Ben Shapiro, Higher Education, and the New Cold War McCarthyism

This chapter uses a psychoanalytic mode of rhetorical analysis to examine how universities have become the central site for an updated form of Cold War McCarthyism. As I will document, conservative and libertarian ideologues tend to utilize the same unconscious process of splitting, denial, projection, and projective identification, and this mode of the political unconscious reveals many of the inner workings of the contemporary culture war. In looking at Ben Shapiro’s Brainwashed, I describe how this popular media personality turns to his own educational experience at UCLA in order to produce a conspiracy theory regarding the way professors indoctrinate students into a Leftist, pro-Communist ideology.