The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  THE DEATH OF BUSINESS NEUTRALITY

  The final consequence of corporate America going woke isn’t merely internal purges—it’s corporate America’s willingness to direct its own resources against potential customers guilty of such heresy. As the authoritarian Left flexes its power, wielding pusillanimous corporations as its tool, those corporations will increasingly refuse to do business with those who disagree politically. The result will be a complete political bifurcation of markets.

  In fact, this is already happening. In 2016, North Carolina passed a bill that would ensure separate bathroom facilities for men and women throughout the state, in contravention of a local Charlotte ordinance that would allow transgender people to access the bathroom of their choice. The business world reacted with universal outrage, and big business vowed not to do business at all in the state: PayPal dumped plans for a facility, as did Deutsche Bank; Adidas decided to hire in Atlanta rather than Charlotte; the NCAA vowed to cancel championship games; Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan stated, “Companies are moving to other places, because they don’t face an issue that they face here.” According to the Associated Press, North Carolina was slated to lose some $3.75 billion over a dozen years if the state didn’t dump the bathroom bill.34 In March 2017, the bathroom bill was duly repealed.

  The same pattern has held true in a variety of states. In 2010, businesses began boycotting Arizona after the passage of a law that allowed local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law.35 After Georgia passed a pro-life law, Hollywood production companies announced they wouldn’t do business in the state—even while doing business in human-rights-abusing China.36

  And corporations are beginning to target private citizens based on political belief, too. In August 2017, Visa and Discover announced they would not allow “hate groups” to process their credit card payments; PayPal, too, announced its app would be barred from use for those groups. MasterCard, by contrast, said it doesn’t ban merchants “based on our disagreement with specific views espoused or promoted.”37 In February 2018, the First National Bank of Omaha dropped its National Rifle Association credit card, stating, “Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA.”38 That same month, American Airlines and United Airlines announced they would pull all discount benefits for NRA members.39

  In March 2018, Citigroup announced it would limit retail clients’ firearm sales; one month later, Bank of America announced the bank would no longer give loans to manufacturers of guns for civilians. Leftist interest groups immediately began pressuring other major banks to do the same: American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said the union would not recommend Wells Fargo’s mortgage lending program to its members because of ties to the gun industry.40 In May 2019, Chase Bank began closing bank accounts for customers deemed radical, including Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and radical activist Laura Loomer. Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase Bank, said, “Very directly, we have not and do not debank people because of their political views.”41 For now, presumably.

  This threat extends beyond the financial services industry. When Amazon Web Services, whose sole job is to provide cloud services, decides to deplatform Parler, that’s polarizing. When Mailchimp, an email delivery service, refuses to do business with the Northern Virginia Tea Party, that’s polarizing.42 When PayPal announces that it uses slurs from the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which groups to ban, that’s polarizing.43 When Stripe announces it will not process funds for the Trump campaign website after January 6, that’s polarizing.44

  The question here isn’t whether you like any of these groups. The question is whether neutral service providers should be removing access to their business based on political viewpoint. The hard Left demands that religious bakers violate their religious scruples and bake cakes for same-sex weddings . . . and then turn around and cheer when credit card companies decide not to provide services for certain types of customers. There’s a solid case to be made that private businesses should be able to discriminate against customers based on their right to association. But our corpus of law has now decided that such freedom of association is largely forbidden, unless it targets conservatives. Anti-discrimination law in most states bars discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, race, medical disability, marital status, gender expression, age, and a variety of other categories. But there is no anti-discrimination protection for politics. Since the Left is particularly litigious, this means that businesses are wary of avoiding business with anyone of the Left—but when it comes to the right, businesses have acted to protect themselves from rearguard attacks by the woke authoritarians.

  The result will be two separate systems of commerce in the United States. We won’t eat at the same restaurants. We won’t go to the same hotels, theme parks, or movies. We won’t use the same credit cards.

  All of which makes it rather difficult to share a country.

  THE MONOLITH

  The chances are that you, the reader, know all of this already. That’s because the chances are quite good that if you work, you’re working for a giant company that’s part of the authoritarian monolith. Decades ago, you probably would have worked for a company with fewer than 100 workers; today, you likely work for a massive company with rigorous, top-down policies that mirror the prevailing political notions of the day. According to The Wall Street Journal, nearly 40 percent of Americans now work for a company with more than 2,500 employees, and about 65 percent work for companies with more than 100 employees.

  And the big companies are growing. The arenas in which big companies thrive—the services sector, finance, the retail trade—are also the fastest-growing areas in the American economy.45 Unsurprisingly, these are also the areas in which employers are most likely to lean to the Left, or at least to mirror leftist priorities.

  The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the advantage for large companies. Between March 2020 and September 2020, more than 400,000 small businesses closed. Meanwhile, big companies got bigger. As economist Austan Goolsbee wrote in The New York Times, “Big Companies Are Starting to Swallow the World.”46

  Small businesses are generally tied to the communities in which they exist—they know the locals, they trust the locals, and they work with the locals. Large companies cross boundaries of locality—they’re national in scope and orientation. This means that they are far more concerned with enforcing a culture of compliance than in preserving the local diversity that typically characterizes smaller outfits. Large companies have huge HR departments, concerned with the liability that innately accrues to deep pockets; they have legislative outreach teams, concerned with the impact of government policy; they have corporate CEOs who are members of the New Ruling Class.

  And there’s something else, too. Entrepreneurs believe in liberty, because they require liberty to start their businesses. But as those businesses grow, and as managers begin to handle those businesses, managers tend to impose a stifling top-down culture. Managers prefer order to chaos, and rigidity to flexibility. And these managers are perfectly fine with the rigid social order demanded by the authoritarian Left.

  Which means that our corporations aren’t allies of free markets—or of the ideology that undergirds free markets, classical liberalism. They’ve now become yet another institutional tool of an ideology that demands obeisance. And so long as their wallets get fatter, they’re fine with it. Better to lead the mob, they believe, than to be targeted by it.

  There’s only one problem: sooner or later, the mob will get to them, too.

  Chapter 6

  The Radicalization of Entertainment

  In September 2020—in the midst of the supposed racial “reckoning” sweeping the nation after the death of George Floyd—the Academy Awards announced it would shift the standards for its golden statuettes. No longer would films be selected on the basis of quality. Instead, studios would be given a choice of fulfilling one of four criteria. First, the film cou
ld itself contain certain woke prerequisites: either a lead or significant supporting actor from an “underrepresented racial or ethnic group”; or at least 30 percent of all actors in secondary roles would have to be from such a victim group or a woman or LGBTQ or have a disability; or the main story line would have to center on such an underrepresented group. Second, the film could be staffed by members of those underrepresented groups. Third, the film company could provide paid apprenticeship and internship opportunities for such victimized groups. Finally, those participating in the marketing could be from one of those victimized groups. Academy president David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson explained, “We believe these inclusion standards will be a catalyst for long-lasting, essential change in our industry.”1

  The standards were superfluous: Hollywood has long dedicated itself to the simple proposition that prestige pictures must fulfill leftist messaging requirements, and moneymakers must please the public. Sometimes prestige pictures are moneymakers. Generally, they aren’t: superhero movies bring in the dollars, and Moonlight brings the critical plaudits. The last four Best Pictures winners are, in reverse chronological order, a morality tale about the evils of income inequality (Parasite); a morality tale about racism and homophobia (Green Book); a morality tale about the evils of the military, and discrimination against the disabled, blacks, homosexuals, communists, and fish (The Shape of Water); and a morality tale about racism and homophobia (Moonlight). None of this means all these movies are necessarily bad (although The Shape of Water is indeed one of the worst movies ever committed to film). It just means that Oscar voters aren’t typical representatives of the American entertainment audience. It isn’t difficult to handicap the odds of Oscar victory by tallying woke talking points beforehand.

  But the Academy’s new standards weren’t about a change of heart. They were about ass covering. In 2015, on the back of massive racial unrest after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Hollywood’s woke contingent began complaining that Hollywood had marginalized black creators. In 2015, the Academy hadn’t nominated a single black actor in any of its categories. This, obviously, meant that Hollywood had to get woke. Thus the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite was born. Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy, said that as soon as she saw the nominations, “my heart sank.” Spike Lee later commented, “When black Twitter gets on your black ass . . . ooh, it ain’t no joke.” Ana Duvernay, who directed Selma—which was indeed nominated for Best Picture that year—said, “It was a catalyst for a conversation about what had really been a decades-long absence of diversity and inclusion.”

  Decades-long. Never mind that literally the year before, in 2014, 12 Years a Slave had won Best Picture, Chiwetel Ejiofor had been nominated for Best Actor, Barkhad Abdi had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Lupita Nyongo had won Best Supporting Actress. Never mind that Selma is, in fact, a rather mediocre movie. Selma’s lack of awards attention meant that discrimination had reared its ugly head.

  And no dissent would be brooked. As Duvernay said, “I would do it all again. If you cannot be respectful of our alignment with that cause, with that protest, with that rallying cry, then there was nothing I wanted from you anyway.”

  Naturally, the Academy responded the next year with an emergency meeting and sought to radically shift the Academy membership through affirmative action directed at women and minorities. When other members of the Academy complained that political correctness had taken control of the institution—when, for example, Dennis Rice, a member of the Academy’s public relations branch, explained that he was “color- and gender-blind when it comes to recognizing our art,” and added, “You should look purely and objectively at the artistic accomplishment”—Boone Isaacs shot back, “Are you kidding me? We all have biases. You just don’t see it if it doesn’t affect you.”

  In 2017, Moonlight, a little-known film among audiences, revolving around a black gay man growing up in gang-infested Miami, won Best Picture. As Barry Jenkins, director of the film, said, “If Moonlight had come out three years earlier, I’m not sure how many people would have picked up that screener.”2

  Hollywood had embraced woke politics as the sine qua non for art.

  And Hollywood would continue to chest-thump its own wokeness in spite of the evidence that Hollywood is, in many ways, insanely regressive.

  Later that year, sexual abuse allegations against mega-producer Harvey Weinstein began to resurface. Hollywood celebrities began hashtagging #MeToo, pointing out the exploitation of women that ran rife through the industry. And they weren’t wrong. The Hollywood casting couch—the sexist and disgusting practice by which females were subjected to sexual harassment and assault by powerful men in Hollywood in exchange for job advancement—had been a feature of the industry since the very beginning: the intersection of Hollywood and Highland featured, for years, a fiberglass structure widely known as the “casting couch” in town. But it was Hollywood’s decision not to look internally but to pronounce judgment on the rest of America that spoke to the new wokeness. Instead of recognizing its own complicity in #MeToo, Hollywood celebrities began lecturing the rest of America about the country’s inherent sexism.

  The cause quickly morphed from the universally praised attempt to end sexual harassment and assault into broader left-wing talking points: criticism of the supposed gender pay gap, for example, or attempts to lecture Americans about heteronormativity. At the Oscars, Jimmy Kimmel—who used to star on a television show, The Man Show, featuring women bouncing on a trampoline, and who infamously wore blackface on Comedy Central—lectured America, “the truth is if we are successful here, if we can work together to stop sexual harassment in the workplace, if we can do that, women will only have to deal with harassment all the time at every other place they go.” Magically, Hollywood was transformed from moral pariah to moral leader.3

  It was merely an ironic shock, then, when the Oscars ended up canceling a black host, Kevin Hart, for violating woke tenets. After Hart was named the host of the 2019 Oscars, the woke internet went to work, digging up Bad Old TweetsTM—in this case, a tweet from 2011 suggesting, “Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughers doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay.’” In 2010, it turns out, Hart did a routine about how he would prefer his son not to be gay, too. Hart responded to the burgeoning scandal correctly: “Our world is becoming beyond crazy, and I’m not gonna let the craziness frustrate me . . . if you don’t believe people change, grow, evolve as they get older, [then] I don’t know what to tell you.”4 Within a few days, Hart announced he would be stepping down from the Oscars gig. He then kowtowed to the mob: “I’m sorry that I hurt people. I am evolving and want to continue to do so. My goal is to bring people together not tear us apart.” When Ellen DeGeneres tried to encourage Hart to come back and do the show in January, even Ellen was slammed by the woke Left.5

  With all that controversy, it was no shock when the Academy moved to formalize woke standards, largely as a preventative measure designed at buying time and space from the woke mob. Just as in the universities, the liberals gave way to the radicals.

  HOLLYWOOD’S LONG HISTORY OF PREENING

  More broadly, the Academy’s move to formalize its heretofore-voluntary politics was merely the culmination of a long-lasting movement in Hollywood to propagandize on behalf of leftism, slap at flyover country, undercut traditional values, and excise those who disagree. Hollywood has been the preserve of political liberals for decades: the artistic community in the United States has typically leaned to the Left, a phenomenon that can be attributed to the counterculturalism that characterizes art itself. Pushing the envelope is often the name of the game in art, and in the United States—a traditional values country with a solid religious streak—the artistic community has historically bucked hard against traditional values. And when it comes to film and television, artistic media predominantly located in the echo chambers of Ne
w York and Hollywood, such attitudes are amplified radically. That echo chamber routinely reflects the self-absorbed notion of liberal elites that they have a monopoly on decency. As Allan Burns, co-creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, told me years back, “Writers have always had a social conscience. That’s no surprise. I don’t mean to sound arrogant about it, because I don’t consider myself to be an intellectual, but I do consider myself to be a person who empathizes and thinks about what’s going on in the world.”6

  Hollywood has long believed itself better than the common rabble.

  That disconnect was evident early. The Hollywood films of the 1920s were so racy, for example, that local authorities began passing laws censoring theaters. Hollywood responded with the so-called Production Code, a set of standards meant to prevent films from promoting sundry moral no-nos of the time. The Production Code held, “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence, the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin. . . . Law, natural or human, should not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.”7 By the 1960s, the American people had stopped boycotting films on the basis of Code violations, and adherence quickly collapsed. Television made a similar move during the 1960s, moving away from more values-oriented programming like Bonanza and toward politically oriented material like All in the Family. Hollywood both reflected and drove forward America’s generalized move toward liberal causes. And as that liberalism set in, Hollywood closed itself to outside voices and creators: As Michael Nankin, producer on Chicago Hope and Picket Fences, told me, “People generally like to work with people they’ve worked with before or with whom they’re comfortable. . . . And that mindset, which is entirely appropriate, makes it hard for new people to get in.”8 Fred Silverman, former head of NBC, ABC, and CBS, was blunter when I spoke with him a decade ago: “Right now, there’s only one perspective. And it’s a very progressive perspective.”9