True Allegiance

by Ben Shapiro

From the author of THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY

New York Times bestselling author Ben Shapiro’s breakneck thriller asks how close are we to our country’s collapse—and will we be able to stop it once it begins?

America is coming apart. An illegal immigration crisis has broken out along America's Southern border—there are race riots in Detroit—a fiery female rancher-turned-militia leader has vowed revenge on the president for his arrogant policies—and the world's most notorious terrorist is planning a massive attack that could destroy the United States as we know it. Meanwhile the President is too consumed by legacy-seeking to see our country’s deep peril.

Brett Hawthorne is the youngest general in the United States Army—and he’s stuck, alone, behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. He’s the last lost soldier of a failed war, fighting to stay alive and make it back home—but will he be able to stop the collapse of America in time?

Genres: Fiction, Politics, Thriller, Dystopia, Audiobook, Contemporary, Novels

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2016

About the author

Benjamin Shapiro was born in 1984 and entered UCLA at the age of 16, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in June 2004 with a BA in Political Science. He graduated Harvard Law School cum laude in June 2007. Shapiro was hired by Creators Syndicate at age 17 to become the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the U.S.

His columns are printed in major newspapers and websites including Townhall, ABCNews, WorldNet Daily, Human Events, FrontPage Mag, Family Security Matters, the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the Conservative Chronicle. His columns have also appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Sun-Times, Orlando Sentinel, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, RealClearPolitics.com, Arizona Republic, and Claremont Review of Books, among others. He has been the subject of articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Associated Press, and Christian Science Monitor; he has been quoted on "The Rush Limbaugh Show," "The Dr. Laura Show," at CBS News, in the New York Press, in the Washington Times, and in The American Conservative magazine, among many others.

The author of the national bestsellers, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (WND Books, May 2004), Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future (Regnery, June 2005), and Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the Road to the White House (Thomas Nelson, 2008), Shapiro has appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows around the nation, including "The O'Reilly Factor" (Fox News), "Fox and Friends" (Fox News), "In the Money" (CNN Financial), "DaySide with Linda Vester" (Fox News), "Scarborough Country" (MSNBC), "The Dennis Miller Show" (CNBC), "Fox News Live" (Fox News Channel), "Glenn Beck Show" (CNN), "Your World with Neil Cavuto" (Fox News) and "700 Club" (Christian Broadcasting Network), "The Laura Ingraham Show," "The Michael Medved Show," "The G. Gordon Liddy Show," "The Rusty Humphries Show," "The Lars Larson Show" (nationally syndicated), "The Larry Elder Show," The Hugh Hewitt Show," "The Dennis Prager Show," among others.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

For a guy who complains about the Left constantly trying to brainwash and influence people through Hollywood, Ben sure as heck doesn't come as a hypocrite here ;). The novel is written incredibly poorly with a plot line that I would expect from a 12-year-old boy. I'm assuming the book did not have an editor because no editor would let slip "and his head blew back like a PEZ dispenser" (seriously) into a book. Ben also can't go a few paragraphs without preaching about how right-wing politics are the best-wing politics. Every right-wing meme is used: unions are bad, government is bad, social programs are bad, Vietnam war, Iraq war all were justified, it's okay that Bush killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, even moderate Muslims are probably terrorists/sympathize with terrorists, racial profiling is okay, etc etc. Probably the most egregious example of this occurs at the end of the book, where a Muslim on a plane stands up and starts praying in Arabic. Ben writes that everyone on the plane "was frozen by political correctness." Ben can't get past his politics and write a fictional story that works. Sad!

[James Tullos · Rating 1 out of 5]

Full thoughts: https://youtu.be/nwQGPkxQE3g

This isn't just propaganda, I expected that. But it's very poorly written propaganda, and that I can't forgive.

Also I'd just like to remind everyone that Ben Shapiro once called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, so fuck him.

[Tina K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why do I keep doing this to myself?

[Chuckold · Rating 1 out of 5]

I dont wanna talk about it

[Phil Kariuki · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dude's a major cunt. that is all

[Sameer C · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is like the novel version of Threat Level Midnight

[Allan Bailey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Heard enough of this book on Chapo reading series' to know it's a horrible book by a worse human being. You'd have to be filled with loathing from watching hours and hours of Fox News and intensely stupid to find this book at all compelling. Truly some of the worst prose ever published.

[Tyson Adams · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave this more of a chance than it deserved.

I'll start by saying I'm not a fan of Shapiro's. I've recently read a couple of his non-fiction books and find him to be either someone manipulative, someone trolling, or someone who is a fool. But as inflammatory, combative, and misrepresentative as his non-fiction is, it is at least articulate.

True Allegiance reads like the first draft of a Brad Thor novel. That isn't a compliment. It has the same stylings and pacing of Thor, but with the amateurishness you'd expect of a first draft or someone who arrogantly presumes writing a thriller will be easy. Let's ignore the cartoonish character analogues, the cardboard thin characters, the heavy handed style of writing, and the cliches that I thought had been cremated back in the 90s. Let's instead talk about the hackneyed and inconsistent writing.

Taking a couple of examples from the prologue: Shapiro compares a bridge collapsing to the sound of a million aircraft crashing; the suspension bridge oscillations to guitar strings vibrating; and cars sliding off the bridge as bath-time playthings of an angry god. I shit you not. It is clear this is the fiction authoring of someone unfamiliar with the form.

So even if you like his politics, you'll find this thriller to be odious and the analogies thinly veiled. Not worth the time nor money.

More on Shapiro here: https://static.currentaffairs.org/201...
Update: discovered this video that highlights many of the same problems I had with the writing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYp_6...
Update: Behind the Bastards podcast covered this novel in an episode https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-be...

[Robert Clarke · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don’t bother reading this right-wing trash written by a squeaky-voiced little man who squandered a Harvard education to work for Breitbart. If you want a laugh, listen to the Chapo reading series tearing it apart. Once you see how embarrassingly, cringingly bad a writer Ben Shapiro is, you’ll have every reason to never take this chud demagogue seriously ever again.

In this book, you will find:
-Justification for why a cop should shoot an 8 year old black kid wielding an orange-tipped toy handgun
-That all Muslims are chaotic evil terrorists who want to watch the world burn, but actual right-wing domestic terrorists are patriotic heroes
-That there really were WMDs in Iraq, but they were smuggled away to Iran, who hate America for no reason and want us all dead
-Oddly homoerotic descriptions of Ben’s military badass Gary Stu of a protagonist (“A bear of a man”, really Ben?)

[Leland · Rating 1 out of 5]

I listened to a reading with commentary by Chapo Trap House. Politics aside, this is abysmal writing.

[Kevin James · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know whether to give this 1 star for the content or 5 stars for the unintentional enjoyment I got out of this read. When I first heard of this book, I thought it might be an excellent candidate for one of my favorite podcasts, 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back, where two professional comedians mock bad books. I'm thrilled to say this is indeed a prime candidate for Mike Nelson and Conor Lastowka's brand of MST3K style humor. Some of the lines in this book are so ripe for mockery from the absurd "She opened her mouth to scream and realized that she was already screaming so hard, no sound was emerging" to the almost alien "He could hear her sexy fingers manipulating the phone" (everyone's favorite sexy body part and activity: fingers dialing phones) and my personal favorite "'The blood of innocents is on your hands, President Prescott,' the masked figure stated in a monotone laced with fanatical passion.” Ben, sweetheart, you can’t have a passionate monotone.

The downside is that you will have to muddle through the truly insane politics of this book. I can't tell if the positions stated here are Ben's actual opinions or if he is merely pandering to what he perceives as his audience but the things that happen in this story are truly bananas. A civil rights organization thinly based off of Black Lives Matter purposefully sends children to get shot by cops so that Detroit has an excuse to riot, Mexican drug cartels attack the US border with military helicopters and only the brave governor of Texas (who, of course, is named Bubba) responds while the cowardly president says that the cartels should be allowed to continue their attacks, a separatist rancher gets a far right militia to slaughter a large group of police officers because of environmental safety regulations (and folks, she’s a hero! Good luck trying to unpack why she's a hero for her actions when the black people attacking cops in Detroit are villainized), terrorists hijack the president's plane and the Secret Service are unable to stop them because they are "paralyzed by their peculiar inability to overcome their political correctness," and in perhaps the most insane twist Russia, China, Japan, Europe, and Canada prepare to mount a full scale invasion of the United States through its southern border. No, that’s not a mistake. Canada is invading the US from the south not because Ben has forgotten which direction Canada is but because they think it will give them the element of surprise. And that's only a small sampling of the lunatic ravings that pass for a plot in this novel.

All in all, a strange book with an insane worldview but you'll get a lot of enjoyment out of reading this book's unintentionally bad writing. It may be a hysterical fever dream of ultra far right paranoia where an all black police force forces a nice CEO to provide free energy for the city of Detroit but at least it's also bad to the point of hilarious self-parody and that's gotta be worth something.

[Ary Chest · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not the least bit entertaining, not the least bit good at preaching his political ideology. Most of the situations in this novel are unbelievable and poorly thought out. For a seasoned journalist, he could've put more data to add to the world building. It's a Ben Shapiro novel for Ben Shapiro fans. I'm sure the students at the college campuses he's invited to speak at will purchase this.

[T · Rating 1 out of 5]

It reads like something a 14 year old would write. It is basically a teenage daydream that got published somehow. The characters are boring and one-dimensional and the plot is unbelievable. It exposes the ignorance of the author about the real world. This should belong on a website for fanfic.

[Margaux · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's like if your great-great grandfather managed to overhear a terrible action movie from the bargain bin on in the background while he was half-asleep, and now he's trying to tell you what it was about. The writing is reminiscent of my unedited fifth grade stories we had to write for class, with a plot cooked up by a racist 12-year-old boy on cocaine. Ben wants to be a cool guy, and so he wrote a story of what he imagines a cool guy to be, and I don't know what's more sad... Him thinking that his main character is some kind of cool guy, or that he didn't have enough self-awareness to realize how embarassing that is.

[Drew · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s pretty much impossible to be engaged with the online political world and not be familiar with Ben Shapiro. I’m of course familiar with his EPIC DESTRUCTION of woefully unprepared college kids, and I routinely hop over to his Twitter page to get a right perspective when news breaks. I’ve also seen plenty of vile posts of his about Muslims replacing western society, the myth of the moderate Muslim, and of course the classic “Arabs like to live in sewage and bomb things.” I haven’t, however, read one of his books. This one was absolutely stunning in some of the worst possible ways. It’s just a few steps removed from being a modern retelling of The Turner Diaries.

I hope I get all this right, but basically we have a weak and intellectual president who’s clearly a stand in for Obama. He is completely uninterested in the border crisis and is instead focusing on some big government program to cement his legacy. Meanwhile the black lives matter movement is present, and apparently they do the totally normal thing of slipping kids a 20 to go harass a cop in the hopes that the cops will indeed shoot the kids so they can start a riot (I cannot stress enough how ABSOLUTELY INSANE this section was). Ben also describes these guys in the totally normal way of “looking like he was headed for a lifetime of prison workouts.” There's also the growing threat of a terrorist with a nuke, as Saddam’s WMDs were smuggled into Iran because that’s completely logical and doesn’t ignore splits between Sunni/Shia, Arabs/Persia, Saddam/terrorists, or the history of the Iran-Iraq War. At any rate, at some point the president is on a plane and a Muslim is clearly about to blow the plane up with a nuke, but in an effort to be politically correct, the president and his people just let him do it. A whole bunch of people are killed, and the VP who assumes power takes the opportunity to pin it on right wing militias, forms some sort of New World Order military force with Europe, Canada, Russia, and China, and elects to invade Texas and kill the governor who has defied them so many times.

Imagine being born into a life of privilege with an inside track to a Hollywood job, writing godawful rejected scripts which you then turn into a career of grievance, only to shit out this garbage and prove to everyone why your scripts were rejected in the first place. This book is absolutely embarrassing at best, and the ramblings of an alt-right lunatic at worst.

[Cody · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Turner Diaries, but somehow even stupider

[Alex Curran · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books I have ever read from one of the dumbest liars out there. Hilarious stuff. The amount of times he refers to big bear-sized men is bizarre.

[Summer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor writing. Racial stereotypes. Dates itself with brand-name dropping. Obvious Gary-Stu self-insert protagonist. Lots of extreme right-wing politics and mudslinging on anyone who disagrees with it. Just overall painful to read.

[Wade Ferguson · Rating 1 out of 5]

True allegiance provides an insight into the worldview of its author. While more dramatised, this book reflects a focus on the paranoia that external forces (muslims, Iran, Russia, china) want to destroy America along side internal forces (left wing ideology, activism, black Americans). Interestingly, this book shows odd symmetry in characters, yet reflects them oppositely as protagonist/antagonist. For example, muslim bombing an embassy in Iraq is evil, while a white American women bombing an EPA building is somehow a main protagonist and one the book is at pains to sympathises with. Furthermore, the book includes sloppy writing mistakes (seriously, who edited this book), repetitive sentence structure and is filled with characters who serve no other purpose than a singular paragraph plot device.

I would not recommend this book for anyone seeking insightful political commentary in a fictional setting. This book serves as nothing more than conspiratorial propaganda masked as fiction.

[Kyle Epps · Rating 1 out of 5]

You cannot make this up unless you’re a try-hard cuck like Ben. I heard much of this book from “Behind the Bastards” podcast, which covers this book in three episodes. The plot is contrived to something your Uncle Jim might say at a TX Thanksgiving dinner, while everyone moans waiting for him to shut up and start talking about his third ex wife and why she left him and his mobile home. The writing is BAD BAD BAD. He’ll say the same word like “hope” three times in two sentences. Run-on sentences amok. Clearly he doesn’t have a wide vocabulary. And as someone pointed out, there was no editor. Maybe bc he himself is an editor? Just drivel nonsense for the birds. And birds deserve so much better.

[Corey J Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found the book refreshing, it tied many political topics into one book with interesting stories for each character's part, tied together well too. I enjoyed the focus on each side and how each character felt about their decisions. I really enjoy Ben Shapiro, his views, his factual books, and now his first fictional read. I feel he'd do great writing an alternative history piece. Thanks for the read.

[Emi · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is such a weird power fantasy. Heroes must be tall and brawny. Villains are short and have brown skin. The liberal president is somehow weak and ineffectual AND a renegade controlling, domineering evil leader at the same time? Inner cities are bad. Cops that shoot 8 year old children are "clear headed" and good.

It's also really poorly written. Not for English majors.
Don't read it.

[Paul Wilson · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Hawthorne was a bear of a man, six three in his bare feet and two hundred fifteen pounds in his underwear, with a graying blond crew cut and a face carved of granite."

As heard on the Behind the Bastards podcast: the only way to experience this literary abortion.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

Haha fuck ben shapiro

[Owen Rumsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh. My. God.

When I read New Moon, I legitimately thought that it would forever be the worst book I had ever managed to stumble into reading. If, through some terrible, horrific tragedy, I managed to find a book worse, I thought, I would simply close such a book and walk away. If I had followed through on such a plan, I would be a happier man than I am now.

But alas, I did not, could not, abide my own rules. There some things in life that supersede logic and a care for one’s own state of mind, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t find one in this book.

Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro. Putting aside my guttural hatred for the little weasel that he is, and his general ineptitude for having good ideas and/or a sense of argument beyond talking quickly and whining, he is an absolutely shit writer. Add to that the fact that this is less of a book, and more of a piece of propaganda wrapped in some stupid cover art. I wish I had judged this book by its cover.

Where do I even start? There is so much bad in this “work” that I legitimately can’t find a reasonable place to even begin hating it.

If I had to note one thing that gripes me above all others, it’s the god awful grammar and syntax. I simply must assume for my own sake that he did not have an editor for this book. I could easily look it up and check, but I will not because if doing so yielded results, any spark of hope will have gone out.

Next are the stupidities. The book flat out lies. Stupid lies. Not even political lies intent on spurning hatred in its audience, but simple nonsense statements that drive me up the wall. “Youngest general in American history at 41 years old.” Ha. No. Lafayette was 19 when he became Major General. George Armstrong Custer was 23 when he became Brigadier General. I could go on all day. If Ben Shabibo couldn’t even google the age of the earliest generals in American history, I can’t even find it in my heart to not wish this book had never been written and imagine a world in which Ben Shabito didn’t ever go on the internet.

Is that all? A shit book with shit grammar and foolish mistakes? No.

Ben. What. Were. You. TRYING. To. Say.

The propaganda and mounds of steaming stinking horseshit this book is comprised of are truly on a mythical scale. Never did I expect to read something as impossibly cruel and painfully stupid as I had to with this book. When a police shoots an unarmed black child who was EIGHT YEARS OLD, he becomes the victim of a crazy mob who are absolutely mad for wishing that someone who shot a small child for zero reason gets punished. That’d be insane right? Ha. Liberals. Ben Shobitto, if you ever find yourself writing a storyline about how Black people are using their “social power” to accumulate power and sending children in as lambs for the slaughter for the purpose of… creating an all-black police force(???) please look at yourself in the mirror and kindly jump off the nearest cliff. The book’s hatred for muslims and further depictions of people of color as overall brutish, stupid, conniving, and soulless is genuinely hard to read.

While it’s not quite as bad as the absolutely vile material of the story, a special mention goes out to the abysmal writing, courtesy of Ben Hobbitto himself. I find myself more entranced by the instructions printed on the back of a shampoo bottle than any passage in this “””story””” I can even remember.

Ben, too, you should really write books like they aren’t your own little fanfictions. When it comes down to the brass tax of it all, this is Benadryl Shepardo’s epic fanfiction reimagining of mid-2000s America, complete with self-insert OCs with genius level intellect and monstrous physical power. Example: the main “main” character, Brett. Passage: “He’d seen that arm angle before. He knew what a person looked like before they drew a gun from concealment. He could feel the threat before he even knew he felt it.” Putting aside the Wattpad-tier writing and preteen-esque characterizations, it’s just really f*cking stupid. Oh and to add onto it, I clarified that Brett was the main “main” character because it’s one of those books with a shifting perspective nearly every chapter! Yay! If you’re curious, the other main characters include the cop who shot the eight year old and a woman who had her life ruined by ANTIFA and wanted to assassinate the weak, Liberal president. Oh yeah and Iraq has nukes they want to detonate in America. How, why? Some guy just sold them to Iraq. Makes sense, right?

Like fuck man, I don’t even know if I can describe any more effectively what makes this story so damn bad.

I would strongly recommend this book be added to the curriculum of writing classes around the country and around the world, because every choice and style and idea used in and for this book is the exact dead opposite of what any author should do.

0 stars would be generous. -5 stars. -50.

Fuck you Ben Shapiro, you little pathetic weasel. I don’t plan on reading any of your future works because I don’t believe I’d be able to without lobotomizing myself. I know you’ve written other books, but never write again, and never talk again. Hell, never eat or drink or breathe again. Fuck it, never ever ever again anything.

You aren’t needed here. You sure as shit aren’t wanted here. Go fuck yourself, Ben.

[Jerry Binder · Rating 1 out of 5]

This novel is what would happen if you raised a child on nothing but Ayn Rand, Breitbart, and The Turner Diaries, then asked them to write a military thriller in one draft. Ben Shapiro shows a startling ignorance of just about every single subject he touches here. Here are a few highlights:

* BLM activists pay kids to get shot by cops to justify their activism.
* There really were WMDs in Iraq, they were just covered up to make the invasion look bad.
* Democrats are so politically correct that they won't search people's bags before letting them onto Air Force One.
* Civilian oversight of police is some sort of plot to prevent cops from doing their job.
* Pretty much every location in the Middle East is described as "primitive," even huge cities like Tehran.
* An all-plastic 3D printed gun does not get picked up on a security scanner, even though it's shaped like a gun and has metal rounds inside. It is also implied to be accurate at dozens of meters.
* Too many errors about how the Army, the National Guard, and the federal government operate to list. The sort of mistakes skimming a Wikipedia article could fix.

Most of the plotlines in this book feel very tenuously linked at best. It gives the feeling that the only reason this covers BLM, Mexico, and war in the Middle East is so that Shapiro can write racist propaganda about three different minority groups. And boy howdy, this book is racist. All characters of color are described solely in negative ways. They're short, they have scraggly beards, they have "dead eyes", and so on. One character is described as being bound for a life in prison for no stated reason other than being a muscular black teenager. Almost every single POC is involved in some plot or another to destroy the United States.

On top of all that, the prose manages to be nearly as awful as the propaganda. Shapiro writes the way he talks: way too fast, in the hope that you'll nod along and think he sounds smart. Scenes and perspectives change without any indication, forcing you to double back to try to figure out where the hell the novel even is. Many chapters begin with a confusing cold open then go back to explain what just happened and why. Shapiro rarely even bothers to give readers some impression of the passage of time, beyond occasionally stating "it's been X long since Y happened". These are a few of the many signs that Shapiro was trying to write a TV drama instead of a novel.

If you like Ben Shapiro, I invite you to read this book! Maybe then you'll get some idea of what a worthless hack he is. If you don't like Ben Shapiro, just go read a Tom Clancy novel or something.

[Von Green · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yikes. Just a bunch of propaganda, and I’m a libertarian. Shapiro sure likes to spoon-feed his audience a narrative they already believe is true, so don’t bother thinking this “book” will challenge you in any way, intellectually nor morally. I wish I could give it zero stars.

[K995 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just horrible, no plot, cardboard characters and an overlying sauce of politics and finger wagging that make no sense in the story.

[Liam Haines · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hilariously bad

[Jillian Garcia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel like I'm being extremely generous by my 1 star rating. To be fair if you like current events and political thrillers this is a book for you.

To me this felt like a cheap Vince Flynn novel, and sadly it was underwhelming. Ben Shapiro is so smart and I am a big fan of his podcasts and radio program. This book was just interesting enough to keep your attention, but not good enough to make you think or feel anything.

This book was void of emotion and any heart.

Spoilers are a COMIN:

Did Brett Hawthorne really REALLY think he could stop a terrorist by himself? Him against the entire United States government?

I thought when Brett was captured by the terrorists in Afghanistan he wanted to spend more time with his wife? When he was released from being a Prisoner of War... he left his wife again to kill a terrorist?

Why didn't Brett inform his military higher ups since he is a GENERAL...and go back home to Texas and be with his wife?

Why did Ellen jump Omari causing a detonation on the airplane? Secret Service and probably other security personnel could have disarmed him...Ellen still caused the destruction of New York City so blah....

President Prescott was made to be so evil and vicious. Lacked in every way.

Seriously the Levon storyline needed to be cut, Big Jim storyline all that needed to be cut out.
Ricky Sullivan, Aiden, and Soledad are the only characters that have any real emotion and character. Just underwhelming for me.