[3] Ahmari is the author of The New Philistines (2016), a critique of how identity politics are corrupting the arts; From Fire, by Water (2019), a spiritual memoir about his conversion to Roman Catholicism; The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (2021) and Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty -- and What to Do About It (2023).

[8] While in law school, inspired in part by the protests following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential election, he began working as a freelance journalist, contributing pieces to publications such as The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Commentary among others.

[17][18][19] Ahmari had previously identified with neoconservatism and criticized politicians such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Marine Le Pen, whom he considered to stand for a global trend towards illiberalism and increasingly polarized populist politics.

[27] The dispute began on May 26, 2019, when Ahmari expressed on Twitter his frustration with a Facebook advertisement for a children's drag queen reading hour at a library in Sacramento, California, which he described as "transvestic fetishism".

[26][27] On September 5, 2019, French and Ahmari engaged in an in-person political debate moderated by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.,[33] again prompting a flurry of commentaries.

[29] He argues that the political realm should be viewed as one of "war and enmity", and that the power of the government should be directly utilized to impose culturally conservative values on society.

[29] French, by contrast, advocates a conservative libertarian approach in which decency, civility, and respect for individual rights are emphasized, and argues that Ahmari's beliefs "forsake" the philosophy of classical liberalism that the Founding Fathers of the United States espoused.

The Times Literary Supplement writes that Weddady and Ahmari "perceptively edited this collection of winning entries" from the Dream Deferred contest and that "some of these young writers [featured in the anthology] possess more clarity than all the pundits combined.

"[35] The book received endorsements from Polish Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Wałęsa and feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who wrote the anthology's foreword.