Ben Shapiro's book is bad. Let's discuss. (True Allegiance)

hey James hmm what it's time to do the review come on oh okay cool let's uh let's get started then uh wait it's it's that easy you're just you're just doing it well what did you want me to do do you want me to cry and scream no no no while you drag me away and force me to do the review because that seems kind of overplayed by this point don't you think I mean that's been around ever since YouTube has been a thing I I mean I just thought you'd put up more resistance than that I did you want to just do some cringy sketch where I got a couple of people together and came up with this bizarre way of explaining how bad this book was before I even started the review because I mean I I don't even have two people to work with this okay we're not two people talking this is just me talking to myself but I cut it together in editing so it looks like two people matter of fact I didn't even change my shirt for your half okay I just put a jacket on over it that's how lazy I'm being right now I mean at the end of the day it's just a book it's not that bad and it seems kind of cringy to just play it up like that to make it seem like it's ending my life and make me want to kill myself don't you think well look do you do you want to get started or not well yeah I'd love to get started right away but I filmed this half first I have to wait for you to go oh this is true allegiance by ben shapiro this is the introduction song it's not very good but it's not too long so ben shapiro for those of you who aren't familiar with him i envy you because he's an extremely right-wing political commentator who is known for things like advocating the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians claiming that if schools teach his children about LGBT people he's going to shoot somebody claiming that the US military should be allowed to kill civilians having a bizarre obsession with Alexandria Ocasio Cortes and being a climate change denier just overall he's kind of a piece [ __ ] and I would go into a lot more detail about that but honestly I don't want to that much and honestly this one clip kind of encapsulates how shitty he is much better than I could ever hope to so let's say let's say for the sake of argument that all of the water levels around the world rise by five let's say five feet and it puts all the low-lying areas on the coast underwater alright would you let's say all of that happens you think that people aren't going to just sell their homes and move just once Oh problem so the houses - who've been [ __ ] Aquaman now a lot of you have probably already seen that and normally I wouldn't play other people's content like that but I just I feel like H bomber guy just said it so much more succinctly than I ever could so go check out that video in his channel if you haven't but you know the point is at one point Ben Shapiro wrote a book it's called true allegiance and it's not very good so here's the summary 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 first 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 or failed war fighting to stay alive and make it back home but will he be able to stop the collapse of America in time so from that you can pretty clearly tell that yeah this is meant to be some sort of contemporary thriller story okay there's gonna be like political intrigue there's gonna be spy stuff there's gonna be action it's not that hard to figure it out and that is definitely what this book tries to do it also tries to be propaganda and it's not particularly good at it but you know we'll get into that as it goes on I think we've done enough so let's just let's just start reading let's go to the prologue New York City by the time Jennifer Coulier hit the George Washington Bridge it was already almost 9:00 a.m. rush hour the bridge had turned into an enormous parking lot Jennifer looked out at the sea of red lights before her stretching all the way into New York and sighed there had to be 30,000 cars on this bridge all of the moving two miles an hour Jennifer glanced at her watch inside she was on the west side of the bridge and she could see its two enormous steel encased towers looming before her and her passenger seat her daughter Julie briefed softly sleeping Jennifer glanced at her watch again 903 come on she muttered which is when she heard it the bridge groaned it was a loud low groan that made the car vibrate Julie woke up what was that she asked drowsily the groom died away nothing said Jennifer probably just a plane overhead go back to sleep mommy the bridge groaned again this time it was longer more drawn-out Jennifer felt the brake pedal vibrate beneath her foot mommy that's not a plane said Julie wide awake now the groaning continued booming from beneath them the bridge was undulating slightly up and down now Julie could see the cables of the suspension bridge oscillating like the strings of a guitar mommy what's going on Julia cried cars ahead were honking now urgently pleading for those at the front of the bridge to hurry up a few cars were trying to ram their way through the traffic pushing other cars towards the edge of the bridge the honking and crashing combined with the burgeoning low roar made Jennifer's headache pound the driving rhythm of her blood surging through her temples was kind of confusing to read but ok then the bridges roar stopped again the people ahead of Jennifer kept honking panicking trying to get off the bridge after about thirty seconds the honking seemed to die down a little bit Julie's wide eyes grew wider she was staring out a crash on the other side of the divider the flames leaping from the engine of a smash Toyota Jennifer could see a man's arms hanging lifeless out the window Jennifer reached up and gripped Julie's arm it's ok baby she whispered wetting her lips so quick question there if this if the cars are packed bumper-to-bumper how did how is there enough room to have a crash that bad because normally for crash that bad you have to be going fairly fast ok then time seemed to stop the noise of the traffic went silent Jennifer eyes opened in horror the bridge before Jennifer tilts its sideways the 604 foot tower before her began to lean almost gracefully to her rights Jennifer screamed but it was drowned out in the ear-splitting cracking noise hundreds of thousands of tons of Steel twisting and bending and grating on each other the sound of a million airplanes all crashing at once Julie you're the Jennifer looked to her left as she heard the steel cable shriek stretch on the other side of the bridge she locked eyes with an elderly man driving a silver Lincoln Continental behind him she saw one of the enormous metal cables snap clean and slither wildly back and forth like a beginning fly fisherman's messy cast look out she shouted at the man he couldn't hear her but he turned to follow her eyes the cable ripped through the lincoln slicing its occupants in half vertically a jet of a jet stream of red following in its wake splattering Jennifer's windshield in front of her the road itself began to tilt cars slid horizontally towards the railings vast time playthings of an angry god so yeah it goes on like that for a little bit longer basically there's a big terrorist attack destroyed the whole bridge a bunch of people died and we don't know exactly what's happening now this is a pretty amateurish mistake to do at the beginning of your book because a lot of people here start your book off with a bang started with something to get your audience invested and they immediately assume okay action sequence but well it's kind of hard to care about that if it's with characters that we haven't seen before and in this particular instance Jennifer and her daughter died so we never see them again and it's like well are we supposed to care that much because we really don't and in fact the book flashes back after this because it goes to part one which is before the attack and then later the attack will happen and the start move on past that but it's kind of hard to care about the attack at all when nobody that we know or care about as readers died during it or was hurt during it and no none of their loved ones died during it either so like right off the bat this is very amateurish and that's not even getting into the shitty writing itself like all the various metaphors that he uses it's just it's just clumsy and clunky so now we start off again in Chapter one with another action sequence Brett Kabul Afghanistan brigadier general Brett Hawthorne looked at his m9 magazine and cursed to himself empty he was sat up against a mud brick hovel in the cities poor part of town even in Kabul there was a large income gap and felt the sweat trickled down cold between his shoulder blades he hadn't been alone for years generals always had a personal security detail but things had done hellishly wrong Hawthorne was a bear of a man 6 3 in his bare feet and 215 pounds in his underwear with a graying blond crew cut and a face carpet granite but he had prepped plenty of smile lines he just didn't like showing those to people unless he knew them so those of you who don't know Ben Shapiro is short and I wouldn't normally make fun of him for that partially because I'm not a big dude either like we're taller than him but like I'm I'm still a pretty small guy and partially because like it's just a bit mean-spirited to make fun of something someone for something that they can't help like that but one ben shapiro is a piece of [ __ ] and i don't feel bad about anything i say about him and two he clearly has a complex about it so i'm gonna start a counter every time that a character is introduced as being big we're gonna put it on screen so rather than trying to get us invested in that action sequence which we were just introduced to the book instead goes into a very long flashback where it just explains Brett's entire life like literally from the moment he was a kid up through his school years him joining the military meeting his wife his whole career up until this point which kind of went to [ __ ] and that's why he was here and then it goes into the specifics of the day before where there was an attack and that's why he's in this current position but I do have to talk about his his backstory a little bit because for the most part it's just kind of like standard thriller [ __ ] like okay he's just he's just a ultra badass normally but in this case there's a couple of dumb things like for starters it has an introduction with him and his friend Derek and it says Derek taught him how to talk his way out of situations and the thing is that it happened because he went to an all-black school in a middle school or high school I don't care enough to check uh and this other really big black kid thought that Bret's called him the N word which I'm not gonna repeat it on camera but I get the feeling that Ben had a real just way too much fun typing it down but anyways he thinks he called him that and then Derek who is also black came up and just acted like a [ __ ] weirdo and started singing and then the other guy backed off which I don't see how that taught Bret how to talk his way out of situations and you would also think that by bringing it up it would become important to the story later and it doesn't and then he goes into how he met his wife on one of his rare off days Bret found himself at Charleston's bustling city market the shops were heavy with traffic rain outside had forced everyone into the covered complex of artists Hawking their pictures and crafts he was wearing his citadel uniform standing out conspicious Lee among the women in their summer dresses and the men in their jeans and seersucker sport coats reluctant to run back out into the rain he leaned against a bookcase no loitering cadet the voice was musical for some reason the image of a woodwind came to mind a southern woodwind since her accent sang of long summers and lemonade now I know it's not uncommon for male writers to write women as being attractive and they do it in kind of a cringy way but nonetheless that's particularly dumb so then it goes through his military career and it says by Kosovo he was a captain on September 11th he was a major a major who by simple coincidence knew Pashto which for those of you don't know that's a language which is fairly commonly spoken in Afghanistan but we don't get any other explanation for how he pashto like it doesn't say he knew somebody and you've learned from them it doesn't say like he thought that Afghanistan was going to be a trouble spot so he purposely went out of his way to learn it it doesn't say anything like that he just knows Pashto and granted sometimes you just pick up [ __ ] like that but four languages I could believe it if it was something fairly commonly spoken in the US like if if he learned Spanish cuz like he lives in Texas so if he had just learned Spanish by osmosis I find that very believable and if he learned something like I don't know German or Italian or French those are also like fairly common so it wouldn't be that weird for him to know it but Pashto really he just knows that so then it goes into how Brett thinks that the president's screwed up the war the deal for the military bases was all but dead the administration was scrambling the Afghan presidents in an attempt to appease his inflamed population demanded that US troops changed their rules of engagement to avoid civilian casualties in the process endangering more American soldiers see that's a very interesting line to me because as I said man Shapiro has publicly said in real life that he thinks the US military shouldn't have to worry about civilian casualties and that he doesn't give a [ __ ] if we kill Afghani civilians so this is him just straight-up saying that in the books universe as well the other characters not only agree with him but his way of looking at things is the correct way of doing things like apparently it's smart to kill civilians because you know that's not a great recruiting tool for the Taliban or anything just cool so then it has this weird moment where like he's showing a camera crew from CNN around and they have to specify that from CNN because those guys aren't explicitly right-wing and therefore their opinions are all bad but basically they're he's showing some camera crew around and then a child strapped to a donkey with a bomb on it comes up near them and the Taliban is nearby about to set it off and Brett saves the day by pulling out his handgun and shooting the cellphone which was going to set off the bomb which disables it and then saving the kid from the donkey so he's just you know a big damn hero and that part look I get that this is a thriller and that the main character is supposed to be a major badass like I'm not I don't have a huge issue with that it's just that it's such a bizarre and stupid way of showing it that it's just kind of funny so then we finally get to an explanation about how and why Brett was in the situation we found meant the beginning and basically it turns out that the US military was pulling out of Afghanistan like you know they want to all be gone soon and so the Taliban stages a big attack when there's not many of them left in there all week and basically like they have an attack and then they send a car bomb in and blow a bunch of people up and then they wait for evil to come in and help them and then they blow it up again and this whole thing it's meticulously well-planned for the Taliban which is you know not that unbelievable I don't think but then it also shows that a pretty huge portion of the Afghani population is apparently on their side and that they also want the US military gone and so it just seems to me that like why would you bother sticking around if that's the case because like you're clearly not ever going to get it into a situation where the Afghani government can stand against the Taliban on its own and the US ally so it seems like you're just sending sending all these people over to die and using up all this money and equipment just to try and prop up a puppet regime and this isn't even really what I think about the real world this is what the book is showing off okay so yeah the Taliban take over the US embassy the Ambassador gets evacuated a bunch of the men you get evacuated and then a bunch more of them get killed and Brett gets separate and that's how we need him but that's also how we leave him that's the end of the first chapter so we started an action sequence we went away from it went through this whole long flashback explaining this man's entire life and why we should agree with him because he has the right politics and then it just ends I guess it's supposed to be a cliffhanger but it's not a very good one so then we get our introduction to president Prescott in Washington DC we simply can't pay for it sir White House chief of staff Tommy Bradley was standing over the president's desk in the Oval Office a sheaf of Budget papers in his hand crumpled wrinkled papers covered in red notes the numbers just didn't add up and president mark Prescott didn't care listen to me Tommy said the president my reelection relies on our ability to secure funding for this action you know that I know that the polls show it we don't have a choice in the matter Tommy gritted his teeth he knew Prescott was right the President had been dropping precipitously in the polls his critics blamed his policies for a widespread inflation and unemployment Prescott was deathly afraid of becoming Jimmy Carter and he was right on the precipice of having his worst fears realized 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 hand-picked protege of the power brokers but he hadn't quite contemplated the nature of the country he'd be handed once elected okay so that whole thing about the power brokers that never gets brought up again but I find it interesting because it's like Ben is admitting that there are people who work behind the scenes to try and influence American elections like even if it is on paper at least a democracy there's a lot of [ __ ] that works against that and I just want you to remember that he talks about the power brokers and just keep that in mind as it goes on because it like it makes Prescott and his ilk seem like the bad guys but seriously just just remember so then it explains how Prescott is trying to help the country because it's in a deep economic spiral down it's not doing good and so he's trying to make a big program that will are actually he's done a lot of different programs but he's trying to make a big one which will like yeah say hey let's put Americans to work builds and [ __ ] and then it says big men prescott anew required big governments and big governments required big spending because you know why not throw in some more buzzwords and then as he's explaining it he decides it'll be called the work freedom program Prescott's work freedom program everyone recognized the value of freedom but what did that mean other than the right to a job freedom meant nothing if you couldn't put bread in your children's mouths at night and America was a country of workers freedom was worked and work was freedom work freedom simple easy repeatable genius you're really [ __ ] subtle been you know just compare all of your political opponents to Nazis I'm sure that's something you're okay with when they do it to you and then Prescott is like going on camera and explaining it to you know the American people and I'm sorry if I'm jumping around a bit but there is a lot of like littler bits of info in the middle that I don't really have time to get into but he says I know he said wearily that some of my political opponents would like to call this planet irresponsible I know they sling around words like socialism he framed the word with his fingers and Marxism and redistribution ISM and they hope to scare you with those words and I find that fascinating because that is the first not the last in this book by a fair margin but the first point where a character says something fairly reasonable but it's framed as though they're saying something crazy like he's saying that his political opponents just use socialism and Marxism and all that to describe anything they don't like and yeah that's kind of what happens so Prescott finishes telling everybody about that and then we go to the next chapter which introduces another character and like I know Ben was trying to write this like sprawling political thriller what he was trying to write this huge story which has a whole bunch of different angles to it that intersect and interconnect in interesting ways but you're not George doubler Martin okay you can't do that George Toffler and Martin you can't even really do that very well it it takes a very skilled author to be able to pull that sort of thing off and you're not because throughout the majority of this a lot of these characters aren't just doing their own thing and it does come together at the end but in a very unsatisfying way that could have been handled some other way and I'm realizing that this is a pretty short book most copies are 272 pages the one I'm reading on here is a little bit longer but that's because it's you know on phone smaller screen whatever but and then I'm realizing that's pretty short and he probably just needed to fill up space because he didn't have much plot so this new character is named solidad Central Valley California the SWAT team didn't expect the first time she brought them cookies nobody brings the SWAT team cookies do I even need to keep going like I feel like those two sentences sum up how shitty the writing is in this so I honestly find Soledad's parts of this book the most well boring for lack of a better word like I don't like using that too much because it doesn't say much but yeah it her parts are just really boring so basically she's just a rancher in California her water supply got cut off by the EPA because they're trying to protect fish and she had to basically let one of her workers go or all of her workers really but there's one in particular that the book focuses on named Emilio and Emilio had a son named one and then they had to move to Los Angeles where he got a different job and then Juan got killed by some gang members and so Soledad blames the government for one being dead and for her not being able to pay her bills and all that and so basically long story short she builds a bomb and then sets it off in front of the EPA's offices in California so one of the major characters of this book is a terrorist and it goes to great lengths trying to say like oh no she did it when nobody was there so nobody got hurt or anything like there's no way to guarantee that you very well could have killed a lot of people doing this but it just tries to reassure us no no she's not a terrorist she was forced into this by the government and the problem is I'm pretty sure the Taliban built the exact same way I'm pretty sure the people who blow up that bridge feel the exact same way but I guess they're fighting for political beliefs that ben shapiro disagrees with so they're bad but so laid out is fighting for political beliefs that ben agrees with so she's good and again it goes to great lengths to explain no no she's not a terrorist [ __ ] you and anyways basically her house gets surrounded by SWAT team but then a couple hundred militia members show up and surround the SWAT team and so they wind up not arresting her and so she just brings them cookies and [ __ ] and that's basically it for this chapter it's very boring and then we go to another character names LaVon in Detroit and he's a black guy who runs a barber shop but he also runs a racketeering ring because you know obviously if you're black and live in Detroit you're a criminal LeBron is talking to another man named Big Jim Crawford who is like this you know black leader I guess a black community leader like he talks at protests and stuff I don't know just they don't really explain it that well but anyways now Crawford looked confused Levon smile never faltered it's Shakespeare he said it means you'll learn to trust me Crawford laughed loudly this time then he looked at Levon curiously quoting dead hongki's he twinkled you might be useful yet then I mean this sincerely have you ever in your life met a black person so then a cop named O'Sullivan is walking around the city at night and he finds a black kid and he's like hey kid what are you doing and the kid is like [ __ ] you honky get the [ __ ] out of my neighborhood you know calls him a white boy all that [ __ ] again Ben have you ever met a black person they they don't talk like that but anyways um yeah and kid has a toy gun and cop shoots him and kills him and apparently this was all set up by Levon in order to spark a conflict he he was set up to make people angry and the thing is that there is security footage of this which shows it at just the proper angles so you can't see that the kid did reach for his fake gun and that the cop just shot him and we as the audience know that the kid was reaching for the fake gun but the rest of the world doesn't okay so as this goes on I know I keep saying this but as this goes on I really want you to keep in mind that from their point of view the cop just shot the kid for really no reason even in the land of make-believe where Ben can control everything that happens he still accidentally winds up reinforcing the belief of a trigger-happy murderous cop it's just it's kind of beautiful so then we go to another character but this one we already sort of had introduced to us this one was named Ellen and she is Bret's wife and she lives in Texas and she works for the governor of Texas specifically she works for Border Patrol well she doesn't work for control but she's working a lot with them at this point in time so it starts off with several pages of her just kind of whining about how the border is open now because the president told them not to deport unaccompanied minors which automatically equals crime Mike that's weird because it says don't deport on the company minors and then it immediately goes to okay yes so there's drugs and rape and all that coming over the border now and there's no way to stop it which is dumb I don't know and then her and her friend they're driving along and a helicopter has stopped in the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere and apparently it's a bunch of cartel members and they just start screaming at her in Spanish still she didn't move Ellen had time for one thought [ __ ] before the Mexican pointed the carbine at the truck and fired a burst through the windshield the first bullet missed a million but the second Cocker directly in the face her head slammed back against the seat rest of the back of her head splattering one moment her pretty face was staring directly at Ellen the next there was no face just a mess of tissue and tendon and bone and blood but what about the third bullet those fire and three round bursts been like you seriously couldn't do even the most basic of research about this so yeah then the men dragged Ellen out of the car and they don't kill her instead they just say hey tell the governor to get his men off the border and let us through blah blah blah you know that kind of [ __ ] and I feel like you could have just killed her and that would have sent an even better message especially because now she like saw your faces and stuff but okay whatever now I want to talk a little bit more about this sequence because it's another part where Ben can control everything he wants but he still winds up making it seem nonsensical and stupid because like it said the only real thing it mentions is that unaccompanied minors are not getting deported it doesn't say anything else about it and it says that apparently the number of illegal border crossings has jumped up significantly recently which doesn't make sense because as he said earlier the u.s. is in a huge economic spiral like it's going to complete [ __ ] and at one point it mentions that the employment unemployment rate is about 25% which is huge that means that that's the worst it's been in my 80 years so why are they all coming across the border it's certainly not for economic opportunities in fact that's actually a fruit in fact that fewer immigrants come in during times of economic downturn and more come in when the economy is on the upswing and less come in when Mexico's economy is on the upswing or when other countries where they come from their economies on the upswing so it really doesn't make sense from that regard so maybe they're just fleeing violence and in that case well it seems needlessly cruel to not let them in at that point and all I'm going to say on that is that if people were fleeing more from Mexico I'm sure Ben would say don't let them in but if they were fleeing from let's say the Holocaust or the Holodomor I get the feeling you would feel differently about that and it's not hard to guess why so I'm almost 40 minutes into filming this and I'm like barely a page and a half into my notes and I have like six pages so we might have to go into overdrive for this and I'm gonna have to skip over a lot of little things that I want to talk about but you know what other people have read through this as well and honestly like I was able to get it free from my library so just check it out yourself you're really that curious but basically next we go to Brett back in Afghanistan and he manages to not die he has a broken arm by the way which kind of after this opening sequence they mentioned that it's broken a couple more times but it never seems to bother him so they really didn't need to put that in there but anyways he has a broken arm now and he manages to get to an aircraft hangar and he finds the dead body of the American ambassador which got away a while ago and at first he's [ __ ] happy about it and it's only a small thing and he's only happy about it for a brief second because you know dudes an [ __ ] but at the same time like you're happy that you failed in your mission and you're happy that the Taliban killed somebody just because you disagree with them politically and you see a lot of that throughout this book really so I just felt they need to bring that but anyways he finds the dude's briefcase and he opens it up by guessing a stupidly basic combination and then there's a bunch of coordinates in there and apparently one of the coordinates is in Iraq Brett knew what it meant 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 the desert beneath those coordinates and now they were in Iran thanks to ambassador Beauregard Frederick bailed cough felt off you son of a [ __ ] Bret muttered you sold us out then he passed out so a couple of things one this is just [ __ ] real life fan fiction at this point okay Iraq didn't have WMDs sorry Ben you know it was his stupid war didn't work out well trying to justify it was a sick 2016 so trying to justify it thirteen years after the fact just makes you look like a petulant child well more so than storming out of interviews when you get asked difficult questions at least and also again this guy who he disagreed with politically was obviously in league with the enemy which just really goes to show how much of a [ __ ] ideologue Shapiro really is because at the end of the day this isn't a work of fiction this is Shapiro's propaganda so it goes back to Prescott has a bunch of high mighty political sounding dialogue with him and another character and then he's talking to the governor of Texas you could send me some troops to the border is what you could do I'm sure you saw in the news about my staffer Prescott kicked off his shoes put his feet on the desk yes sir I sure did he found himself accidentally blurring into a drawl of his own when he talked with the rednecks tragic just tragic not sure what anybody could have done about it you could have done something about it you still can it's an act of war it's not an act of war governor if it's not by a foreign government a pause then the storm horseshit mr. president you know as well as I do that the Mexican government is run by the cartels now that's another really dumb line because while I'm not gonna pretend the Mexican government isn't super corrupt because it is and I'm not gonna pretend that the cartels don't pay people off a lot trying to say that it's run by the cartels is stupid because it still does plenty of actions against them and trying to say like you're describing the cartels as those are one entity they're not they're a bunch of different political a bunch of different criminal organizations but the lines between the two can be blurred but anyways a bunch of different criminal organizations that all [ __ ] hate each other and fight each other all the time and do we'll [ __ ] to each other because they're all fighting for a slice of the exact same pie they're not one entity and pretending that they are is like just a complete misunderstanding of everything so then we go back to Ellen in Texas and she's about to enter the Capitol building when she arrived at the Capitol she made straight for the governor's office the halls were thronged with angry Texans and angry Texans were anything but subtle some carried signs tacked to wooden planks close the border enough is enough protect your people she edged her way past one burly linebacker of a man wearing a cowboy hat and a gun which was perfectly legal in the state that was reason enough for Ellen to love the Lone Star State there wouldn't be any random shootings shootings in this Capitol building anytime soon even if the media made it seem as though every civilian with a gun represented a threat to public safety okay again treating the media as though it's one entity when it clearly isn't and to I'm not against guns at all in fact I think that's one of the very few areas where Shapiro and I will agree politically I think guns are cool and I think they have their uses but the idea that a normal person would stop a mass shooting is kind of dumb because if you're in a crowd and used to your gunshots and you just start shooting I have the people you think are doing it suddenly you're gonna have 18 people all shooting each other rather than just one or two and look I don't wish that was the way things are but that's how people act weird um in crowds she showed the guards her ID and they waved her through - knocks on the door and she stood cross from one time Republican presidential candidate and four-time governor Bubba Davis after a stint in Vietnam back in the late 1960s Davis a big bear of a man burly and fun-loving had come home without a job so it basically explains Bubba's back story there where he was just a successful businessman who got a loan from his father and launched or that had nothing to do with it but and then he you know became part of the Texas State Legislature and then he himself became the governor of Texas but what I find interesting about this is that he's clearly the good guy here okay like this entire book he's shown to be in the right and you know in a difficult position but doing his best but you know he was a businessman who just decided to get into politics and remember earlier how it said Prescott was handpicked by the power brokers who does Ben think the power brokers are and then it brings up a bunch of [ __ ] about how like environmentalists are lobbying against oil fracking and [ __ ] and apparently they're also funded by the Saudi government's it's a good thing that oil companies never ever Lobby so then that goes back to Soledad in her you know weird the siege thing and basically a SWAT guy breaks into her house and says hey I'm defecting he basically just says that in as many words I want to help you escape blah blah blah and then as they're leaving some gunshots get fired in the militia and the SWAT team starts fighting in the distance the cavalry was coming so laid out soldiers at least a dozen bearded gun-toting men on their steel horses riding directly towards the swat lines she could see it in the distance pickets hog charge sorry just looking for an excuse to read that line basically she just escapes and it's really dominant boring so it goes back to LaVon in Detroit and again it reiterates that the only evidence of the police shooting is that he killed a kid and the only footage shows that he was not justified in doing it okay and then it goes into a bunch of stuff about how the history of Detroit and how it got to this and how apparently staffing up the police department is controversial and so they weren't able to hire more officers whatever and then we go to Muhammad in Tehran Iran today's attack has ensured that the crippling weakened infidel Giants that was the United States will never rise again the emptiness and degradation of that perverse country has been wiped away and the glorious reign of Allah has begun those that rejected Allah fall of vanities and Allah has destroyed them and it goes on for a while like that's actually a different guy Oishi me or Asami sorry who's just he's doing his bad guy monologue and it's just trying to fill in as many buzzwords as possible it's really dumb and then Mohammed is like the 17 year old kid that's working and he's you know hiding out it or not hiding out really but he's going to a Western cafe to meet up with someone and he just wished that Andre would show up already even if this was a safe spot he was getting sick of listening to the western-style sinful music blaring over the speakers what he asked himself doesn't mean to hit me baby one more time and you know that line is genuinely funny oh I'll get I'll give one point in Shapiro's favor that's that that's a funny funny line so then we learned that uh Sean he is actually captured Brett and is currently interrogating him about you know various info you know he's the US general so he's a valuable source and then Brett talks him he talks to him and he says you're a piece of [ __ ] because you kill women and children despite earlier bitching about how he was not allowed to kill women and children it's almost like he thinks the rules are for other people and not for him the rules don't apply to America that's a very common theme in this book actually so then we go to part two collapse and this is just after the terrorist attack at the bridge that wasn't the prologue and it doesn't really do a great job of explaining that okay yeah this is after it because this book doesn't have a good time line in general I don't know if it happens over the course of months or just a couple of weeks but it's confusing so they do that you know hostage video thing with Brett and he sends a Morse code message by blinking and asked them to send in an airstrike but the president decides not to send in an airstrike because you know that could kill a lot of innocent people and start a war with Iran and Iran is you know a sovereign nation that has control over its own territory which I feel like that's something that men should understand because he's making such a big deal about the American border needing to be closed why does that not apply to other people oh right they're not Americans they're not special but you know anyways they send in and you know like a spy special ops team to save him whatever you would call that and here's that they crept down the hallway visibility no greater than 10 ahead to the sides ran door after door a light flashed on behind one of the doors an old woman suddenly thrust it open one of the operatives sprang forward grabbing the handle and easing it shut police he bellowed in Farsi hoping the rest of the apartment dwellers could hear him stay in your home she nodded terrified and let the lock click home in Tehran questioning the police would have been foolhardy now I find that interesting because again he's admitting that the police can be corrupt and overly violent but only other people's police like if black people in America are complaining about police brutality then uh oh no that's not real they're just being whiny but other people doing it suddenly it's different so basically Brett gets rescued and he's actually kind of pissed off about being rescued he's like you should have just killed him blah blah blah and then it goes back to Ellen and she's happy about her husband coming home obviously but then uh as she's talking to Bubba the governor of Texas he's talking about how he's refusing to send the National Guard to help in New York there's another river with dead kids in it Bubba Ellen said he shot her a hard look you think I don't know that I've seen the footage too I now I'm damn sorry about it but I'm not the governor of New York I'm governor of the Republic of Texas and my first duty is to this state we give up these troops we might as well let Prescott open the border officially to the cartels and smugglers they're the only thing standing between us and a full-scale invasion again kids coming through as an invasion and criminal organizations as bad as they are aren't an invasion either they're just criminal organizations we have those in America too and then Ellen is like watching the footage of the cleanup after the disaster and says she glanced at the television the rescue crew was pulling another body from the water a young girl wearing a Disneyland sweatshirt it was footage Ellen knew from 911 that they'd only show today during live coverage then the psychiatrist would explain to the network brass that showing such images was triggering and the pictures would disappear to spare the sensitivities of the American viewer okay um seeing dead bodies is something that you're right to be upset about and that's something that gives first responders and military veterans post-traumatic stress disorder and that feels like a proper time to be triggered by something and not like you know the mocking way that people like to say on the internet but just Jesus Christ dude like can you go anytime at all having empathy for your fellow human beings like like at all seeing dead children just like [ __ ] you so we go to Soledad she has fled to North Dakota and her and Aiden are hanging out and they want to go to Detroit because there's a bunch of like protests and I mean basically riots you know they're they're getting to at this point and apparently Aiden knows O'Sullivan the cop that murdered a child and he wants to go rescue him and that's uh I mean that's kind of it and well solidad also insists that she's not a terrorist a couple more times so there's that the only thing that's really interesting in this chapter is at the end when Soledad is talking to one of the militiamen I always say the best defense is a good offense so does club it's when your force is small concentrated and hit them where they're weak who are they the same people who shut down your farm the same people who attacked you those people are Americans it isn't American to do those things America means more than being born here it means believing certain things and I find that fascinating because that is Shapiro just straight up saying right out to us that people he disagrees with are not real Americans and he has a history of saying this kind of [ __ ] because he said that Jews who vote for Democrats aren't real Jews so he literally thinks the rest of us are so human and can be killed so let me go back to Detroit and Big Jim the black leader I mentioned earlier says that the police have a history of racial violence and racial prejudice and that's another thing that somebody says which is totally reasonable but it's painted as him being a crazy person it's just just really dumb and anyways o'sullivan the cop gets off even though what it shows his guilt it's like the prosecutors are saying no no because reason it's like she doesn't even give a reason for it really just like this isn't murder or manslaughter it's yeah he's fine and it's like it bet is accidentally showing off how corrupt police and prosecutors are so then it goes to Brett and he's looking for Mohammed the kid that was with Tommy and who he actually saw when he was captive and he's going to you know an airport and ask him for records and saying yeah yes I'm looking for an Arabic young man the official hemmed and hawed I'm uncomfortable with that sir that's racial profiling and only know what [ __ ] isn't okay wait at that point you're just being descriptive okay like you're saying yes I'm looking for a young man this age this height this race like that that's just being descriptive Ben's just seems to think that anyone who mentions race at all is being overly sensitive and PC like [ __ ] off dude so then Prescott president Prescott is giving a speech at the site where the terrorist attack happened there's a protester but he calms her down and she tells everybody like look we need love okay you need to love each other we can't be angry or hating each other we need to find the people who did this yes but we also need to rebuild and come together as Americans and that's another thing which is fairly reasonable but paint it as a crazy person saying it okay whatever and then it goes back to Ellen and Bubba Davis and it's talking about how the media day after day ran with the story a president calling for love and unity and a southern secessionists governor looking like George Wallace never mind that David had stood with the marchers of the civil rights era no you [ __ ] did okay I'm saying that right now no you [ __ ] didn't you did not you're a [ __ ] liar stop and it's interesting to say that because at the time that that was happening they were viewed as a bunch of rabble rousers by large portions of the country but it's only through decades later that we see the mess like okay yeah those were good people fighting for their rights and I just wonder what Shapiro thinks of black lives matter I don't have to wonder I already know and then Bubba decides to send Ellen to New York but he says this you're competent your husband is a well-known military figure and well dammit you're a woman and those sexist in the press won't label a woman an insurrectionist despite the fact that a huge portion of this story is focused on Soledad a woman who the press has called but rightfully so a terrorist and an insurrectionist it's like can you even keep your own logic straight dude I'm sorry I don't want this to be like just a political thing I want this to be like laughing at how dumb this book is but like for [ __ ] sake so then a National Guardsman gets beheaded by the cartels and they send his head in and well it's apparently lieutenant Jeff Jeffords but like we've never met him before this and we don't see him after and like so it's just impossible to care that this happened to this guy and then baba decides that he's gonna send the cartels into Mexico and that he's gonna have them just not to send the cartel send the National Guard into Mexico and have them blow up lunch of cartel [ __ ] which is an act of war because at that point you're violating Mexico's national sovereignty you're violating their borders but it's different because we're American nationalism is a hell of a drug so then it goes to Aiden and Soledad and Aiden rescues his friend O'Sullivan from jail and keeps them from being killed by rioters and I don't know the only reason I bring this up is just because it also needs to take a moment to complain about unions and how apparently his dad lost his job obviously because of unions there's no other reason for it whatever let me get to part three the end of the beginning which is a stupid name so then Bret continues investigating on his own but he's also being followed so he has to lose his tails in order to you know be able to investigate properly and so he's just wandering around the hotel trying to lose him instead of exiting at the lobby level he continued sprinting down into the basement area he'd planned for this eventualities he arrived at the hotel in Afghanistan he'd acquired the useful habit of locating exits scoping out his location he knew the maze of hallways and doors in the hotel basement and he quickly navigated them waiting long enough to ensure he'd lost his pursuers when he emerged onto the street he found himself alone and just that's it that is the most unsatisfying action sequence I have ever read like it's literally just yeah I lost them because I'm that cool like even with people like James Bond and Batman who are just so cool they never lose we still know how they did it so Brett meets up with his old friend Derek who got mentioned at the beginning only now Derek is called a son because he converted to Islam at one point and okay and they just apparently Hassan is like a an informants and mosques like he talks about people he thinks are radical and might have terrorist sympathies to the FBI which okay that's fine and they just mentioned another guy named on John Omar or on Jim Omari sorry and he's like just this prominent Muslim and mom and he you know talks about how terrorists are bad but at the same time he mentions how American occupation of the Middle East and Israeli actions against Palestinians are also bad and again it seems seems totally reasonable like just so many people in here that are just totally reasonable but Ben is painting them as crazy so Brent gets captured and then he meets up with president Prescott again which okay cool and then it goes to the border again where governor baba has basically declared war on Mexico because he's going into their country killing their citizens with military weaponry but again it's okay because we're Americans and it also mentions how there are probably corrupt cops that are on the cartel payroll again acknowledging that cops are corrupt just not in the ways that is inconvenient to Shapiro and then you know national guard kills a bunch of women and kids but it's okay because reasons and then it goes to Soledad who her and Aiden and O'Sullivan are all hiding out in the woods in Tennessee and then Aiden gets killed in a drone strike and the government thinks that she's dead so cool there's that and then Brett gets away from Prescott and he goes back to his friend Hassan slash Derek and he's dead Bret knew the apartment wasn't empty the door would it have been closed had the killer had time to leave they wouldn't want the body discovered too quickly that would give away too much information Brett quickly turned towards the bedroom as he did he saw a large black masked figure out of the corner of his eye so Brett kills the guy cuz he's just that awesome and then he leaves and Ellen is in New York now and she's talking about how there's just so many military people all over the place that she feels safe with armed men and women everywhere she didn't feel nervous she felt reassured no terrorists would be shooting up a restaurant anywhere near here and she had to admit she felt safer in midtown Manhattan than she felt in El Paso Texas and then she's trying to find a journalist who is thickly built so then Brett is talking to the presidents again and he says he thinks the bridge is a preliminary attack like he thinks that oh you're gonna draw in a bunch of people and then you're gonna kill all the ones that come to help as well which is admittedly similar to what happened in Afghanistan at the beginning so it's like hey there's an actual call back an actual setup for something but it doesn't make any sense big terrorist attacks are not easy to pull off they're extremely difficult that's why we don't have them very often and so the idea that people could actually plan and successfully pull off two of them is um well it's stupid so Prescott is giving another speech which is like 80% of what he seems to do in this book and it has him how do I put this he has the quote most racially diverse troops behind him so they all show up on camera and it's clearly shown in this book as a manipulative tactic which it is and it is kind of you know underhanded maybe not underhanded but like it's stupid and it tries to give off a false impression but I just want to point that out because that's the exact same [ __ ] Donald Trump does now and well I just don't think that Ben would find it nearly as manipulative and I know he claims to not like Donald Trump but he also seems to agree with everything he says ever so so solidad actually comes to this event and is in the crowd and she manages to smuggle in a 3d printed gun so it doesn't have any metal on it and she you know is trying to assassinate the president like she's gonna try and get close and do that and Brett sees her and this happens he responded instinctually gun he shouted grabbing at her hand before she could respond she rested control of it from her but she managed to pull the trigger firing uselessly into the air the crowd around them panicked moving a thousand directions at once women falling to the ground men trampled on the stage Secret Service agents jumped onto Prescott to protect him then hustled him offstage as sirens began to wail and screaming broke out and mouse Brett realized he was holding the gun a split second before he felt a large man jump on his back slammed him to the ground so yeah Ellen goes on Air Force One with the president's and with Omari the Imam that I mentioned earlier and he is as they're flying they're flying like you know right over New York he is muttering in Arabic and apparently she finally realizes that Mohammed the guy from earlier brought him a bomb it was the weapon of mass destruction that Iraq made it's a small nuclear weapon because you know that they would totally not have used that if they're being invaded whatever but yeah Omari just straight-up stands up starts chanting in Arabic holds up a phone like he's gonna blow [ __ ] up and the other passengers looked around uncomfortably paralyzed by a peculiar inability to overcome their political correctness yeah that that's it you know they're just too PC to racially profile so it's not that they're just confused by what's going on or that they're shocked by what's going on and people tend to freeze up in difficult circumstances it's obviously because that damn political correctness but at the same time if you say anything bad about Israel you're an anti-semite so bomb goes off ellen is killed along with hundreds of thousands of others and so we get to the epilogue Washington DC good evening my fellow Americans the former governor of Michigan looked directly into the camera she spoke from the East Room of the White House the tears in her eyes were genuine she forced them down I know many of you may not know me a few Americans bother to learn the name of the vice president of the United States but my name is Allyson Martin and okay that sequence isn't too bad but like why did you introduce her as the former governor of Michigan rather than just saying the Vice President Lee but that's just unnecessary info and it winds up being kind of confusing so yeah so yeah this is basically just the new president introducing yourself to the world and the whole epilogue is like a bunch of short little things which showing like hey what people are up to now and apparently a whole bunch of other countries are sending support to the United States including Russia and China which like just seems dumb like that would never ever happen but whatever and you know the Chinese general is like just way too open in his thoughts about how haha we're actually going to attack and take [ __ ] over which is like I mean not uncommon in these kind of books when you have a brief moment with the villain and you're in the villains head for them to just straight-up say ha I'm evil but that doesn't make it less stupid and then it goes to Bubba and apparently he's like on the verge of being impeached by the Texas Legislature legislature and it's just I I don't know and at one point he just says but they wouldn't keep the citizens of Texas safe those citizens were Americans but their rights didn't spring from the federal government they came from somewhere deeper where where do your rights come from I I'm genuinely curious where you think they come from like because people have a lot of different philosophies on this and you could say something interesting here but you decided not to because in your mind it's just so patently obvious and anyone who disagrees with you deserves to be shot so yeah just Soledad manages to rescue Bret from prison and and its sequel Bates it just says yeah let's go to Texas and she admits she's a terrorist now so but she also says the government made me a terrorist so she's not accepting any sort of responsibility for her own actions look this book is [ __ ] awful okay like I knew going in that it would be propaganda but I didn't realize it would be such bad poorly put together obvious propaganda like what the [ __ ] dude one of the reviews I read of this calls it ham-fisted but like honestly even that's giving it way too much credit because as I was saying this whole thing is just so transparently hypocritical like America has to play by different rules than other people and when we do it it's okay but when bad guys do it they're it's because they're bad like it's so up its own ass and so circular in its logic that it's not even good propaganda like the people who already believe this [ __ ] like your uncle who shares racist [ __ ] on Facebook would probably love this book but it's not gonna convince anybody new so it's just I don't know and they're like I said there's a lot of small things in the prose that I just ignored because I didn't have time for them and they just weren't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things but overall it's just a very poorly put together book like there's so many different plot lines which don't intersect that well or only come together at the very end and they didn't really need to be there like solidad didn't have anything interesting to do in the book and she didn't have anything important to do until the very end and she probably could have been replaced with another character that was actually with Rhett the whole time or most of the time and it would have worked better and the sequel bad ending hopefully there's never a sequel but if I had to say anything positive about this book I would say that one or two of the action sequences kind of work and it's really not that long you know like I said it's a fairly short book and I got done with it in like two days or two and a half days and the pacing is pretty good too like there was no there were very few sequences like that opening flashback sequence of Brett was out of nowhere and stupid but other than that there really weren't any sequences that felt unnecessary or dragged on like everything was over with pretty quickly so that's that is a positive I'll give us that credit where it's due and at the end of the day this is kind of a funny book to laugh at and just point out it's stupidity and point out its flaws but even beyond that I just wanted to give some of you insight into ben shapiro because at the end of the day he's not just a piece of [ __ ] okay he doesn't just see his political opponents as less than human he doesn't he's not just a racist he's not just homophobic he's also really [ __ ] dumb thanks to everybody who watched this far and thanks especially to my patrons thanks to Oppo Savile Aenon Christopher Hawkins Joseph Pendergraft Melanie Austin you guys you're great I love you guys and all the other names on here if you want to like be able to vote in polls to determine what kind of content I make or if you want to I don't know just get early access to my contents or other stuff or just want to support me at all they check out my page please and if you can't do that then you know subscribe rate the video comments on the video so that it shows up and I've talked long enough my throat hurts bye

Channel: James Tullos

Views: 319,472

Keywords: book, review, bad, thriller, general, humor, action, reading, read-along, series, roast, belief, commentary, America, spying, stupid, hypocritical, New York

Id: dflhM5XGRzs

Length: 63min 19sec (3799 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 17 2019