True Allegiance

Cover of True Allegiance

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True Allegiance (ISBN 9781682610770) is a 2016 novel by Ben Shapiro, and so far his only attempt at writing an (openly) fictional book. The entire book is a series of "based off a true story" events with obvious expies for characters in then-modern day politics. Similar to Glenn Beck's The Overton Window, it does not come off as if Shapiro was writing this with any self-awareness about how wrong he gets things, nor that he is intentionally hyperbolizing events for the purpose of a satire; instead, it perpetually seems like Shapiro is just writing one of his typical books with the names changed. To give just one example from early in the book, here is how Shapiro describes President Prescott:

When Mark Prescott ran for president, he didn't know what he'd be inheriting. He was no babe in the woods--he was a hardened ideologue, a product of the Chicago machine, the handpicked protege of the power brokers--but he hadn't quite contemplated the nature of the country he'd be handed once elected. He campaigned on great blustering clouds of rhetoric, his boyish good looks, and a record obscured by a complacent media. He came out of nowhere, they said, an inspirational figure unlike any candidate since John F. Kennedy. He answered no difficult questions, evaded all exposes about his early political career, his rocky marriage, his connections to some of the more shady characters in town. He brushed off all the attacks on him as the cynical manipulation of a tired opposition.

It didn't hurt that his opponent, General Hart, had been a militant and boring old man; it also didn't hurt that his presidential predecessor had been an unpopular member of Hart's party. Prescott linked Hart to the president, and the country bought into it.

Gee, does that remind you of anybody? Does the mention of a Chicago politician who was young and got compared to John F. Kennedy and ran against somebody with a military background who was also old and a member of the same political party as the unpopular incumbent President remind you of anybody?

Oh, but it only gets more subtle from there, as Shapiro writes about the administration of this hypothetical President:

The easiest way to survive: end his predecessors' wars, no matter what the cost, then pump up the spending at home. There was no glory to be won on the poppy fields of Afghanistan. Everlasting glory didn't come in the form of military victory in this day and age--it came in the form of everlasting social programs that grew and inured to the benefit of all Americans. FDR was worshipped not because of World War II, but because of Social Security; LBJ had lost Vietnam, but he'd won the Great Society.

Big men, Prescott knew, required big governments. And big governments required big spending.

So Prescott spent. He spent on green technologies, on education programs, on food stamps, on highways and medical mandates. He spent on vacations and dinners and public work projects. Every dollar spent, he told the American public, created five dollars--no, ten!--in commerce. The money could either be hidden in the mattresses of the rich, or it could be shared with everyone.

Shapiro’s subtlety for allegory gets even worse as President Prescott creates his "Work Freedom Program." Jose pointed out in his review of the book that one popular Nazi Germany slogan was "Work, Freedom, Bread." "Work will set you free" was also an inscription over a gate in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

How Ben writes black people

“”Crawford laughed. Loudly this time. Then he looked at Levon curiously. "Quoting dead honkies," he twinkled. "You might be useful yet."

—How Ben thinks black people talk.

One of the characters in this book is a black man by the name of Levon, who Shapiro describes as a gangster that runs a barbershop which doubles as a front for his crack cocaine ring in Detroit, Michigan. ("Detroit was a shithole. But it was his shithole.") He also describes "a cute black kid, wearing a Simpsons T-shirt and somebody's old Converse sneakers, and baggy jeans." A police officer, Richard O'Sullivan, shoots this kid and "the blood seeped through Homer Simpson's face."

When the left-wing podcast Chapo's Trap House covered the book, they all made note that it seemed like Shapiro had only experienced the inner cities through watching the film New Jack City. However, the actually fucked up part comes through events revealed later. Later on, the reader learns Levon had been the reason Kendrick Malone, the kid shot by the police officer, was killed and that he intentionally did so in order to get revenge on whitey:

Levon had one of his boys give little Kendrick a $20 bill to go and harass the cop. Kendrick, of course, thought it was just a piece of good, clean fun--messing with white cops was a rare joy, and made you feel like more of a man. And with all the big boys telling him how he'd be a boss in the neighborhood if he baited the cop, he'd been enthusiastic. He probably looked forward to coming home and telling his buddies how he'd told that cracker ass pig to go to hell--stared right at him and cursed him to his face, made the pig back down. Kendrick knew he was supposed to go for his toy gun. They told him it would be a joke, that the cop wouldn't do anything, that the cop would pussy out.

Of course, Levon knew better. No cop could sit still when somebody went for the waistband. Police procedure dictated what happened next.

If this serves as a microcosm for how Shapiro thinks the black community operates, then he is basically saying that black people intentionally enter situations where police have the right to use violence against them, which is a rather disturbing view for how people operate.

It also has no basis in reality; the mention of a toy gun makes this more than likely a reference to the shooting of Tamir Rice in 2014. However, Rice and the officer, Timothy Loehmann, never actually had any kind of confrontation; instead, "within two seconds of [Loehmann] getting out of his squad car", Rice was shot dead.

Shapiro seems to have a massive double standard when it comes to violence. After the shooting of Kendrick Malone, we hear the following about the aftermath:

For a brief movement, O'Sullivan couldn't breath. When he looked up, he saw them coming. Dozens of them. The citizens of Detroit, coming out of the darkness, congregating. He could feel their eyes.

Going back to Jose, he notes that this is not the only chapter from this book which ends with a standoff with law enforcement. The previous chapter is about a woman named Soledad Ramirez, a rancher who lost her farm because of EPA regulations and blew up a federal building as a result, although "Soledad had insisted on a weekend attack to avoid any human toll." However, Soledad is supposed to be sympathized with, while Levon and the citizens of Detroit aren't.

Ben's Iraq delusion

Another plot point in this novel is that, as a character named Brett Hawthorne discovers, Iraq did have WMDs when the United States invaded, and it had merely been covered up by the media. Said weapons still existed, and were now in a handful of different Middle Eastern nations:

Brett had known of the CIA's discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for years. Everyone on the inside had known. The media had reported that the government had lied, that somehow, all the world's greatest intelligence agencies had been dead wrong. But that wasn't the case. Hussein had smuggled some of the weapons out of the country to Syria, others had been buried in the desert.

Beneath those coordinates.

And now they were in Iran.

First off, claiming the intelligence agencies "lied" and claiming they had been "wrong" are a tad different. Documents like the Downing Street Memo show the Bush Administration and the Blaire Administration both fixed intelligence against Iraq in the run on to war. Other claims, such as that Iraq was attempting to get Yellowcake Uranium from Niger, were not backed up by the intelligence at the time despite Bush's claiming them as true.

Second off, why would Saddam hide WMDs in a nation that he spent a decade fighting a war against?

See also

• What's Fair: And Other Short Stories — Shapiro's e-book of awful short stories