Ben Shapiro's True Allegiance

I recently read through the entirety of Ben Shapiro's action novel, True Allegiance. The writing was evidently mediocre, but nonetheless the following article will solely focus on the book's content per se. Ben Shapiro has been an influential American conservative figure among teens and young adults. He's maintaining an ever-growing YouTube following and he advocates right-wing politics and traditional values by means of, em, reacting to viral videos and trends. I was informed about his book's existence during a conversation with a friend and it certainly sparked my interest. Here's what I learned:

Conservative Scaremongering

The world is undoubtedly following the wrong course. Despite humanity's recent technological advances a considerable portion of our planet's population is still starving to death. Climate change is looming on the horizon but both American and European governments are hardly taking any measures to prevent the destruction of Earth and the extinction of our species. Inflation is high all while salaries remain constant: I'm only scratching the surface here! Throughout his narration, Ben refuses to recognize any of our modern deficiencies and instead tries to accumulate attention on an artificial danger, with the sole purpose of supporting and justifying his racist and fascist bigotry. A Mexican immigration crisis cannot possibly mean the end of the world. Nor can a failed invasion of Afghanistan, a country thousands of kilometers away from motherland. This books is precisely an attempt of an American nationalist (just like most proclaimed "patriots") to associate American imperialism with heroism and altruistic benevolence. The sheer fact that most people out there believe that an invasion of an Asian country with the pretext of ending terrorism is logically coherent is mind-boggling. Check out Rambo 3, an old film funded by the US Army, which portraits the Taliban as heroes resisting the communist aggressor!

As if that wasn't enough, Ben chooses to portray the only African-American character of his novel as a wicked bully, who intentionally and falsely accuses the protagonist of calling him a negro just so he can justify the subsequent beating of his enemy classmates. I wouldn't be mad if it weren't for it being such an apparent attempt to frame most black people as being privileged and arbitrarily hateful towards whites. White conservatives are frequently victimized throughout all chapters. Soldiers, filthy capitalists and racist mayors are all praised as saintly martyrs of an unjust attack towards everything tradition-respecting.

The book lacked character and was not particularly original. He's basically just another scaremonger trying to milk some bucks out of his addicted and confused viewers.

Some Additional Notes (written a year later)

This one turned out to be too much of a rant. What can safely and rationally be concluded is that no one should take political advice (or perhaps any advice) from someone making a living out of social media, because the management of such an account is, by nature, a one-way exploitation-consumption relationship. Political advice should not be extracted from ultra-sentimental books, but from sane real life conversations and activities involving active thinking as opposed to mindless rehearsal.