Shapiro At UCLA: Exposing The Fascism Of The Left - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Ben Shapiro facilely uses the book 'The Authoritarian Personality' to analyze the leftist intelligentsia in American universities.

Shapiro At UCLA: Exposing The Fascism Of The Left

On Monday evening, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro returned to UCLA, his alma mater, where he graduated in 2004 before attending Harvard Law School. He spoke of the rise of campus fascism by the Left, using the theories of the famed 1950’s Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno culled from his book “The Authoritarian Personality.”

Shapiro noted that Adorno sprang from the so-called Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist philosophers from Germany who fled Hitler’s rise and came to the United States, and who believed that capitalism had infected the West with certain value systems that prevented true happiness and freedom from rising to the fore.

He pointed out that Adorno wanted to draw a distinction between Hitler and Marxism, and tried to obfuscate the fascism of the Left. But, Shapiro noted, Adorno’s theories described well the Marxist school of thought displayed by the Left on campuses across America.

He began his odyssey into the nine elements of the authoritarianism Adorno spoke of as laid out by Professor Adrian Furnham, professor of psychology at University College in London.

Shapiro started with conventionalism, which some have accused the Right of promulgating with an insistence on bourgeois middle class values. He said that the idea that conventionalism is a concept utilized by the Right was simply not true, adding that conventionalism is about adhering to the moral standard that is promulgated at the time. Ergo, on campuses, students’ obedience to the leftist standards that are prevalent is conventional. He stated, “Obedience to the Left, obedience to authority is key.”

Next came authoritarian submission: uncritical acceptance of authority. Shapiro stated, “On campus, the idea that you have to uncritically accept authority is obviously true. This is why you have speech codes, and conduct codes and every other kind of code . . . it’s why you have kangaroo courts where due process is not necessary.”

Third element: authoritarian aggression: a tendency to condemn anyone who violates conventional norms, the idea that a person who has bad manners, habits and breeding can hardly expect to get along with decent people. Shapiro stated that campus thought dictated, “All people who disagree with the prevailing leftist superstructure of thought, they must be cast out of society.” No cool-kid parties, no being accepted as a decent person.

Fourth: Anti-intraception: rejection of weakness or sentimentality, the idea that businessman and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and professor. Shapiro said Adorno felt this was one of the keys to authoritarianism, but Adorno missed the underlying structure of thought: that the reason so many authoritarian societies don’t value the artist and the poet is that the artist and the poet spend so much time attempting to understand beyond boundaries of identity and job description. But the Left does that in terms of intersectionality.

The fifth element: Superstition and stereotypy: belief in mystical determinants of action and rigid, categorical thinking. Shapiro asked if there was anything more superstitious than gender theory, or environmentalist theory that suppressed dissenting questions.

On to the sixth element: Power and toughness: preoccupation with dominance over others. He pointed out Antifa is obsessed with dominance. Leftists chant mantras such as “The people united will never be divided!” “Whose campus? Our campus!” Shapiro stated, “For all the talk about pacifism, the least pacifistic people on campus are the ones who are out there beating up supporters of mine who want to come to my speeches.”

Seventh element backing authoritarianism: Destructiveness and cynicism: a generalized feeling of hostility and anger. He pointed out the Left believes all anger is justified, that their boundaries can never be crossed. He added, “This generalized feeling of hostility: it doesn’t have to be justified by statistics; it doesn’t have to be justified by evidence; it doesn’t even have to be justified by solid anecdotal evidence that can be backed up by evidence. If you’re angry, there must be a reason for it and therefore we have to kowtow to your anger. Subjectivity overrules objectivity.”

The eighth element: projectivity: a tendency to project inner emotions and impulses outward. Shapiro pointed out there is no more conspiratorial group in America today than leftists on college campuses who assert that the economy is rigged against them. The supposed “white privilege” mantra: Shapiro quipped, “People like me are getting together in our Protocol of the Elders of Zion meetings after davening (praying) on Fridays and we are figuring out how to keep the black man down. This is supremely stupid. And not only is it supremely stupid; it’s supremely counterproductive because it’s teaching individuals in the freest country in the history of the planet if they work hard, that if they abide by the standards of decency and reason, that they still can’t get ahead because some conspiracy’s out there to stop them.” Shapiro also deconstructed the idea that women are systemically underpaid.

And finally, the ninth element: an overfocus on sex. Shapiro pointed out that the Left that is obsessed with sex. He noted that the Left believes that religious people should be forced to accept leftists’ notions of sex.

Shapiro stated that all of these elements add up to a ripe field for recruitment when it comes to shutting down those who disagree, that intolerance is the ultimate outcome, that dissent has to be silenced.

He concluded:

The Founding Fathers thought differently from all of this; the Founding Fathers were right. They thought in terms of individualism; they thought that you had a right to speak freely. Not because all opinions are equal, they weren’t moral relativists; they didn’t think that all opinions were correct; they didn’t think that all perspectives were correct; they didn’t think any of that.

But what the founding fathers did believe is that we are all individually made in the image of God, and that came along with certain inalienable rights, and one of those inalienable rights is the right to exercise our free will and our reason in coming up with arguments. And to express those arguments in order to convince others.

This is something that Founders deeply believed; this is what the First Amendment is all about, and this is what undergirded all the ideas of free government. And they were certain, by the way, if left to our own devices, that social institutions, properly supported by the community, could fill the gap left by a non-tyrannical government. In order to force people to be virtuous, folks like Aristotle talked about having an overbearing government that would basically cause virtue. And the Founding Fathers disagreed with that; they said, “Well, that ignores the fact that virtue has to be an exercise of free will; that is why we need social institutions to fill those gaps but we need a government that doesn’t impede people in pursuing their own free will.”

That is the best way, and American conservatism is not authoritarian. American conservatism is not Hitlerian. American conservatism is not Marxist; it’s not Authoritarian Leftism. American conservatism is about individualism. It’s the opposite of the American Left and the campus Left. That’s why our campuses require hundreds of police officers every time I speak . . . whenever the Left authoritarian mindset predominates on campus it quashes the debate.

An hour-long Q&A followed. The speech and Q&A can be seen in their entirety below:


Daily Wire



The speech:

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Instead of adapting to changing conditions regarding what does and doesn't work (like Chinese communism has) western communism remains mostly a doctrinal, almost philosophical thing and this makes it possible to deconstruct it in the same way it itself deconstructed religions. Since those early communist doctrines are clearly full of flaws, there is no enacting them in a way that is true to their texts and they are doomed to the same fate they brought upon western traditionalism. Only much faster.

Basically, western leftism of the communist schools has become a dysfunctional type of traditionalism.
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Hong Wu wrote:Instead of adapting to changing conditions regarding what does and doesn't work (like Chinese communism has) western communism remains mostly a doctrinal, almost philosophical thing and this makes it possible to deconstruct it in the same way it itself deconstructed religions. Since those early communist doctrines are clearly full of flaws, there is no enacting them in a way that is true to their texts and they are doomed to the same fate they brought upon western traditionalism. Only much faster.

Basically, western leftism of the communist schools has become a dysfunctional type of traditionalism.


You do understand that Communism has never been fully built within Soviet Union or Cubaetc? They wanted to build socialism at the least and then move on to Communism?

On top of that, real socialism is pretty much dead in most of the western world. At best we have Social democracy and at worst technocratic liberalism. :eh:

So what the hell are you even talking about?
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I have two observations about this, the first of which is apolitical and I would invite any of my fellow academics to comment in kind.

In terms of academic culture, at least as it is manifested in UK universities, all students from undergraduates to PhD are encouraged to challenge everything, to trust no-one, to seek out heterodoxy in order to properly triangulate their evidence and build arguments that are fully and robustly supported. That seems, to me, entirely at odds with everything Shapiro is saying about the student body in the US. Can US colleagues offer any observations? I did two years of a doctorate in education before switching to PhD and I can tell you that in the UK, undergraduate study is the point at which students are guided through switching from knowledge aquisition to knowledge application and key to that is to get across the idea that just because somebody told you something, it doesn't mean it's true and you have an obligation to investigate it and satisfy yourself as to its veracity. Is it different in the US?

JohnRawls wrote:Fascism of the left? :hmm:
What is that supposed to be?


This is the more pernicious and toxic element of Shapiro's speech. The rise of the so-called Alt-Right has seen a sustained, subliminal, cynical campaign to utterly demonise everything to do with the Left. I'm well aware of models that place Fascism and Communism close to each other but until recently that had always been merely in terms of their authoritarianism. Now the Alt-Right are vigorously campaigning through social media et al to conflate the two utterly and re-write history to have us (or rather the minimally-political silent majority) believe that all the ills of history are owed to the 'Left'.

It's unsurprising to me that this whole Alt-Right nonsense originated in the US. The US is famous for its negative campaigning, which sadly we seem to be slowly adopting as well (if the Brexit Referendum was anything to go by). No longer do political aspirants offer up all that is great and good about their beliefs and political ideals. Now it's all about denigrating, deriding and demonising your opponent. I've never heard a single Alt-Right talking head actually set out the specifics of their anticipated right-wing utopia. All we ever hear are attacks on the 'Left'. They never tell us how good life could be if only we'd stop whingeing on about out-dated libtard concepts like equality, human rights, dignity, respect, compassion, community and so forth.

So, to be clear...Fascism of the Left is:
as Godstud wrote wrote:A bit like the tooth fairy. Not real. Made up.

And made up in order to promote the agenda of the Alt-Right.
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I've heard that UK schools are as bad as American schools but since you can go to jail in that country for posting racist things to social media, maybe they don't have the same speech issues because no one would even try to say something "racist" in a college setting. So maybe there is supposedly no problem if no one even tries.

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