constitutional duty, Republican senators abandoned electoral challenges, and Republican governors certified their state votes. Despite Trump's authoritarian rhetoric throughout his presidency, institutions consistently constrained him.
By contrast, in the aftermath of January 6, America's institutional powers swung decisively toward authoritarian measures. Media outlets advocated deplatforming conservatives, social media companies removed Trump's accounts, corporations cut funding to Republicans who challenged electoral votes, and tech companies collaborated to take Parler offline. Meanwhile, Democratic politicians called for "media literacy" commissions, removal of congressional members, and urged Biden to bypass Congress through executive action.
The consequences are real. More than 60% of Americans fear expressing their true thoughts-including most liberals, moderates, and a staggering 77% of conservatives. Only "strong liberals" feel confident speaking freely. For non-leftists, institutional hatred is palpable-in academia, media, sports, entertainment, social media, and workplaces. Even liberals like Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling, and Steven Pinker face cancellation for minor deviations from orthodoxy.
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How to Silence a Majority Through Emotional Manipulation
When Trump won in 2016, political elites faced a choice: self-reflection or condemnation of millions of Americans. They chose the latter. After brief journalistic forays into "red state America," the establishment doubled down on their original thesis-Trump voters were "deplorables," racist and ignorant. This narrative relieved journalists from leaving their comfort zones and allowed them to abandon journalistic principles. Instead of examining Trump's policies, they focused on his tweets as confirmation of their hypothesis about his supporters.
Though Trump lost in 2020, Republicans outperformed polls across the board. Trump's defeat reflected rejection of his personality rather than Democratic policies. The "silent majority"-completely missed by media, pollsters, and experts-broadly rejected the Democratic agenda. Americans didn't vote against polls because they were racists, but because they refused to surrender to the authoritarian Left. They went quiet but didn't go away.
The cultural divide in America isn't economic or racial-it's cultural. Our culture wars center on a simple question: Can we agree that freedom of speech is more important than freedom from offense? The authoritarian Left has successfully pursued a three-step strategy to take over major institutions: winning emotional arguments, renormalizing institutions, and locking all doors.
The Left has artificially shifted the balance between offense and free expression by establishing that any offense to "vulnerable groups" represents profound harm requiring silence. They've invented the concept of "microaggressions"-claiming minor verbal offenses constitute actual violence, regardless of intent. Phrases like "Where are you from?" or references to "meritocracy" are deemed harmful.
This system requires no intent-"implicit bias" is enough to condemn someone. The Left has progressed from "speech is violence" to the contradictory "silence is violence"-meaning silence about injustice (as defined by the Left) makes one complicit. People must "do the work"-learn why their perspective is irrelevant, cede ground to woke ideology, and become crusaders for it.
The culture of authoritarian leftism has hijacked nearly all major American institutions through what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "renormalization"-a process where a motivated minority forces a larger, uninterested majority to accommodate them. This process requires only about 20% of a population supporting an extreme view to trigger radical renormalization.
The final step in institutional takeover is converting liberals into leftists. While both groups may share redistributionist goals, true liberals support free speech for all, while leftists believe opposing views should be silenced. Organizations like the ACLU have shifted from defending free speech (even for Nazis) to weighing speech against "equality and justice work." This renormalization happens gradually by closing the Overton Window-the range of acceptable discourse-to anyone right of Hillary Clinton, labeling conservatives as racists and penalizing liberals who engage with them.
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How the Authoritarian Left Transformed America's Political Landscape
In 2012, Barack Obama won reelection despite losing support across most demographics compared to 2008. His victory came through a different coalition: overwhelming support from minorities, women, LGBT voters, and lower-income Americans. This marked a transformation in American politics-moving from campaigns of unification to narrowcasting to fragmented audiences and pitting Americans against each other.
Obama reconciled two competing leftist impulses: the Utopian Impulse (faith in government control) and the Revolutionary Impulse (destruction of America's prevailing systems). By embracing government power while positioning himself as the revolutionary representative of the dispossessed, Obama empowered an authoritarian leftism that poisoned American politics.
The American Left has always been seduced by state power, viewing it as the vehicle for utopian change. Early 20th century progressives like Woodrow Wilson rejected constitutional limitations, arguing the state should consider itself "bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile." This progressive vision led to persecution of political opponents and even eugenic policies targeting the "incompetent."
After World War I, America rejected this vision, electing Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge who championed limited government and individual rights. But the Great Depression revived the Utopian Impulse under FDR, who created massive welfare programs while implementing extensive regulations. The LBJ administration's "Great Society" further expanded government into American life, promising solutions but delivering government projects that "quickly degraded into dystopian hellholes."
While progressives championed government solutions throughout the twentieth century, a more radical Revolutionary Impulse emerged on the American Left. Critical Race Theory pioneers like Derrick Bell claimed that even purportedly good outcomes might be evidence of white supremacy, as white people would do good things only to uphold the system that maintained their power.
These radical arguments gained little ground in the mainstream for decades. By the early 1990s, the radical arguments had been set aside. When crime rates soared, particularly in minority communities, a bipartisan coalition passed tough-on-crime legislation supported by 58 percent of black Americans. Even Barack Obama's famous 2004 DNC speech rejected identity politics, declaring "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America-there's the United States of America."
After his 2008 election, Obama abandoned his broad-based appeal for a strategy that sliced the electorate into demographic groups, focusing on an "intersectional coalition" of supposedly victimized groups. By 2012, Obama had fully embraced this approach, delivering targeted policies to each group: supporting same-sex marriage for gay Americans, implementing DACA for immigrants, and framing Republican policies as a "war on women."
To hold together his intersectional coalition, Obama raised the specter of something powerful and dangerous-not the government (since he led it), but the past. His brilliant slogan "FORWARD" unified the coalition against regression. Biden suggested Romney wanted to put black Americans "back in chains," while Obama claimed Romney would "turn back the clock 50 years for women, gays and immigrants."
This strategy successfully united the Utopian Impulse (faith in government) with the Revolutionary Impulse (tearing down systems) through perpetual revolution from within government. Democrats would campaign on revolutionary aggression against hierarchies of power, top-down censorship of opponents, and anti-conventionalism that cast opponents as bigots.
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The Creation of a New Ruling Class Through Education
The New Ruling Class is defined not just by credentials but by cultural markers that separate them from mainstream America. As Charles Murray notes in Coming Apart, Americans have divided into two classes: an elite who "run the nation's economic, political and cultural institutions" and everyone else. This elite consists of those with "advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America."
The New Ruling Class practices different social norms than the "new lower class"-they're more likely to be married, less likely to engage in single parenthood, and less likely to be crime victims. Yet paradoxically, they're more politically liberal and refuse to promote the very social standards they follow.
Beyond educational credentials, the New Ruling Class now requires fluency in "the language of social justice"-a specialized vocabulary taught in universities that sounds like gobbledygook to outsiders. This linguistic divide has widened the political gap, with college graduates increasingly voting Democratic while non-graduates trend Republican.
The wokabulary functions as a complex signaling mechanism, not designed to convince others but to demonstrate belief in the cult. It creates costly barriers to entry that help identify true believers and exclude outsiders. Membership in the New Ruling Class comes with clear linguistic markers: using pronouns in bios, terms like "Latinx," phrases about "systemic discrimination," modifiers to "justice" (social, environmental, racial), concern about "microaggressions," dismissing opponents by referencing "privilege," and discussing "structures of power."
Universities have become factories for wokeism with virtually no ideological diversity. Harvard surveys show nearly 80% of faculty identify as liberal or very liberal, with conservatives representing just 1.46%. Yale shows similar skewing with 75% liberal faculty and only 7% conservative. In humanities departments, the imbalance reaches 90% liberal.
The political homogeneity is staggering: professor donations favor Democrats by a 95:1 ratio, and studies show Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 10:1 across forty leading universities. Since 1984, the liberal-to-conservative ratio has increased 350%. Some disciplines are particularly imbalanced: just 2% of political science professors, 4% of philosophy professors, 7% of history professors, and 3% of literature professors identify as conservative.
Even traditional liberals now find themselves marginalized. Former ACLU head Ira Glasser describes visiting a top law school where students and young professors argued that free speech was incompatible with social justice. When professors like Bret Weinstein or Nicholas Christakis express moderate views, they face vicious student backlash.
The ideological purge is self-reinforcing through hiring discrimination. Studies show 30% of sociologists openly admit discriminating against Republican job applicants, with similar patterns across disciplines. Conservative scholars are systematically excluded from dissertation committees, hiring, and advancement opportunities.
Rather than institutions shaping employees, woke employees are reshaping institutions. Corporate leaders now fear their staff, media organizations have surrendered to "wokescolds," and even churches increasingly accommodate the new radical value system.
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How "The ScienceTM" Defeated Actual Science
The distinction between genuine science and "The ScienceTM" is crucial: where real science involves painstaking knowledge-gathering through observation, data collection, and falsification to discover objective truths, "The ScienceTM" functions as a call for silence and compliance with politicized interpretations. The ScienceTM is never invoked to convince but to cudgel-politics dressed in a white coat.
This manipulation became evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. While officials initially cited science to justify lockdowns and condemn anti-lockdown protests, their stance dramatically shifted after George Floyd's death. When 15-26 million Americans participated in Black Lives Matter protests-often without social distancing-the same public health officials who had condemned other gatherings suddenly endorsed these mass demonstrations. Over 1,000 "public health specialists" signed an open letter supporting the protests as "vital to national public health" while maintaining opposition to anti-lockdown gatherings.
Public health experts like Harvard's Ranu Dhillon claimed protesting systemic injustice was "different than wanting to go to worship or take kids to roller coasters." Epidemiologists from prestigious institutions argued that "the health implications of maintaining white supremacy are too great to ignore." Meanwhile, contact tracers in New York were instructed not to ask if COVID patients had attended protests, deliberately avoiding data collection that might contradict the narrative.
The public health community's extension of expertise into racial justice issues highlights the Ultracrepidarian Problem-weighing in on matters outside one's area of expertise or pretending expertise extends to unrelated questions. When doctors opine on policing and race relations, they operate in uncharted waters. Simply labeling political opinions as "science" doesn't make them scientific.
Even more serious is the Bleedover Effect-when outside political viewpoints infiltrate scientific institutions themselves. This restricts science's actual reach by replacing inquiry with ideology. The CDC's vaccine distribution guidelines exemplified this problem. Despite COVID-19 death rates being 630 times higher for those over 85, CDC official Kathleen Dooling recommended essential workers receive vaccines before the elderly for "racial equity" reasons. Though this approach would increase deaths by 0.5-6.5 percent, she deemed this "minimal" compared to pursuing equity.
The push for "diversity" in science has undermined the meritocratic foundation of scientific inquiry. When identity politics infiltrates science, qualifications become secondary to demographic representation. The Association of American Medical Colleges even hosted Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones who argued that standardized tests like the MCAT are inherently racist because they disproportionately weed out certain demographics.
The politicization of science reached its apex in 2020 when Scientific American made its first presidential endorsement in 175 years, supporting Joe Biden. Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine followed suit, all claiming to speak in the name of "The ScienceTM" while actually promoting political positions.
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Your Authoritarian Boss: How Corporations Enforce Ideological Conformity
America's corporations, once reliably apolitical or conservative-leaning, have become bastions of authoritarian leftism. During the Black Lives Matter protests, major corporations issued statements decrying systemic racism and pledged millions toward diversity initiatives. These weren't merely public gestures-companies began mandating diversity training and firing employees who expressed contrary views like "All Lives Matter."
Corporations aren't ideologically committed to free markets but to profit-seeking. They've historically embraced government relationships when profitable, welcomed regulatory capture, and worked within liability frameworks. Since the 1960s, civil rights laws created new categories of legal liability, making companies fearful of discrimination lawsuits. Staffed increasingly by the "New Ruling Class," corporations comply with prevailing opinions, installing "diversity officers" whose functions resemble "twentieth-century commissars."
Additionally, businesses cater to their most passionate customer base-studies show 70% of consumers want brands to take political stands, with 55% claiming they would boycott brands that don't mirror their politics. This desire for corporate politics resides almost solely with the Left-studies show consumers penalize companies for conservative positions but not liberal ones, viewing leftist positions as "merely normal business."
Corporate fear once manifested as avoiding controversy, but as the authoritarian Left moved from "silence is required" to "silence is violence," corporations followed suit. They now enthusiastically support leftist causes from climate change to Black Lives Matter, hoping to be "lined up last for the guillotine." This shift toward "stakeholder capitalism"-championed by figures like Klaus Schwab and embraced by the Business Roundtable-replaces shareholder primacy with vague commitments to "the public good."
Companies enforce ideological conformity internally through mandatory diversity training sessions costing $20,000 each, featuring consultants like Robin DiAngelo who promote concepts like pervasive white supremacy and the impossibility of meritocracy. Despite studies showing these trainings are ineffective and may increase discrimination, corporations invest billions not for effectiveness but to prevent blowback and create ideological conformity.
Corporations are increasingly refusing to do business with those who disagree politically, creating a bifurcation of markets. Financial institutions like Visa, Discover, PayPal, and Bank of America have begun targeting "hate groups" or gun manufacturers, while Chase Bank has closed accounts of politically controversial figures despite claiming not to "debank people because of their political views." Even neutral service providers like Amazon Web Services, Mailchimp, and Stripe are denying services based on politics.
Most Americans now work for large corporations that enforce top-down political conformity. Nearly 40% work for companies with more than 2,500 employees, and about 65% for companies with over 100 employees. These big companies dominate growing sectors like services, finance, and retail-areas that tend to lean left. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this trend, with over 400,000 small businesses closing while big companies expanded.
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The Radicalization of Entertainment and Media
In September 2020, during the racial "reckoning" following George Floyd's death, the Academy Awards announced new diversity standards for Oscar eligibility. Films would need to fulfill criteria like having leads from "underrepresented" groups, diverse staffing, or storylines centered on such groups. This formalized Hollywood's existing bias toward leftist messaging in prestige pictures, with recent Best Picture winners all featuring progressive morality tales about inequality, racism, or homophobia.
Hollywood's formalized woke politics represents the culmination of a decades-long movement to propagandize for leftism, mock traditional values, and exclude dissenters. The artistic community has historically leaned left due to its counterculturalism, amplified by the echo chambers of New York and Hollywood. Creators like Shonda Rhimes explicitly aim to "normalize" progressive values through entertainment while dismissing conservative viewers, portraying them only as bigots or incompetents in content.
Cancel culture has become Hollywood's new standard, targeting not just conservatives but anyone who falls short of current woke standards. Even condemning offensive content isn't enough-shows like "The Office," "Community," and "30 Rock" had episodes removed for merely depicting blackface in contexts that criticized it. Classic films like "Gone with the Wind" have been temporarily removed or tagged with warnings about "negative depictions."
The sports industry's politicization continued its downward spiral as ESPN struggled with internal divisions between liberal and conservative staffers. By 2020, sports leagues mandated wokeness-the NBA emblazoned courts with "BLACK LIVES MATTER," allowed players to wear approved social justice slogans on jerseys, MLB opened with "BLM" on pitchers' mounds and universal kneeling, and the NFL painted end zones with phrases like "End Racism." These political intrusions contributed to unprecedented viewership declines: NFL ratings dropped 10 percent, NBA Finals plummeted 51 percent, and MLB's World Series became the least-watched ever.
The establishment media has become the primary vehicle for promoting authoritarian leftism through revolutionary aggression, censorship of dissenting views, and imposing a new moral standard that labels traditional values as immoral. Despite the media's desperate attempts to portray the Black Lives Matter movement as legitimate and nonviolent, Americans could see the hypocrisy when these same outlets expressed outrage at the January 6 Capitol invasion.
American journalism began as openly partisan, with newspapers identifying with political parties for over a century. The concept of journalistic "objectivity" only emerged after World War I, championed by Walter Lippmann who viewed journalists as a priestly caste serving as the "bible of democracy." Today's establishment media demonstrates this through their slavish coverage of Obama, rancorous treatment of Trump, and fawning approach to Biden.
The religious wokeness permeating newsrooms is enforced daily, with "moral clarity" resembling an inquisition. The battles in today's newsrooms aren't between conservatives and liberals-there are virtually no conservatives at establishment media outlets. Instead, the conflict is between authoritarian leftists and liberals who may agree on policy but disagree on methods.
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Unfriending Americans: How Big Tech Controls the Narrative
One month before the 2020 election, the New York Post released a bombshell report about Hunter Biden that could have upended the election. The report revealed Hunter had introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top Ukrainian energy firm executive shortly before Biden pressured Ukrainian officials to fire a prosecutor investigating that company.
The Biden campaign and media allies dismissed the story as "Russian disinformation"-a claim with no evidence. Social media companies then took unprecedented action: Twitter suspended the Post's account and prohibited users from sharing the story link, while Facebook's Andy Stone (a former Democratic operative) announced they were "reducing its distribution" before any fact-checking had occurred.
Section 230 created broad protections for platforms removing content without incurring publisher liability. Initially, social media companies embraced their role as guardians of open discourse. Facebook's original mission was "to make the world more open and connected," Twitter aimed "to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers," and Google's motto was simply "Don't be evil."
This open platform approach worked until Trump's 2016 election victory fundamentally altered the landscape. Media elites and Democrats, seeking a scapegoat, blamed social media platforms for allowing "fake news" to flourish. Senator Dianne Feinstein openly threatened tech companies: "You created these platforms... and now they're being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it-or we will."
Social media platforms now use algorithms to identify and remove content. While some targeted material is uncontroversially problematic (explicit calls for violence, pornography, foreign disinformation), these companies increasingly see their role not merely as policing the boundaries of free speech while leaving the core untouched, but as actively fostering "positive conversation" and encouraging engagement with approved content.
For most Americans, social media's greatest danger lies not in news censorship but in the roving mobs they enable. The case of Mimi Groves illustrates this perfectly-after posting support for BLM protests, her classmate Jimmy Galligan released a years-old video of her using a racial slur, resulting in her removal from the University of Tennessee. The Times framed this not as malicious destruction but as "accountability" through social media.
Social media's virality mechanics deliberately amplify controversy. Twitter's trending algorithm prioritizes velocity over volume, making minor incidents into national stories. The platforms encourage mob formation by rewarding engagement and punishing silence. As seen with Justine Sacco, whose AIDS joke to 170 followers destroyed her career, these mobs form "with the speed of an aggressive autoimmune disorder."
The social media oligopoly, pressured by media and Democrats, threatens true social authoritarianism by controlling information flow. When Parler attempted to create a censorship-free alternative, it gained millions of users after the 2020 election. Following the January 6 riots, Apple, Amazon, and Google coordinated to eliminate Parler from the internet, claiming insufficient content moderation-despite evidence showing Facebook and Twitter were far more heavily used by rioters than Parler.
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The Choice Before Us: Resisting Authoritarian Leftism
In February 2021, actress Gina Carano was fired from Disney+'s "The Mandalorian" after posting a meme comparing political hatred to how Nazi Germany turned citizens against Jews. Though not anti-Semitic, her post provided the excuse Disney needed after months of tension over her conservative views. Unlike her progressive co-star Pedro Pascal, whose Holocaust comparisons went unchallenged, Carano faced immediate termination.
The authoritarian Left has successfully pursued an educational project that makes Americans embarrassed of their founding philosophy, institutions, and people. Their argument that America is systemically racist has won emotionally, though it's fundamentally wrong. America isn't systemically racist, despite racism's existence and slavery's evil. The solution isn't overthrowing American systems but embracing America's founding principles: protecting citizens' preexisting rights and committing to virtue and reason.
To fight back against authoritarian leftist control of institutions, we must reject their three-step process in reverse order. First, reject the notion that "silence is violence"-sometimes ignoring radicals removes their power. Second, firmly reject that speech is violence-disagreement isn't harm, and politics isn't identity. Third, deny the conflation of cordiality with inoffensiveness-facts matter regardless of feelings, and we can't grant others emotional veto power over our perspectives.
Our institutions can be returned to normalcy by creating an intransigent minority willing to stand against the authoritarian Left. The key is courage-refusing to acquiesce to power hierarchies. When Donald McNeil Jr. was forced from the New York Times for contextually using a slur while explaining its usage, many staffers privately disagreed but remained silent. What if they had formed their own intransigent group to counter the 150 staffers demanding his removal?
For institutions already captured by the authoritarian Left, Americans have three options to pursue simultaneously. First, legal options: filing lawsuits against discriminatory practices like race-segregated "diversity training" that violates civil rights laws. Second, political options: expanding anti-discrimination laws to include political viewpoints, forcing the Left to live by their own standards. Third, building alternative institutions: creating our own media, entertainment, and businesses that serve Americans ignored by captured institutions.
I worry deeply for America and my children's future. I grew up in a country that made room for different viewpoints, where we could attend ball games together regardless of politics, where offensive jokes could be forgiven, where we could search for truth without fear of excommunication. That America is disappearing. The solution lies in the fact that we are the majority. The authoritarian moment relies on our silence. When we stand together for liberty, the authoritarian moment ends, and freedom begins anew.
